Ken Borland

The Sunshine Tour on Monday announced an exciting new playing opportunity for their members with the launch of the ISPS Handa South African Matchplay Championship to be played at Zwartkop Country Club in Centurion from October 29 to November 4.

A matchplay tournament has been absent from South Africa’s major golf tour for about 25 years and Sunshine Tour executive director Selwyn Nathan said he was delighted to reintroduce the head-to-head golfing contest on the schedule.

“It was almost 25 years ago that the last matchplay tournament was played, at Sun City, and we are thrilled to have it back on the schedule. It’s such an exciting format and the players don’t often get the chance to experience it in tournament play once they turn professional,” Nathan said in Sandton on Monday at the launch of the event.

The tournament has been made possible by the support of ISPS – the International Sports Promotion Society, which was set up by Japanese philanthropist Dr Haruhisa Handa to support charitable causes throughout the sporting world.

Handa is passionate about disabled golf and is considered the father of blind golf, ever since he played nine holes with a golfer with 5% vision in Perth 25 years ago. Handa lost and it has become his mission for golf to be included in the Paralympics.

Because of the ISPS’s involvement, the SA Matchplay Championship will feature a concurrent tournament for 16 disabled golfers, including some from the On Course Foundation they support in the United Kingdom, which gives seriously injured members of the British Armed Forces the opportunity to play golf.

There will be a field of 128 golfers, 16 of them to be seeded, in the main event and they will compete over seven rounds. Once the field is down to 64 golfers, they will be divided into four brackets and Saturday’s semi-final and Sunday’s final will be over 36 holes. The prize pool is R2 million and the winner will walk away with R300 000.

As Nathan pointed out, first-round losers will walk away with about R4 700 and the event is another fantastic addition to the Sunshine Tour schedule.

SuperSport golf broadcaster Dale Hayes, whose passion is the health of the game in South Africa, will be intimately involved in the tournament because Zwartkop has been associated with his family since 1940, with his father, Otway, being the club pro for 56 years. The Hayes family have been official owners of the club since 2001.

“We need to get more people playing golf. Because of the recession, people have stopped playing because of economics. But we need to reverse that, and we’ll be giving away 30 000 free tickets in the Centurion and Pretoria region. If you have to pay for a ticket to the tournament, then you clearly have a social problem!” Hayes joked.

“It would be very nice if Tony Johnstone entered, he was the winner of the last matchplay event and he also won the ICL International at Zwartkop in 1987 and 1988,” Hayes added.

“It’s also wonderful to have the disabled department in the tournament. There are very few sports that the disabled can participate in against the able-bodied, but golf is one of them because of the handicap system.”

Sunshine Tour marketing and communications director Duncan Cruikshank said some of South Africa’s leading overseas campaigners have already expressed an interest in the tournament.

“The timing is good because they’re usually back in the country at that time of year, so the field won’t be based strictly on the order of merit, although it will be for our money-list. It’s the start of our summer swing and it will be mostly Sunshine Tour members, but also some international invites which ISPS are assisting with,” Cruikshank said.

While Zwartkop is a country club in the truest sense of the words, it is also a top-class golf course with a classic parkland layout and there is a vast amount of water with the Hennops River running parallel to practically every hole!

The Sunshine Tour will also be fulfilling their development obligations after the tournament.

“There will definitely be some sort of leave-behind, with a development chapter being started at Zwartkop for youngsters in the area,” Cruikshank said.

Midori Miyazaki, ISPS’s executive director of international affairs, said they hoped their involvement in the tournament would provide a platform for them to promote golf as a Paralympics sport.

“Men’s and women’s professional golf around the world has provided an excellent platform to promote blind and disabled golf and we are trying to build a disabled component into our events in Europe, the British senior tour, the Ladies European Tour, the Australian tours and the US Senior Women’s Tour,” Miyazaki said.

“We are trying to get support for our Paralympic bid and the difficulty in disabled golf is formalising the rules to suit all the different types of disability. We like the exposure at the top level, but we have to work at all the different levels. We’re trying to pull all the different platforms together,” she said.

http://www.supersport.com/golf/sa-golf/news/120625/Matchplay_golf_back_on_Sunshine_calendar

South African women’s golf has received a boost with the announcement that the South African Women’s Open will return to the Ladies European Tour (LET) schedule in July.

The likes of 2010 LET Order of Merit winner Lee-Anne Pace and Ashleigh Simon, a three-time SA Open champion and the winner of two LET events, will take on a strong international field at the Selborne Park Golf Club on the KwaZulu-Natal south coast from July 13-15.

Fellow LET campaigner Tandi Cunningham, who won the last South African Women’s Open in 2009, is the defending champion.

The organisers announced on Monday that there will be a field of 84 golfers, including 56 from the LET, who will be playing for 260 000 euro in prizemoney.

Some of the United Kingdom’s top golf journalists travelled south to cover the Volvo Golf Champions and all of them have been impressed by the Fancourt Links course used for the prestige, 35-man event.

The Fancourt Links is rated South Africa’s top course but it was pleasing to see the visiting journalists saying it lived up to its reputation, especially as the United Kingdom is the home of links courses.

While Fancourt, which lies perhaps a dozen kilometres from the sea, cannot truly be described as a genuine links course, the journalists said it was an impressive attempt to recreate the feel of classics such as Portmarnock, Royal Dublin, Carnoustie, Royal Birkdale and St Andrew’s.

“Normally I’m very skeptical about faux links courses, for example I didn’t enjoy Whistling Straits when the PGA was held there, it put the sham into the shamrock if you like,” Irish Independent golf correspondent Karl McGinty told SuperGolf.

“But this is a fantastic place and a wonderful course. On Saturday, when the wind blew and it was overcast and rainy, it was like a mild summer’s day in Ireland, but I was very impressed. We suddenly found out what everyone has been talking about and it was a wonderful test,” McGinty said.

Lewine Mair, the European correspendent for Global Golf Post.com, didn’t particularly like the plastic used to rivet the bunkers, but overall she was very impressed with Fancourt.

“It’s such a fantastic venue that I just wonder about the plastic rivetting of the bunkers. I understand it works in terms of maintenance, but I feel such a classy course deserves the old turf blocks.

“But it’s an absolutely amazing place, it blows you away and they’ve done a terrific job – one of the best links creations I’ve seen,” Mair said.

Freelance golf writer and author Graham Otway said he was concerned when Nicolas Colsaerts and others were able to take the course apart on the first two days.

“It’s rated the toughest links course in South Africa, but you question that when you see Colsaerts shoot 64 on the first day and Lee Slattery 65 on the second. But when the pin positions are generous and the weather even more so, these guys can destroy any course.

“But Saturday was the true test of this golf course. Once the wind started to blow, it took no prisoners and that is a better way of measuring its degree of difficulty. It lived up to its reputation,” Otway said.

As Otway pointed out, a true links course is all about the coastal sand dunes that lie beneath and should drain water rapidly, leaving the course dry.

“The Fancourt course has a genuine links feel about it, but I still don’t like the word used outside of its historical context of golf played on the wasteland that linked beaches with the farmland beyond. An inland links, however cleverly built, cannot truly match the real thing,” Otway said.

Mair marvelled at the back tees at Fancourt and joked that it might say something about our future evolution as human beings.

“It’s a real man-sized course and the mind boggles that there are tees even further back than the ones they used. I presume it’s so the course is ready for the next generation of long-hitters – whether they be apes or humans or whatever!” she said.

Otway bemoaned the fact that there are so few chances these days to see professionals put under real pressure on the golf course.

“It’s a pity that tour players don’t get challenges like this more often. Life is very easy for them most weeks and they don’t have to learn how to cope with challenges,” he said.

Volvo, the tournament creators, have also been impressed and the chances are good that the event will return to South Africa in the future.

“Fancourt is a special, world-class venue and we are very impressed with the people and management. Long-term, we definitely want to move the tournament around and showcase it all over the world, but we will certainly look at bringing it back here every third or fourth year,” Per Ericsson, the president of Volvo Event Management, said.

Branden Grace wants to crack the world’s top 50 and make it to the Masters following his extraordinary second consecutive European Tour title after his victory at the Volvo Golf Champions at the Fancourt Links on Sunday.

“One of my goals is definitely to make the top 50. I just need to keep grinding on and to get to the Masters would be indescribable,” Grace said after his dramatic playoff victory.

Grace prevailed over his fellow South Africans Ernie Els and Retief Goosen and the 23-year-old said beating them had made his victory even sweeter.

“Lying in bed last night, I was reading articles about the tournament and I saw that there were 14 major wins behind me. It was unbelievable to win a tournament of this calibre and to beat two of my idols in a playoff is awesome,” Grace said.

It was an awful missed putt on the 72nd hole of regulation play that ensured Grace would have to join them in a playoff after his par on the 18th hole left the trio tied on 12-under-par. Grace shovelled a four-foot putt wide of the hole and his misfortune was repeated by Nicolas Colsaerts, who smashed a three-foot putt past the hole moments later to drop out of contention.

“If you make that sort of putt, you’re the hero, but when I missed it, I didn’t think I’d hit a bad putt, it was just a bit low on speed. It’s just one of those things, I didn’t really think of it being on the last hole because I knew we had one left,” Grace said.

The George Golf Club representative has always featured highly in the opinions of respected South African golf judges and finally seems to be fulfilling his undoubted potential. Grace celebrated his 50th European Tour start with his maiden victory at last week’s Joburg Open and became just the sixth golfer to win their first two events back-to-back.

“I would’ve preferred to have won much earlier in my career but I’ve learnt the hard way. I’ve been on tour, I’ve lost my card but sometimes it’s not bad going backwards to go forwards. I’ve learnt my lesson and I know for a fact that I’m a better player than before,” Grace said.

An analysis of Grace’s final round 71 shows that he hit 12 out of 14 fairways and made 14 out of 18 greens in regulation and it was clear he has an affinity for the Fancourt Links.

“I really wanted to do well and perform here at home, so it’s a dream come true. It’s unbelievable to win a tournament of this calibre,” Grace said.

“Amazing” and “phenomenal” were the other words Grace used to describe his double triumph and he is the fifth South African to win back-to-back European Tour titles. Dale Hayes was the first to do it when he won the Italian and French Opens in 1978, before Els claimed the Dubai Desert Classic and Qatar Masters titles in 2005. The other two instances have been during the Sunshine Tour’s co-sanctioned summer swing, with Richard Sterne winning the Alfred Dunhill Championship and South African Open in 2009 and Charl Schwartzel triumphing in the 2010 Africa and Joburg Opens.