Ken Borland

Glendower Golf Club was confirmed on Wednesday as the venue for next year’s South African Open … and a most unlikely golfer went in to bat for the Edenvale course that will host the second-oldest national open for the third straight year.

Charl Schwartzel has led in the final round of the two previous SA Opens held at Glendower, in January this year and in November 2013, but on both occasions it ended in tears.

Schwartzel squandered four shots in the last five holes of the 2015 SA Open and then lost on the first hole of the playoff to Andy Sullivan as his wayward tee-shot went miles off track. The previous Glendower SA Open saw Schwartzel leading by three shots four holes into the final round, before he faded to a 71 after a triple-bogey on the sixth and a double on 10, and finished three behind winner Morten Orum Madsen.

“I’m excited to come back here because I don’t see it as being two disappointments. I see it as a course that has treated me well, for two years in a row I had chances to win, but there are a lot of very good players out there. Glendower suits me well, and to know that I came so close to winning here is a positive because now I have another opportunity.

“You have to play cleverly here, think your way around, it requires a lot of strategy and thinking, which is right down my alley. Modern-day courses are often wide open and they allow guys to get away with playing badly, the course plays into so many hands. But you don’t have that freedom here, if you don’t stick to the right lines here then the course will catch you,” Schwartzel said at Glendower on Wednesday.

Schwartzel is known for putting in an enormous amount of preparation and strategizing when it comes to the major golf tournaments and he said he would be returning to Glendower a couple of weeks before the 105th South African Open tees off on January 7.

“The four Majors are by far the most important tournaments and you obviously focus more on those, but this tournament obviously has some degree of importance for me as well. Personally, it’s the same as the Majors and other big tournaments for me in that I prepare the same. Ninety-five percent of our tournaments are at sea-level, but here you’re at 5000 feet and it makes a big difference in club-selection.

“So preparation is important, I want to get comfortable with the course even though I know it well, make sure about the lines off the tee. It’s how I prepare for the Majors and if you do that then the expectation goes away and you’re able to handle the pressure.

“I hope it works out, but if it doesn’t I’ll try again. I can only control what I do and if someone plays better than me then so be it,” Schwartzel, who has never won the SA Open, said.

The 2011 Masters champion said he hoped the SA Open would remain the sort of tournament children are told about when they sit on the knees of their grandfathers.

“When you see the passion of Ernie Els [tournament host] to play in it, it’s inspiring for the future generations. I hope guys like Louis Oosthuizen and Branden Grace feel the same as me, because I’m going to keep coming back and give it my all,” Schwartzel said.

In the meantime, the 31-year-old will be back on the farm in Deneysville – his mom Lizette’s whole family is in farming, anything from corn to wheat to dairy to chickens and pigs – and, perhaps controversially, will not be playing in the first two co-sanctioned events, the Alfred Dunhill Championship and the Nedbank Golf Challenge.

“I’m not playing any tournaments in December, I didn’t get into the Nedbank Golf Challenge, so it will be a nice long break and I feel I need it,” Schwartzel said.

The 105th South African Open Championship will again be proudly hosted by the City of Ekurhuleni, with a new title sponsor in BMW, and it will again have Els as tournament host/player.

“Sports such as motorsport, sailing and golf are key global sponsorship pillars for the BMW brand. With this in mind, this local sponsorship initiative – which mirrors the brand’s global sponsorship strategy – sees BMW become the overall naming rights partner of the SA Open Championship. In addition, it gives the brand the opportunity to consolidate its position in golf with a signature event that we hope will grow over time to become the biggest professional event in South African golf,” said Tim Abbott, the managing director of the BMW group in South Africa.

The wait to see which of the country’s major golf courses will host the 2015/16 South African Open is finally over with Glendower Golf Club in Edenvale confirmed as the hosts for the third successive time and sixth time overall.

At this stage, the 105^th SA Open will be held in the same calendar slot as the 2014/2015 event, from January 7-10, with Johannesburg’s other co-sanctioned Sunshine/European Tour event, the Joburg Open, taking place the following week (January 14-17), which will not only encourage overseas golfers to play in both tournaments but also cut the costs for the Sunshine Tour.

“There’s a need for back-to-back tournaments because it’s not fair on the European golfers to make them travel back and forth to South Africa. It also means we save money on costs, which is important as well,” Duncan Cruickshank, the marketing and communications director of the Sunshine Tour, told The Citizen.

There had been strong speculation that Humewood Golf Club in Port Elizabeth, which has hosted the SA Open on five previous occasions, would be the venue for this summer’s prestigious event but the financial muscle of Gauteng has perhaps won the day.

Even though hosting the SA Open is of enormous value in terms of worldwide television coverage – Cruickshank said the exposure gained for the tourism industry by the tournament in January was worth more than a billion rand – sponsors are still needed over and above the huge investment made by municipalities and local government.

It is believed that the Africa Open at East London Golf Club is in some doubt due to a lack of sponsors, but it would be very sad if the Eastern Cape – and the coastal region as a whole – did not host a single co-sanctioned event.

Cruickshank confirmed that the Alfred Dunhill Championship would kick off the Summer Tour at Leopard Creek in Malelane from November 26-29, with the Nedbank Golf Challenge following immediately afterwards at Sun City from December 3-6.

The SA Open and Joburg Open are then on successive weekends in January, with the Africa and Tshwane Opens scheduled to go back-to-back in early March.

It was also confirmed on Tuesday that the 2016 AfrAsia Bank Mauritius Open, the only tri-sanctioned tournament endorsed by the European, Sunshine and Asian Tours, will be held from May 12-15, 2016, at the Four Seasons Golf Club Mauritius at Anahita.

The leading contenders used various terms to describe the rough at Glendower Golf Club, but one thing they all agreed on was that this year’s South African Open starting on Thursday in Edenvale will be a stern test.

Anything offline and away from the fairway will be punished, with chipping out of the rough often the only option.

Ernie Els, recently announced as the tournament’s ambassador and searching for his sixth SA Open title, is pleased that the Glendower set-up is tough.

“If you stray just off the fairway, you can really get a very tough lie. I hit one at 18 yesterday where I was a metre off the fairway and I could only advance it maybe 100 yards. But it’s what Opens are all about it, isn’t it? I think for a tournament of this stature it needs to be tough.

“Kikuyu is obviously a very thickly-laid grass and they’ve obviously let it go when there’s been a lot of rain, so it’s as thick and as tough as I’ve ever seen rough. But we want to find the best player this week and that’s what we’re going to get. You’re not going to get a guy who’s hitting it offline and getting lucky lies in the rough winning. You’re going to have to play proper golf and that’s what I think a national Open should be like,” Els said on Wednesday.

Charl Schwartzel thought the rough should have been even longer, while Branden Grace hoped it would be cut a bit, and George Coetzee described the course as “a real challenge”.

“If you miss a fairway, there is an 80% chance that you’ll have to chip out and I hit an eight-iron about 15 yards on one hole,” the Joburg Open champion said.

The greens, however, are soft and receptive, so conditions will favour the most accurate golfer rather than the most powerful.

“If there’s no rough then it’s usually a big hitter that wins, but this week is about hitting fairways and greens, which changes things a bit,” Danie van Tonder, the leader of the Sunshine Tour Order of Merit, said. “I won’t be stupid and hit driver everywhere. I’ll take three-wood or four-iron and lay-up before going for the green. To the pins I’ll be aggressive, but not on the tee shots.”

That doesn’t suit a guy like Coetzee, who likes to bomb it off the tee, but the 28-year-old said he will apply himself and look to adapt.

“I prefer tricky greens to tricky rough, but you’ve got to make your game suit the course. Hopefully I’ll hit it straight and make a few putts. You’ve got to hit a lot of fairways, because I don’t think the best putter will win it this week,” Coetzee said.

What is certain is that the leading South Africans – Schwartzel, Els, Coetzee, Grace, Richard Sterne and Hennie Otto – are all extremely hungry to claim their national Open and return the imposing trophy to home soil for the first time since Otto’s triumph in 2011.

Victory would be especially sweet for Ekurhuleni products like Els, Otto, Van Tonder and J’be Kruger.

“It’s wonderful to be back at the SA Open, especially here at Glendower in Ekurhuleni, the city where I’m from,” Els said. “I’ve played a lot of golf at Glendower, I grew up 12km from here and we’ve got a great venue this week. I feel very motivated to win as many as I can before I’m done,” the 45-year-old said.

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Glendower Golf Club, the classic parklands layout in Edenvale, will host the South African Open for the second successive time, from January 8-11 next year, the Sunshine Tour announced yesterday.

It will be the fifth time overall that the 6899m course will host the world’s second oldest national open, following last year’s event won by Morten Orum Madsen, and the 1997 (Vijay Singh), 1993 (Clinton Whitelaw) and 1989 (Fred Wadsworth) tournaments.

The 104^th edition of the South African Open will be the first since 2010 for which the Sunshine Tour will hold the commercial rights, which is one of the reasons the tournament has moved from November to January, which will hopefully make it easier for the country’s top stars to participate.

The SA Open will now fill the spot in the calendar that had been taken by the winners-only Volvo Golf Champions, staged in Durban over the last two years.

“We are delighted that we can announce that the City of Ekurhuleni will remain on board as the host sponsor for the 104th SA Open and we thank the mayor, Cllr Mondli Gungubele, and his executive for their massive support of the SA Open and professional golf in South Africa. We are also very pleased to be able to return to the magnificent Glendower Golf Club for the second consecutive year,” Selwyn Nathan, the executive director of the Sunshine Tour, said yesterday.

“We are honoured to once again be the host city of the prestigious South African Open Championship and look forward to welcoming some of the very best golfers in the world to our aerotropolis. We are very proud to be involved with an event of this stature. For the past three years that we have been involved with the SA Open it has given our city such important exposure to so many decision-makers around the world – something that augurs well for our efforts to bring in investors from all over the world,” Gungubele said.

Marquee names for the tournament will be announced soon, according to the Sunshine Tour, and there are also plans afoot to ensure South Africa’s leading golfers play regularly in the South African Open.