Ken Borland

The Nedbank Golf Challenge is almost as much of a summer tradition in South Africa as watermelon, mielies, Redchested Cuckoos calling “Piet-my-Vrou!” and cricket, but there will be a definite sense of the end of an era when the tournament starts at Sun City on Thursday.

The event that started in 1981 as the richest tournament in golf – the only one to offer a million dollars in prizemoney –had a field of just five invited contestants, before going to 10 the next year. There were eight golfers in 1987 and 1988 and the event had its traditional 12-man field from 1993 to 2012 (apart from 2003 when South Africa hosted the President’s Cup and both teams played), before becoming a 30-player tournament in 2013.

With the expansion came official European Tour status and more world ranking points, but still almost no Americans have visited Sun City in the last 10 years and there has almost been a feeling of Africa’s Major gradually sliding towards extinction in these vastly-different socio-economic times.

On the continent where human evolution began, it’s always been a case of adapt or die, and so it is welcome news that the Nedbank Golf Challenge will undergo a major change from next year.

For 34 years the tournament has been held in the first weekend of December, a harbinger almost of the festive season and a chance for corporate South Africa to have a year-end party. But now the Nedbank Golf Challenge will be a part of the European Tour’s prestigious and lucrative Finals Series, which has enhanced prizemoney and Race to Dubai points for the leading performers on tour that season, in November.

The fact that the Nedbank Golf Challenge will be the penultimate tournament on the calendar, starting on November 10, the week before the Tour Championship, the season finale in Dubai, raises hopes that some top-class golfers will once again visit South Africa.

At the end of the year, who knows, maybe even the likes of Rory McIlroy will be chasing points as he looks to defend his Race to Dubai crown.

I said a while ago that the Nedbank Golf Challenge’s best hope of survival would be to become a regular, albeit lucrative and prestigious, tournament on the European Tour schedule, and the other major change is that the field will now comprise 72 golfers.

The top 64 in the Race to Dubai standings will be invited, but there will still be space for the defending champion, the winner of the Sunshine Tour order of merit and six invited golfers, with Americans probably being the major target there.

A long time ago, Gary Player and Sol Kerzner had a dream to bring the world’s best golfers to South Africa and, with Nedbank staying on board and increasing their sponsorship to the extent that the prizemoney is now $7 million, the new era at Sun City will hopefully attract the cream of the crop, certainly in terms of European talent.

Thomas Aiken has been watching the Nedbank Golf Challenge at Sun City since he was seven years old and now he will finally be playing in the event following his nailbiting triumph in the Sunshine Tour’s Order of Merit in the final event, the South African Open, at Glendower Golf Club at the weekend.

Aiken faced a terrifying two-putt from about 90 feet on the last hole for par to ensure a top-10 finish in the SA Open and enough of a payday to overtake Danie van Tonder in the final Order of Merit, and the 31-year-old left himself with a knee-wobbling 10-footer, which he curled into the hole.

The three-time winner on the European Tour eventually finished in a six-way tie for fifth and earned R430 000, while Van Tonder shot a 75 in the final round to finish tied-55^th and made R52 500. That meant Aiken beat Van Tonder to first place on the Order of Merit by just over R157 000, but if he had bogeyed the last hole, that one stroke would have left him R1300 behind his young compatriot.

“I didn’t want to know the permutations but I knew a top-10 finish may be enough, so I was aiming top-five to make sure. With three holes to play, I knew I was tied eighth or ninth, so I said to myself that the worse-case scenario was three pars.

“I made good putts on 16 and 17, but then a really poor iron shot on 18, because I was trying to be too safe. I was far enough from the hole that I couldn’t see it and then my second putt was a good 10 feet away. It was maybe worse than having a putt to win a tournament, but I managed to make one of my best putts ever,” Aiken said.

“Winning the Order of Merit is something I’ve been looking forward to since I started playing on the Sunshine Tour in 2002. I’ve been close before and it’s nice to finally get it under the belt. Winning the Sid Brews Trophy is very nice and winning the money-list is obviously a feat because this is one of the five main tours in the world. But it also comes with substantial perks that can make your career – I’m into the British Open, the Memorial, three World Golf Championship events and the Nedbank Golf Challenge, which I’ve dreamed about playing in since I was a kid in the early 90s,” the born-and-bred Johannesburger said.

Winning the Sunshine Tour Order of Merit means Aiken, who has a full card on the European Tour, must have sacrificed to so strongly support his local tour and he said it was because he loves the grand old courses that so many of the co-sanctioned events are played on.

Glendower is certainly one of those and Royal Johannesburg and Kensington, where he will tee it up in the Joburg Open from February 26, is too, but he will sadly miss out on the Africa Open at the old-style East London Golf Club because of his qualification for the WGC Cadillac Championship at the Blue Monster in Florida at the same time.

When Van Tonder shot 78 in the first round at Glendower, his Order of Merit hopes seem to have been dashed, but he birdied his last three holes in the second round to make the cut and Aiken said this typified the gutsy youngster.

“Danie has played extremely well all year, there are few 23-year-olds that can be that consistent all year and he’s had multiple wins. He’s a very tenacious young man  and he has the fiery spirit to make it, he grinds through when the chips are down, he has BMT – like he showed when birdieing the last three holes to make the cut,” Aiken said.

Englishman Danny Willett’s impressive triumph at the Nedbank Golf Challenge over the weekend means it is now seven years since a South African won the prestigious title at Sun City, and tournament director Alastair Roper has an interesting theory why.

Trevor Immelman won the 2007 Nedbank Golf Challenge by one stroke from Justin Rose but since then the best South African finishes have been runners-up slots for Tim Clark (2010) and Charl Schwartzel (2012).

This year it was a trio of Englishmen – Willett, Ross Fisher and Luke Donald – who dominated at the Gary Player Country Club.

Sun City is obviously one of the favourite tourist destinations of South Africans and, being at the end of the year, there is a general holiday vibe around the complex. The South Africans in the field inevitably have an entourage of friends and family joining them at the tournament.

“It’s a pity none of the South Africans showed up, it would have been really nice if Charl or Louis [Oosthuizen] had been up there with the Englishmen on Sunday. Just generally, in the last 18 months/two years, South African performances on the world tours have been sub-standard, so it’s partly a form thing that none have won at Sun City.

“Maybe it’s just a lean period, but something else bothers me and that is that there may be too many distractions for the South African golfers. I remember for many years [8] Ernie Els was trying to win here and it bothered me the number of distractions he had.

“At the South African Open or the Alfred Dunhill, there’s not as much of a demand on their time. Here, all their friends want to be with them and they’re asking for tickets, for access and when they can have dinner together. A guy like Willett was here with his caddy, his wife and maybe one friend,” Roper told The Citizen on Monday.

Roper said the increase in the size of the field from 12 to 30 had led to a similar rise in interest in the tournament.

“I was always the biggest skeptic about going to 30, I was very confident that 12 was the right way to go. But last year it surprised me what a positive reaction we had from the sponsors and we’re getting that same feeling again. More players and more golf is what they want to see.”

That has translated into the number of corporate hospitality suites – the lifeblood of the tournament – rising to 35 and including a diversity of sponsors.

“We want a demand for those facilities, that’s key to the success of the tournament, it’s built around hospitality, and those sponsors continue to be happy. We’ve had more this year in terms of numbers of sponsors and it’s been a whole different bunch of sponsors as well,” Roper said.

The tournament director said there had been little change in the number of spectators attending the event, with just over 60 000 coming over the four days, while the reach of the Nedbank Golf Challenge on television – showcasing Sun City as a tourism destination – continues to grow.