Ken Borland

Top South African golfer Justin Harding says he faces a predicament in arranging his schedule once professional golf resumes because he plays in both Europe and the United States and has to juggle their mussed up schedules with the quarantine and travel regulations of the various countries hosting events.

It is a problem facing many golfers as the U.S. PGA Tour hopes to resurrect their schedule on June 11 with the Charles Schwab Challenge at Colonial and the European Tour is supposedly going to start again at the end of July with a run of events in the United Kingdom. But many of the world’s top golfers hop between the European and American tours, which now becomes a logistical nightmare with all the quarantining and testing that will be required for international travel.

“The European Tour is going to try put on four or five weeks of action in the UK, and hopefully there will be reduced quarantine measures by the end of that otherwise it’s going to be a scheduling nightmare. If you want to play in America you have to go 14 days beforehand, and going to Europe you also need 14 days’ quarantine. The PGA Championship is scheduled for the second week of August, so if you play in the British Masters from July 23 then you miss the quarantine deadline.

“The Korn Ferry Tour [the secondary U.S. tour for which Harding has full status] sent out a 57-page memorandum on the different regulations for when they start on June 8, but I have no intention of playing a full schedule on that tour. I need the world ranking points from the European Tour, and it doesn’t make sense quarantining for six weeks just to play three tournaments,” Harding said in a recent Sunshine Tour virtual press conference.

And before one accuses the 34-year-old world number 111 of being lazy, it is a viewpoint shared by many other golfers and Harding has proven his credentials by playing all over the world in recent years. One trip to the United States that he is willing to make, however, is for the Masters, which has been rescheduled for November 12-15. Harding made an impressive debut at the Masters last year, finishing in a tie for 12^th just five shots behind winner Tiger Woods, earning himself an invitation for this year’s Major.

“I’m certainly happy that the Masters wasn’t cancelled like the Open Championship! I’m dying to go back again and I wasn’t in a great run of form when we stopped playing golf but hopefully I can go to Augusta in November and be competitive. It’s a very strategic course and you need to put the ball in the right places. But I have no idea what the course will be like at that time of year.

“I’m sure Augusta will look different, I think it will be quite firm after it was quite wet last year. It will also be the debuts of Erik van Rensburg and Christiaan Bezuidenhout there so that’s going to be good fun. I think they’re the most upset about golf being suspended because they were both flying! Whereas I had had a dip in form which I was trying to play through, so the 10-week break might be good for me,” Harding said.

Springbok tighthead prop Marcel van der Merwe began his professional rugby career at the Free State Cheetahs in 2011 and would play alongside and scrum against a strong but raw loosehead from Limpopo by the name of Trevor Nyakane.

In 2013 Van der Merwe joined the Blue Bulls and made his Super Rugby debut for them the following year. Nyakane followed the Welkom-born, Paarl Boys’ High School educated tighthead to Pretoria, with Van der Merwe then leaving for Toulon in June 2016.

The 29-year-old Van der Merwe will now return to the Bulls after four years in France and he will find Nyakane has not only switched to tighthead prop but become an integral part of both the Bulls and Springbok teams. There will be competition aplenty now for what new Bulls coach Jake White has called the most important position in the team, and Nyakane welcomes it.

Not only because it will push the 31-year-old to even greater heights but it will also help manage his workload. Nyakane had very little respite in last year’s Super Rugby competition, starting every single game, all 17 of them. Eventually all that physical strain adds up and it may have played a role in his unfortunate departure from the 2019 World Cup, after tearing a calf muscle in the second half of the opening game against the All Blacks.

“I played with Marcel at both Free State and the Bulls and I know the type of player he is, so it’s going to be amazing to have him in the squad. We can now look at alternating at tighthead, it’s always great to be able to do that, but you also want to play of course. But it’s really difficult in a full season to play every game,” Nyakane told The Citizen at the One Cup of Pap Feeding Scheme, alongside fellow World Cup winners John Smit and Joel Stransky, who were also helping to hand out food parcels.

White has been quick to make changes at the Bulls and Nyakane said it will be exciting times when the squad finally gets together again after Lockdown. “It’s always exciting having a new coach to change things up a bit and I look forward to meeting up with Jake and everyone else when we go back to Loftus. The coach has obviously been bulking up the squad, which only makes it easier to rotate and manage players, and to have fresh blood coming in will be a positive,” Nyakane said.

When Marizanne Kapp mooted the idea of becoming a professional cricketer to her mother, her greatest supporter, it did not go down well. But remembering it was the previous decade and Cricket South Africa contracts and having their matches televised was still a long way off for our top women’s players, this should not be a surprise.

Mother Nereda Lamprecht had earlier been the one to approach the principal of Hoerskool DF Malherbe to convince him to allow her 13-year-old daughter to play boys cricket at the Port Elizabeth school. The immense talent was obvious, but ensuring Kapp had the platform to reach her potential was another matter.

“To be able to play cricket for a living, that’s my biggest dream come true. My mother was so upset when I told her I wanted to be a professional cricketer, she said no, I must get a proper job. Well now I can take her anywhere in the world she wants to go and pay for her, so I guess it worked out in the end.

“I was a bit of a tomboy growing up and I wanted to do anything the boys were doing. My cousins used to play cricket in the streets, so I started playing with them and then I graduated to indoor cricket. Then my mother went to the principal and asked if I could join the boys team. I did everything at school and I got provincial colours for swimming, biathlon, cross-country and netball, but it was cricket that really stuck,” Kapp, who has a degree in sports management and is studying for another one in human resources, told Saturday Citizen.

Chosen by South Africa for the first time in March 2009, Kapp was still a teenager when she was given a baptism of fire by hosts Australia in the World Cup. But she has grown into one of the best all-rounders in world cricket, chosen by the International Cricket Council for their 2017 ODI team of the year and headhunted by the Sydney Sixers for the inaugural Big Bash in 2015. That’s the most lucrative event for women’s cricketers, their version of the IPL, and the Sixers have been the most successful team, winning the title twice and being runners-up in the other two seasons.

There is no question that the Proteas Women have been helped into the upper echelons of the world game by the arrival of the tremendously athletic Kapp. She forms a formidable new-ball partnership with Shabnim Ismail, rated by many as the best in the world, while she is good enough with the bat to play in the top-order and she has scored South Africa’s only World Cup century.

A feisty character on the field, Kapp may seem a bit shy and withdrawn in the public eye when not playing cricket. But she is clearly the type of person you can go to war with and is hard on herself. She is especially eager to contribute more with the bat.

“I really want to do a bit more with the bat, I’ve been playing for the Proteas for quite a while now and the seniors need to put up their hands and take the load. The bowling is still our team’s big strength, but the batting has to improve. Batting at number three, I’d like to end more games.

“The bowling just comes more naturally for me and in ODIs you’re normally bowling first and batting second. Which is why my batting took a bit of a knock, but I want to get into it more and it’s something I can work on. I’m just waiting for the chance now because we’re playing matches every second day at the moment, whereas in the past we had a few more rest days,” Kapp says.

The Proteas, having whitewashed Sri Lanka 3-0 in their T20 series, now take on the tourists in three ODIs in Potchefstroom next week and if Kapp plays in them all, she will be tantalisingly poised on 99 ODI caps.

Her wife, Dane van Niekerk, is the national captain and will probably get to the 100^th game milestone first as she already has 98 caps. They will join Mignon du Preez and Trisha Chetty as the only centurions.

The corridors of Cricket South Africa  can be a rabbit warren of political intrigue, but one thing they are clearly getting right is stabilising and growing the women’s game. Kapp is very appreciative of their efforts and, once her playing days are over (which will hopefully only be in a long while because she is only 29), she is determined to continue working towards the progress of South African women’s cricket.

“It’s tough but there are very good signs which show how serious CSA are in taking the women’s game forward. I wold like to give back when I’m done playing, to contribute to women’s cricket here becoming like it is in Australia,” Kapp said.

https://citizen.co.za/sport/south-african-sport/sa-cricket-sport/2080036/women-in-sport-how-feisty-marizanne-won-her-mom-over/

Lee-Anne Pace is South Africa’s most successful women’s golfer since the legendary Sally Little in the 1980s, but despite hitting the ball better than ever, she is without an overseas professional win since October 2014 and if one enquires after the reasons why, the 37-year-old says she is honestly not sure.

It all points to how massively competitive women’s golf has become, especially since Pace moved to the LPGA Tour in America, having pretty much conquered the Ladies European Tour with nine titles and two Player of the Year crowns.

Which is not to suggest Pace is struggling. She is still chugging along on the LPGA Tour, inside the top-100 on the order of merit, as she finished last year, following excellent top-50 positions in 2015 and 2016.

“It hasn’t been a particularly good year, but I’ve been up there a few times and I just haven’t finished the job. I do feel that my golf is getting better and better though, and I’m confident things will turn around soon. The tour has become super-competitive and it gets more difficult to win every year, with the equipment improving all the time.

“In America, most of the time you’re pitching straight towards the pin, it’s more like target golf and then it all comes down to putting. I’m hitting the ball probably the best I ever have, so I’m not sure really where the problem is. But in golf sometimes just a little bit of adjustment can make a massive difference,” Pace says.

The Paarl-born golfer moved from the European Tour to the United States in 2014 and, even though she won as a rookie, claiming the Blue Bay title (the tournament being held in China), she says it was still quite an adjustment to make, even for someone who had enjoyed a successful amateur collegiate career at the Murray State and Tulsa universities.

“The first few years were all about adapting and you have to be longer off the tee here, that was one of the things I had to sort out with just a few adjustments, as well as getting used to the different grass. But I managed to win one in my first year and I’ve had seven top-10 finishes as well. Slowly, slowly I’ve been getting better, making gradual moves upwards,” Pace says.

The psychology graduate is aiming to win a Major before her career is over and playing this weekend in the Scottish Open at Gullane Golf Club, where fellow South African Brandon Stone shot a final-round 60 to win the equivalent men’s event earlier in the month, is going to be great preparation for qualifying next week for the British Women’s Open. Given her strong start in the tournament, however, which has a stellar field co-sanctioned by the LPGA, Pace might not need to play in the qualifier at St Anne’s.

“The top three this weekend also get into the British Open so this is like a mini-qualifier. But I’m always eyeing the win, I had good early tee-times the first two days, so I had fresh greens and not too much wind. But with half the 156 golfers coming from the LPGA and half from the LET, it’s a really good, very strong field.

“Links golf can be quite a beast, all the holes are different and you have to decide whether to be aggressive or lay back. I probably tend to go for the pins more, I like to shape the ball into the flag, but over the next couple of weeks I’ll have to think really carefully about where you land the ball. I love Links golf,” Pace says.

An ever-present smile masks a tigerish competitor, but Pace embodies the true spirit of the game. Her previous Major appearance, at the PGA Championship in Chicago, ended in her disqualifying herself.

In her frustration she bashed her wedge against a hazard stake, not realising at the time that she had damaged the hosel of the club. A few holes later, she spotted the damage and, even though rules officials encouraged her to continue playing pending a review, she knew the rule about changing the condition of a club during play and it’s penalty – disqualification.

Unlike Phil Mickelson a couple of weeks earlier, Pace did the right thing and disqualified herself, saving a lot of time and effort.

Hopefully her reward will be a change in fortunes in the United Kingdom over the next fortnight.

https://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/the-citizen-gauteng/20180728/282518659300966