Ken Borland

Professional golf returns to action this month with two events in the Rise Up Series sponsored by Betway and African Bank, and the Sunshine Tour is also confident they will complete negotiations with three other investors for a further trio of tournaments next month.

The country’s top golfers will return to competition on August 19 with the Betway Championship at Killarney Country Club, followed by the African Bank Championship at Glendower Golf Club from August 26-28. Three other events are lined up for Pretoria Country Club (September 2-4), ERPM Golf Club (September 23-25) and Huddle Park (September 30-October 2). Each tournament has a purse of R600 000.

“These are exciting times with the Rise Up Series. We would love to be playing for much more money, but these are tough times. But we are going to do some clever things with our wonderful sponsors. For the Betway Championship there will be a birdie challenge with a R50 000 pot, the golfer with the most birdies wins R25 000, second-most gets R15 000 and third is R10 000.

“African Bank also jumped at the opportunity to get involved and they will be bringing their portfolios in and around the golf clubs. SuperSport are tour partners as well and we have other hooks in the water. We are just waiting for confirmation but we are hopeful of having title sponsors for all five events. Plus there will be live streaming of the action for the last three-and-a-half hours every Friday, so that’s further reach,” Sunshine Tour deputy commissioner Thomas Abt said in a virtual press conference on Tuesday.

Sunshine Tour stalwart Jake Roos said the players are just delighted for the opportunity to both play some competitive golf again and earn a living.

“The last time we played was the Tour Championship back in February, so everybody is very grateful to the Sunshine Tour staff who have shown a lot of dedication to get us playing again. It’s important for us pro golfers to compete again, you lose your edge if you don’t play, and it will be nice to earn some money too. We are all super-excited.

“It will be unchartered waters because we’ve had six months off and a lot of guys have never had more than a few weeks without competing. Luckily we have been playing and practising for a couple of months now, but until the pressure of a tournament you never know how your game really is. But we are all refreshed and have had time to work on some technical things,” Roos said.

The Sunshine Tour has spent much of the Covid-19 Lockdown trying to mitigate the dire financial strain put on many of its members and most especially their caddies, while also showing solidarity with the amateur game and all its stakeholders, who have been far more severely affected by the closure of golf courses.

But the Sunshine Tour has also devoted their time in Lockdown to ensuring that they can grow the game further once normality returns, by boldly pursuing new markets, especially through the digital space. Their groundbreaking Virtual Golf Challenge reached out to potential new fans and gave their sponsors exposure at the same time.

In the absence of live golf, fans were able to watch several head-to-head challenges between professional golfers, culminating in a knockout final featuring eight contestants on June 6-7, playing for R6500 of prizemoney. Rookie Nikhil Rama claimed a comfortable three-shot win over Heinrich Bruiners in the final.

International campaigners Brandon Stone, Haydn Porteous, Justin Harding and Oliver Bekker all took part in the series at some stage.

And, most importantly, during the whole series viewers were able to interact with the professionals in a way that would be virtually impossible in normal tournament golf.

Not only could they hear the banter between the golfers, who maintained their usual competitive spirit, but also ask them questions ranging from what are the best Open Championship courses (Carnoustie received a few votes), who are the naughtiest pros on tour (Andy Sullivan was mentioned), the longest hitters (between Wilco Nienaber and James Hart du Preez, confirming the stats) and what was the best chirp ever heard out on the course?*

The Virtual Golf Challenge took place on PlayStation’s The Golf Club game and the front nines of Glendower Golf Club and Royal Johannesburg and Kensington’s East Course, as well as Soweto Country Club for the final, were especially recreated for the series.

“We wanted to create something fun for our fans and they certainly seemed to enjoy watching the pros play these games. The banter was great fun and the viewers could see what type of guy a Brandon Stone or a Jared Harvey is, it gives the fan an insight into their personality. The public loved it, the players said they were just as nervous before their rounds and they were very much on-board in terms of it being serious competition. What more is sport?

“We created the virtual tour to be fun, but the biggest thing was that we have a captive audience that loves pro golf but we need to look outside that at younger viewers. We need to start thinking out of the box, push the boundaries a bit. It’s most important to attract the youth and women’s tennis has the youngest viewership globally, while golf on TV is mostly watched by people aged 55 and over,” Thomas Abt, the deputy commissioner of the Sunshine Tour, said.

“That’s why we’ve gone heavily into things like Instagram as well, because that reaches a much younger market, which gives you longevity in terms of support. The Virtual Tour was for fun but at the end of the day in this economic climate, it’s important what we can get out of it – which is speaking to a completely different market, people who might not ever go to a tournament or watch golf on TV. Our sponsors, and those of the players, have obviously not been able to promote their brands as much during Lockdown and we’ve been able to give them and our partners some value.

“The virtual tour definitely gained motion, it has shown us a positive way going forward and I’m just surprised that no other sport in South Africa really tried something like that in Lockdown. It was fun and something different, a new way of doing things, and the idea was to make ourselves more relevant. Hopefully those who saw it will say it was fun to watch and now they’ll want to go and watch the golfers in real life,” Abt said.

One of the biggest attractions of the Virtual Golf Challenge is that it offers an insight into the game plans of the golfers faced with certain holes which are instantaneously recognisable on the program thanks to the superb job done by the techies building the digital courses.

And the golfers enjoyed the realism of the game and just how tough it was, feeding into their competitive juices.

“Lockdown was like all of us sitting in our cages and champing at the bit for any opportunity that reminded you of competitive golf. Haydn Porteous and I jumped at the opportunity to play each other and we’ve now competed against each other through junior golf, to the amateur champs, at professional level and now virtually!” Brandon Stone said.

“The actual playing of the game was tricky, especially around the greens, and it mimics the toughness of golf quite well. After many hours of playing the game I can now grasp how it feels, understand the frustration, of most golfers. It was quite difficult to play technically, even though it doesn’t mimic the actual swing as much, but from a golf strategy point of view it was very similar to the real game. We had similar game-plans as we would in real life.”

It’s undeniable though that the Virtual Golf Challenge did not have the same heat of battle as one gets coming down the back nine on Sunday afternoon and Oliver Bekker, the 2017/18 Sunshine Tour Players’ Player of the Year, acknowledged that pro golfers would probably have to stay out of the heat of the kitchen if they were to take on proper gamers.

“Internationally, gaming has been around for a while and the games earn millions of dollars per year. But it’s a whole new thing for us and if it had to come down to golfers just being able to play Online, being a pro golfer would definitely not mean you’re a great Online golfer. It’s completely different.

“But I’m glad the Sunshine Tour are being innovative, they put something out that showcased professional golf and it didn’t really matter what we shot, it shows that something is still going on in South African golf. And the game they used is a lot more realistic than some of the others in which Rory McIlroy shoots 56 every time! The Golf Club almost feels real, it’s more up to the standard of real golf,” Bekker said before his match against Justin Harding, which he won to go through to the final weekend.

For realism in the world of virtual golf, however, nothing beats what the outstanding European Tour digital and social media team put together – the BMW Trackman Invitational.

Powered by the Trackman golf simulator, this series was a true test of golf played on digital versions of major courses like Wentworth, St Andrews and Valderrama.

By choosing tough settings in terms of factors like the wind and speed of greens, the golfers, hitting actual practice balls into their nets at home, had to shape shots to avoid the same obstacles that are out on those famous courses in real life. The auto-putt function that meant golfers were given putts within 2.5 metres and sometimes longer was annoying, while one wonders how troubled they were by bad lies given that they were hitting off a mat at home, with the simulator then tracking all the details of the club and ball data. At a glance though, it was difficult to differentiate between it and real golf.

The equipment is extremely expensive – ranging from $20 000 to $50 000 – but it does seem to be the new toy of choice for professional golfers.

The deep pockets of BMW and the wonderful exposure Trackman have received made possible what must have been a very expensive undertaking for the European Tour, but Abt said the Sunshine Tour are looking to follow suit.

“We’re very close to doing something similar, testing is going on in that sphere. But it’s not just about the playing of golf for us, it’s also very important for the fans to get to know the players better. The Virtual Tour may not have been real golf, but it was a platform for our professionals to present themselves,” Abt said.

Justin Sampson is the CEO of S-Factor Sponsorship, the digital PR company running campaigns for the Sunshine Tour, and he has been delighted with the success of the Virtual Golf Challenge.

“We’ve tried to engage social media across the board, from the virtual tour to Robbie Kruse’s Out of Bounds player interviews on Instagram, that included an episode with Louis Oosthuizen. The Virtual Tour had 600 000 viewers in the first six weeks, the majority of those from Facebook, then Instagram and then Twitter. We had 4500 people watching live on YouTube on Sunday afternoons. Those are the kind of numbers you get on SuperSport Channels 6-8.

“We wanted to reach the younger market, position the Sunshine Tour in a different market, not the traditional platforms. It was all part of a bigger strategy and nobody had even heard of Covid back then. But we had to adapt to tough circumstances and we’ve grown a new base, which I think is pretty cool. What the European Tour has done is pretty cool too and we copy each other a bit,” Sampson said.

The rise of eSports, which is now a billion dollar industry globally, means the line between virtual and real sports is going to blur, offering another big commercial platform for sports organisations. And while virtual golf is unlikely to ever replace the real thing, it could become more mainstream.

As Brandon Stone pointed out, if a golfer has never seen a course before he or she can gain valuable insight from the digital version and the fact that so many pro golfers now carry around their own tracking devices and simulator shows how useful a tool it can be in coaching.

*Best chirp ever sidebar

The diminutive Keenan Davidse, light in weight but heavy in game, was playing in the Zone VI amateur championships and was up against a big, burly Zimbabwean.

His opponent tried a bit of sledging on the first tee by saying “How’s a small little guy like you going to hit the ball far enough to beat me?”

Davidse said nothing but laced his first drive miles past the Zimbabwean. They walked to their balls and when Davidse reached his, he turned back to the Zimbabwean and shouted “How small do I look now?!”

One of the key features to come out of the discussions around racism in cricket has been the acknowledgement that it has to be okay for stakeholders who feel discriminated against or marginalised to speak out. Without that freedom, the status quo merely continues and we won’t know that the system is broken until there is something akin to an explosion of anger.

And there are certainly a lot of angry people in the cricket community at the moment, many with good reason because the leadership of the game has failed them so thoroughly. Many people are thoroughly disgruntled by how mediocre the returns have been after millions of rand have been spent on transformation over more than 20 years.

It is not okay, however, for people to spread division, blatant lies or push agendas designed to further the interests of only a select few. Unfortunately many of those divisive voices have been given prominence in the last few weeks.

The troubles in South African cricket seem to have given birth to an extreme version of Africanism that threatens to shut everyone else out of the game.

We now have a situation where White members of CSA management, specifically acting CEO Jacques Faul, director of cricket Graeme Smith and head coach Mark Boucher, are being pilloried, not for anything they have or have not done, but simply because they are White. No matter how often they express their support for BLM or for transformation, some people simply cannot get past their skin colour.

The corollary of this is the perception that Black Africans should not be held accountable for their actions. Suddenly suspended CEO Thabang Moroe, who left the game in such crisis last December that Faul and Smith had to be parachuted in, is the darling of certain sections of the media, who are pushing for his return. The irony that they are supporting someone who nine months ago took away the accreditation of journalists who were critical of him is totally lost on them. Are they are in favour of media freedom or do they support someone who has also looked to destroy the players’ trade union – the South African Cricketers Association?

Convicted matchfixers Thami Tsolekile and Ethy Mbhalati have also been given platforms that are far too exalted for the manner in which they betrayed the game. Tsolekile in particular spouted forth on a well-known radio talk show – with very little counter-interrogation – on how the whole matchfixing investigation of the 2015 T20 competition targeted Black players. He and his host conveniently failed to mention that the entire process was presided over by Bernard Ngoepe, one of the country’s most respected judges. Are they saying he is racist? Sounds like the typical protestations of the criminally guilty to me.

Equally appallingly, Tsolekile accused and named two White players of being involved in matchfixing without a shred of evidence. Their rights have been trampled on and I expect them to go to the courts to protect their names. CSA have subsequently released a statement saying the one player was one of their star witnesses because he immediately reported a corrupt approach and the other was just a name bandied about by arch-conspirator Gulam Bodi in order to get other people involved. They were both thoroughly investigated, by the ICC as well, and totally exonerated.

Even the legendary Makhaya Ntini seems to have been allowed to get away with a one-sided narrative. I’m sure in the early years of his international career there were days when he felt isolated and alone. But he has been unfair in his criticism of Cricket South Africa.

If it weren’t for Ali Bacher personally getting involved and organising proper legal representation for him, Ntini would have spent several years languishing in jail after being incorrectly found guilty of rape, and Proteas manager and team doctor Mohammed Moosajee has revealed the felicitations the great fast bowler received from CSA at the end of his career.

“What Makhaya said I think surprised every one of us because he was a beacon for every youngster. He was in the team with me for the last 8 years of his career and I never noticed him sitting alone. Many players ran from the ground back to the hotel. Many times when we went out to dinner, we would stick to our own, but there were also many other times when we would join the other guys.

“Even when his contract ended, he was paid an extra year of salary which had never happened before, and he was given a special benefit game at Moses Mabhida Stadium. He played his last game for South Africa in January 2011 and his CSA contract continued through to the next April and then he received another year after that,” Moosajee told an Ahmed Kathrada Foundation webinar on racism in cricket recently.

“I did not see him on his own, he always had other players around him, but we need to unpack the way he felt, we need like a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for cricket. I’m sure he felt isolated when he first came into the team because he was in the minority, international sport is very difficult and you feel nervous about where you fit in. It was probably the same for Hashim Amla, but once the colour of the team and the administration changed then a lot of that went away,” Moosajee added.

Doc Moosajee, who has been a great servant of the game, went on to slam those for whom power in cricket is like an aphrodisiac.

“It’s important to remember that a number of communities contributed to the struggle but unfortunately some selfish administrators are looking to create divisions now. We need to move away from the idea that you need to be Black African to have a role in transformation; all communities, including Whites, have a role. Driving only an Africanist agenda has become divisive.

“We can’t continue to pay lip-service to transformation after 26 years, we need tangible action. In terms of Affirmative Action, the question we need to ask is whether the policies have benefited us or promoted racism? There is no doubt it has become polarised. Grassroots is where the issue is and there’s no doubt that has not been addressed. The numbers game has created challenges,” Moosajee said.

A physical, ball-carrying No.12 has almost been one of the consecrations at Loftus Versfeld through the years, but new Bulls coach Jake White looks set to deviate from that formula, which is why he released former captain and stalwart Burger Odendaal from his contract.

The 27-year-old Odendaal, who played 56 Super Rugby and 50 Currie Cup games for the franchise, has moved across the Jukskei River and will turn out for the Lions once rugby resumes in South Africa, hopefully within the next two months. It has left the Bulls with a very inexperienced midfield comprising Clinton Swart, Stedman Gans, Diego Appollis, Dawid Kellerman, Marnus Potgieter, Jay-Cee Nel and Wian van Niekerk, none of whom have any Super Rugby experience.

“The way the Bulls played in the past, there’s no question Burger was very important to the team as a captain and leader and added value as a player. But it was going to be very difficult to continue with him as a player if I could not guarantee him a starting spot and because of the new salary caps you can’t afford a high-earner like him if he’s not going to play.

“It’s like back in 2004 when I became Springbok coach and De Wet Barry and Marius Joubert were the centres, two great players and people. But in the 2007 World Cup my centres were Jean de Villiers, Francois Steyn and Jaque Fourie because I had evolved as a coach from using a player like De Wet into looking for something else. So when I looked at Burger I thought it would be like going back to De Wet Barry and we want to play differently.

“So telling him that up front meant he was able to go with the market value as captain, rather than staying and not playing and losing value, so he decided to go. Our CEO Edgar Rathbone was previously with the Lions and he helped broker the deal such that the player didn’t lose any money and has guaranteed playing time, so it’s a win/win for everybody,” White explained to selected Bulls media on Thursday.

While the Bulls’ midfield may be raw and young, there is plenty of experience elsewhere with the likes of Gio Aplon, Cornal Hendricks, Morne Steyn, Duane Vermeulen, Arno Botha, Juandre Kruger and Trevor Nyakane, and White says he is encouraging an avuncular approach in order to help a new-look squad gel together.

“We’re not like other teams which have the luxury of being settled and how quickly we can become a team is a big question. Duane Vermeulen, for example, does not know half the guys because they have never trained together. But there are things we can do to help that, which we are busy with, such as every week the players draw a name out of a hat and they have to have coffee with that guy and find out his story.

“Psychologist Henning Gericke has also been helping because we are probably the one team that needs cohesion. I heard there’s a possibility of us playing in two bubbles, the first six weeks with the four Super Rugby teams and then in the second round an eight-week Currie Cup like tournament with Griquas, the Pumas, Free State Cheetahs and Southern Kings. I’m sure in 14 weeks we can get them tight-knit and we just want to make sure we get into the finals in December,” White said.