Ken Borland

SOUTHBROOM, KwaZulu-Natal – The most obvious thing young, up-and-coming golfers need is the opportunity to compete, and veteran Sunshine Tour campaigner Hennie Otto has praised the sponsors of this week’s event at San Lameer, Vodacom, for the critical role they have played in the development of the sport in this country.

Otto has been on tour since 1997/98, when it was actually known as the Vodacom Tour, and is teeing it up this week in the Vodacom Origins of Golf Series event at San Lameer Country Club as one of the favourites, given his ninth position on the current Luno Order of Merit.

As a senior statesman of the tour and someone who has enjoyed its benefits so much, Otto is eager to ensure the younger generation get the same exposure and rewards.

“Vodacom have been involved in golf in this country for more than 20 years and what they’ve really done is develop golfers,” Otto said after the first round of the Vodacom Origins of Golf Pro-Am at San Lameer.

“Every young golfer needs opportunity in order to have a successful career, and if nobody creates those opportunities for them, then they won’t get them.

“I’ve played with Mr Mzimba [William, CEO Vodacom Business Group] a few times in these Vodacom Origins of Golf Pro-Ams and he tells me about the dozen or so development players they help. Hopefully those guys really come through, and even if just five of them do then it is still something special.

“The tour is definitely growing and I think in the years to come, it is just going to get bigger,” Otto said.

While the Sunshine Tour has seen a number of very promising young players shine this year, the fairways are still very much the lair of experienced pros like Otto, Jean Hugo, who is seventh on the Luno Order of Merit, and Jaco van Zyl, who won last weekend at Selborne Park Golf Club.

The 46-year-old Otto is still hitting the ball well and looked in hot form last weekend when he finished second to Van Zyl at the Gary and Vivienne Player Challenge. It was his fourth top-six finish this season, a ray of hope after a couple of very tough years following the passing of his wife in 2020.

“As a senior, some of the guys call me ‘Oom’, but this ‘Oom” can still play now and again,” Otto smiles. “I’ve been doing nicely, I just haven’t finished off like I want to.

“But I’m close to where I want to be both mentally and physically, although I’m a bit overweight – I’ve had a few braais,” he laughs.

“But there are nice tournaments coming up, we’re building up and up for the big ones at the end of the year, and the more you finish up the leaderboard, the more confident you get.

“I’ve played all those tournaments before, I know the places, so I’ll be even more comfortable,” Otto said.

SOUTHBROOM, KwaZulu-Natal – For Vodacom’s Eleni Kwinana, the Executive Head of Department for Vodacom Business Marketing KZN, the Vodacom Origins of Golf Series is a wonderful chance for their amateur clients to connect with Sunshine Tour professionals, but what thrilled her the most on the pro-am’s opening day at San Lameer Country Club on Tuesday was the development clinic.

Around 20 kids from disadvantaged areas on the KZN South Coast attended the development clinic, and Kwinana was delighted to see some of the same boys and girls who had attended the corresponding event at Selborne Park Golf Club in 2020.

“To give young kids from areas where they would never be exposed to golf the chance to get some coaching is very heartwarming, and I even recognised some of the boys and girls from two years ago at Selborne. They have sprung up, and it was brilliant to see them again,” Kwinana said.

“Youth education is one of our key pillars at Vodacom and helping communities has almost become a way of life for us, we don’t see CSI programmes as being something separate from our day-to-day work.

“Where we see a need, we help or we find someone who can help. Like our zero-rated Vodacom e-School which allows pupils to access their curriculum and test themselves. My own daughter went from a D aggregate to an A for maths, and it doesn’t cost a cent if you’re a Vodacom customer.

“There’s also our Code Like a Girl programme, where we find girls nationally who have never touched a tech device, we teach them during the June holidays, and by the time school starts again they are able to sort out their own website,” Kwinana said.

While Vodacom’s grand plan is to allow people from every district and rural area to also Connect For Good in this digital age, sometimes disaster strikes, whether it be in the form of the civil unrest that plagued KwaZulu-Natal in July 2021 or the massive floods that engulfed the province in April/May this year. And then Vodacom spring into action with a range of emergency relief measures.

“Vodacom is investing R1 billion of infrastructure into KZN, which is the biggest investment in the province. We find working with communities leads to much better longevity and protection of our assets, and so we never ever neglect our communities.

“We are there for their benefit, which is why when the floods came, we donated R3 million worth of relief aid through the Gift of the Givers, but we also went out to communities that had not been assisted yet and brought them blankets and food.

“During the riots we restored cellphone coverage a lot quicker than usual for those suppliers that the economy depends on, we gave them makeshift satellite dishes. We do these things so we can thrive as a province.

“We helped keep suburbs safe and restored businesses’ connectivity so the economy could bounce back as quickly as possible,” Kwinana said.

So helping people from all walks of life is par for the course for Vodacom. And golf has enjoyed their patronage and support for longer than most sports, with the Vodacom Origins of Golf Series running since 2004. It is the longest-running series of events on the Sunshine Tour.

“We really enjoy seeing the professionals and amateurs connect at our tournaments. Especially in this post-Covid time because people have been starved of human contact,” Kwinana said.

But with Vodacom involved so massively in the entire golf ecosystem , that human touch will always be around.

Proteas coach Mark Boucher admitted that their batting had been insipid in the Test series in England, but said the natural remedy of just finding other batsmen to take the incumbents’ places in the Big Time was not applicable because the batters on tour were the best available.

“The batsmen here have consistently been the best in the country,” Boucher said after the series loss but before the shock announcement that he would be standing down from his post after the T20 World Cup next month. “We always knew we would be under pressure if the conditions made the ball go around a bit against a good English bowling attack.

“You have to be able to trust your defence, but our issue was that we weren’t able to keep out the good balls. Quite a few technical flaws were exposed.

“But it’s a fine line between wanting the batsmen to play the way that got them here and changing too much. And this is not an academy of learning, this is Test cricket.

“We were forced into positions where we had to give opportunities to others, you can’t just keep playing with the same guys who keep failing. There’s a mental side to it too, and it can become like quicksand – the harder you try, the deeper you sink.

“Hopefully these batsmen will get it right next time they come here. We played some very good cricket, but we just couldn’t put the runs on the board,” Boucher said at The Oval.

Although Boucher is now likely to become a franchise T20 coach, he made a plea to cricket’s global administrators for more Tests per annum to be played.

“The only way to get experience is by going out and playing, and losing sight of Test cricket would not be great. I’m a purist, I love it and for me it is the truest form of the game. We need to take care of it.

“The heads of the game need to get together and decide how best we can play more Test cricket, we need to find a way.

“Test cricket is exciting, you very seldom see draws anymore, it’s attacking and nice to watch. The more we see of it the better,” Boucher said.

The Proteas batting has once again found itself under the spotlight as it was the obvious weak link in the 2-1 series loss to England.

The stats don’t lie when it comes to how poorly South Africa’s batsmen responded to the testing conditions in England: A bowling all-rounder, Marco Jansen, topped their averages at just 27.33, while their leading run-scorer was opener Sarel Erwee, who managed just 127 runs in five innings, and also scored their only half-century of the series.

Keegan Petersen and Dean Elgar were the only other batsmen to score more than a hundred runs in the series, but both of them had poor campaigns, averaging less than 25.

The figures, combined with the low output of runs in Test cricket in general over the last three years, once again casts a bad light on domestic cricket and the pipeline’s ability to deliver batsmen who are ready for the international game.

Most alarmingly, there are players in the national team who are trying to take on world-class bowlers, in bowling-friendly conditions, with techniques and mindsets that are not sturdy enough to handle the challenge.

Cricket South Africa needs to realise that the more teams they give a seat to at the top table and access to more rands, the more diluted the strength of their premier domestic competitions become.

Instead of the top 24 bowlers being spread around six teams in the top division, there are now eight teams and therefore weaker bowling attacks, leaving batsmen with a mountain to climb when they try to bridge the gap in terms of intensity and skill at international level.

The situation is made worse by how few domestic first-class matches the Proteas bowlers play, and the effect of quotas in also weakening bowling attacks is another elephant in the room that should be considered.