Ken Borland

Jaco van Zyl has been playing his golf largely out of the limelight despite finishing in the top 10 of the Sunshine Tour Order of Merit for the last four years. But that could change if he wins the Joburg Open at Royal Johannesburg and Kensington on Sunday.

Van Zyl shot an outstanding five-under-par 67 on Saturday to move to 14-under-par and a tie for third place, just five out from the leading mark set by Richard Sterne and Trevor Fisher Jnr.

The 33-year-old member of Dainfern Golf Club almost had the distinction of starting and ending his round with an eagle. Van Zyl began the day with a three on the par-five first hole and then watched in disbelief as his 18-foot eagle putt on the last just lipped out.

“A foot from the hole, the ball just started to go right, but I thought enough of it would still be over the hole to go in,” Van Zyl mused after his round.

But by then he had become used to the ebbs and flows of his round on the East Course, considered to be the tougher of the two at Royal Joburg and solely used for the weekend.

“The first hole is obviously one you want to capitalise on being a par-five, but then on two, three and four you’re just hanging on. Six you can capitalise again on and although things went slow between nine and 15, I had a nice finish,” Van Zyl said.

The 2000 SA Amateur champion felt he had “kind of a chance” of winning on Sunday but conceded that Sterne and Fisher had the tournament under their control.

“I’ll really need a good one tomorrow and I must get a quick start,” Van Zyl said.

While the Lonehill resident says he feels most comfortable at home -“travelling really gets to you” – he will be heading over to Europe once again in April.

Van Zyl, despite seldom being mentioned in the same breath as the likes of Charl Schwartzel, George Coetzee, Richard Sterne and Thomas Aiken, has been able to shine over the last two years on the European Tour, comfortably retaining his card with 50th and 64th place finishes on the order of merit.

But he would dearly love to add a European Tour title to his collection of 10 Sunshine Tour wins.

“My first goal is to retain my card because I try not to lose perspective of how quickly things can go sour in this game. I want to stay modest, learn how to crawl before I try to walk and then run.

“My second goal is to make the Race to Dubai final, but winning a European Tour event has been on my mind for a while, I’ve had a couple of chances and I’d obviously really like to finish one off,” Van Zyl said.

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The Sunshine Tour announced two new co-sanctioned events with the European Tour on Tuesday, bringing to six the number of tournaments to be played in South Africa during the 2013 Race to Dubai season.
The Nelson Mandela Championship, to be staged in association with the former South Africa president’s Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, will be held from December 6-9, while the Tshwane Open, backed by the country’s administrative capital, Pretoria, will take place from February 28 to March 3, 2013.
The Tshwane Open at the Els Club Copperleaf will have prizemoney of 1.5 million euro, meaning the winner will gain a two-year exemption on the European Tour, while the purse for the Nelson Mandela Championship has yet to be finalised, but Sunshine Tour executive director Selwyn Nathan said it would be “a minimum of one million euro”.
The Sunshine Tour also announced on Tuesday that the prizemoney for the Alfred Dunhill Championship, to be played at Leopard Creek from December 13-16, has also been increased to 1.5 million euro.
South Africa is now the country that will host the most European Tour events, with the South African Open, Africa Open and Joburg Open also being co-sanctioned events with the Sunshine Tour.
“I’m particularly excited that we have another two European Tour co-sanctioned events, as it shows the confidence one of the two major tours in the world has in us,” Nathan said. “It’s a really special day for us and we hope the stars will support these events. They show we have a face in international golf.”
Although the venue for the Nelson Mandela Championship has also yet to be finalised, Nathan confirmed that it would be held at one of two coastal courses – the Royal Durban Golf Club or Humewood in Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape. The head of the Sunshine Tour said they were in the process of making sure facilities at the two courses were all in order and they would be paying particular attention to practice facilities and hospitality capability.
“We are hoping the Nelson Mandela Championship will be held for a minimum of three years and it would be wonderful if it could stay in the same place. There are also a whole bunch of opportunities with international players who are in the country already to play at Sun City the week before,” Nathan said.
The Tshwane municipality’s executive mayor, Kgosientso Ramokgopa, said his council are guaranteeing R44 million (4.18 million euro) per annum for their tournament until the Sunshine Tour can find sufficient sponsors.

“The money we are guaranteeing is an investment we are making in ensuring coverage for Tshwane all over the world and it’s a small contribution compared to the budget for the indigent programs that will provide relief to the poor,” Ramokgopa said.

The Tshwane Open, which will be held at the Els Club Copperleaf for the next three years, will bring to an end a month of co-sanctioned events in Africa, including the Africa and Joburg Opens, before the tour returns to Europe.

The Sunshine Tour on Monday announced an exciting new playing opportunity for their members with the launch of the ISPS Handa South African Matchplay Championship to be played at Zwartkop Country Club in Centurion from October 29 to November 4.

A matchplay tournament has been absent from South Africa’s major golf tour for about 25 years and Sunshine Tour executive director Selwyn Nathan said he was delighted to reintroduce the head-to-head golfing contest on the schedule.

“It was almost 25 years ago that the last matchplay tournament was played, at Sun City, and we are thrilled to have it back on the schedule. It’s such an exciting format and the players don’t often get the chance to experience it in tournament play once they turn professional,” Nathan said in Sandton on Monday at the launch of the event.

The tournament has been made possible by the support of ISPS – the International Sports Promotion Society, which was set up by Japanese philanthropist Dr Haruhisa Handa to support charitable causes throughout the sporting world.

Handa is passionate about disabled golf and is considered the father of blind golf, ever since he played nine holes with a golfer with 5% vision in Perth 25 years ago. Handa lost and it has become his mission for golf to be included in the Paralympics.

Because of the ISPS’s involvement, the SA Matchplay Championship will feature a concurrent tournament for 16 disabled golfers, including some from the On Course Foundation they support in the United Kingdom, which gives seriously injured members of the British Armed Forces the opportunity to play golf.

There will be a field of 128 golfers, 16 of them to be seeded, in the main event and they will compete over seven rounds. Once the field is down to 64 golfers, they will be divided into four brackets and Saturday’s semi-final and Sunday’s final will be over 36 holes. The prize pool is R2 million and the winner will walk away with R300 000.

As Nathan pointed out, first-round losers will walk away with about R4 700 and the event is another fantastic addition to the Sunshine Tour schedule.

SuperSport golf broadcaster Dale Hayes, whose passion is the health of the game in South Africa, will be intimately involved in the tournament because Zwartkop has been associated with his family since 1940, with his father, Otway, being the club pro for 56 years. The Hayes family have been official owners of the club since 2001.

“We need to get more people playing golf. Because of the recession, people have stopped playing because of economics. But we need to reverse that, and we’ll be giving away 30 000 free tickets in the Centurion and Pretoria region. If you have to pay for a ticket to the tournament, then you clearly have a social problem!” Hayes joked.

“It would be very nice if Tony Johnstone entered, he was the winner of the last matchplay event and he also won the ICL International at Zwartkop in 1987 and 1988,” Hayes added.

“It’s also wonderful to have the disabled department in the tournament. There are very few sports that the disabled can participate in against the able-bodied, but golf is one of them because of the handicap system.”

Sunshine Tour marketing and communications director Duncan Cruikshank said some of South Africa’s leading overseas campaigners have already expressed an interest in the tournament.

“The timing is good because they’re usually back in the country at that time of year, so the field won’t be based strictly on the order of merit, although it will be for our money-list. It’s the start of our summer swing and it will be mostly Sunshine Tour members, but also some international invites which ISPS are assisting with,” Cruikshank said.

While Zwartkop is a country club in the truest sense of the words, it is also a top-class golf course with a classic parkland layout and there is a vast amount of water with the Hennops River running parallel to practically every hole!

The Sunshine Tour will also be fulfilling their development obligations after the tournament.

“There will definitely be some sort of leave-behind, with a development chapter being started at Zwartkop for youngsters in the area,” Cruikshank said.

Midori Miyazaki, ISPS’s executive director of international affairs, said they hoped their involvement in the tournament would provide a platform for them to promote golf as a Paralympics sport.

“Men’s and women’s professional golf around the world has provided an excellent platform to promote blind and disabled golf and we are trying to build a disabled component into our events in Europe, the British senior tour, the Ladies European Tour, the Australian tours and the US Senior Women’s Tour,” Miyazaki said.

“We are trying to get support for our Paralympic bid and the difficulty in disabled golf is formalising the rules to suit all the different types of disability. We like the exposure at the top level, but we have to work at all the different levels. We’re trying to pull all the different platforms together,” she said.

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