Ken Borland

SUN CITY, North-West (13 October) – Ockie Strydom is the owner of 37 top-10 finishes on the Sunshine Tour and was the runner-up at the Gary Player Country Club in the 2019 Sun City Challenge, so it is never too surprising to see him at the top of the leaderboard as he was after the first round of the Blue Label Challenge at the famous 7831-yard course on Wednesday.

In a tournament using a modified Stableford scoring system, Strydom shot a wonderful seven-under-par 65, his eight birdies and just one bogey giving him a total of 15 points. That left the 36-year-old one point ahead of Ruan Korb (66), while Jayden Schaper and Rhys Enoch also shot six-under-par but finished on 13 points because they did not have an eagle on their cards, as Korb did on the par-five 11^th.

Strydom’s solitary bogey came on the first hole, and he stayed on minus-one points through the next four holes, but thereafter the Serengeti golfer found the conditions and very warm temperatures much to his liking with three successive birdies from the sixth hole. He was especially potent on the back nine, where he collected five birdies.

“On the first hole I hit two in the bush and I thought ‘here we go!’. But I kept calm and then I changed my ball after five holes because that one wasn’t really working. I then got a lucky bounce on the sixth green and I just started making birdies,” Strydom said. “I was hitting it nicely off the tee, finding the fairways and then hitting my irons quite close. The putting then works out itself.”

Strydom is known to be a big hitter off the tee and, with summer rains having arrived in the Pilanesberg, the fact that there is not as much run on the fairways as in winter has suited him.

“Most of the previous events here have been in winter, when the ball really runs on the fairways. But now it’s softer, it feels a club or two longer that normal. But I like that because it means not everyone can attack the greens from long distance. They are very soft greens though and the ball either comes back or stops dead,” Strydom said.

The man who made his breakthrough win at the 2019 Vodacom Origins of Golf Series event at Sishen has enjoyed a solid season and is 30^th on the Order of Merit. His tee-to-green work has been consistent, and now, as the big money co-sanctioned events loom, his putter has started coming to life.

“I was a bit off at the beginning of the season, slowly getting better and I have not struggled from tee-to-green in the last six months. My putting was a bit of a problem though and my coach Doug Wood has been working very hard at it. I’m starting to get more comfortable with the process,” Strydom said.

Toto Thimba Junior has returned from his bucket-list trip to St Andrews for the Dunhill Links Championship in fine fettle and he shot a four-under-par 68 for 11 points.

Welshman Enoch has also returned to the Sunshine Tour, for the first time since winning the KitKat Group Pro-Am in March, and has come off an up-and-down European Tour campaign. But he looked in excellent touch on Wednesday, his only dropped shot coming on the par-five 18^th, which was his ninth hole.

Scores – https://sunshinetour.com/tournament-information/?tourn=BLCH&season=221S&report=tmentry~season=221S~alphaorder~#/home

It is not that surprising to see young Bulls lock Walt Steenkamp playing with extreme vigour in the Rainbow Cup, given that the 25-year-old came down with Covid at the end of last year, which then affected his heart, meaning he only returned to the field three weeks ago.

Steenkamp came down with a particularly virulent but rare strain of the Covid-19 virus that attacks the heart muscle, leaving him with arrhythmia, a condition in which his heart-rate struggles to return to normal after exercise. It actually required surgery in which the misfiring electrical signals are corrected.

“After five months of not playing it’s lovely to be back and playing in a winning team again. But it was quite heavy going through that, I will take nothing for granted again when it comes to playing rugby, it was a big fright. Fortunately the doctors never said I would definitely have to give up rugby, so I always believed I would come back.

“I actually had to have the operation twice, it’s called an ablation – they insert catheters that destroy the tissue that’s causing the abnormal heart signals, turn it into scar tissue. I had just 20% heart function before the operations but it’s all perfect now. And I really value being back in the lovely culture of this team,” Steenkamp said this week.

The former Free State Cheetahs and North-West Leopards star has made a big impact since joining the Bulls last November and has made some major plays, especially a crucial lineout steal five metres from their own line against the Sharks when the Bulls had just gone 19-9 up last weekend. Steenkamp clearly has a big engine, he is mobile but also a big-hitter in the physical exchanges.

But even as a relative youngster, Steenkamp has noticed how the game of rugby is changing, which presents fresh challenges, especially in terms of adapting to the new way tackles are being refereed, which many people consider a cancer in the game.

“Rugby has changed a lot, but Jake White is a mastermind, he knows what it takes to win and we’re doing the right things at the moment. The rules now make it harder to do what locks used to do. There’s more focus on fitness now and we have to be more careful, especially when it comes to tackles,” Steenkamp said.

One of the more pleasing aspects of the Proteas’ previous season was how well head coach Mark Boucher and his assistant Enoch Nkwe dovetailed together, which is probably not too surprising given the similarities between them in coaching philosophy.

It could have been a lot more awkward than it was when Boucher took over as head coach in December, Nkwe effectively being demoted to assistant coach because he had been the interim team director when the Proteas toured India in September/October.

But Nkwe is the sort of coach who always puts the team first and Boucher has always been known to be a great team man. As a player and coach, the record-breaking wicketkeeper’s attributes of honest communication, competitiveness, toughness, courage and discipline are well-known.

They are shared qualities that bind them together.

That the 37-year-old Nkwe has a similar coaching philosophy to the 43-year-old Boucher became clear when I was fortunate enough to sit in on the virtual coaches conference he held with the Lions recently. Apart from the many coaches within the Lions system, including his successor as franchise head coach Wandile Gwavu, there were coaches from as far afield as the Eastern Cape, Uganda and New Zealand logged in to hear Nkwe share his thoughts, and the Soweto-born former all-rounder certainly left them with many great insights to ponder.

Nkwe sees the coach’s role as being to create an environment that enables the team to reach success.

“It’s important that you are all speaking the same language, you need the environment to be freed up and authentic. There needs to be clear role-definition which is one of the most powerful coaching tools and it can determine the brand of cricket played. And if the whole process is done properly then the coach is in a much stronger position to have tough conversations.

“You’ve got to be totally honest, one can feel sorry for the player but you can’t sugarcoat things or beat around the bush. It may be uncomfortable at the moment, but going forward the player will have respect for you because of your honesty. Don’t be scared or shy to have those honest conversations; the players know the moment you are bullshitting,” Nkwe said.

In order to discover his own coaching philosophy, Nkwe, who began his coaching career as player-coach for Dutch club HCC Rood en Wit in 2005, said he looked at his own character and what he consistently did as both a player and coach.

He came up with the word ‘competitive’, a word closely associated with Boucher himself.

“You need to master the little things, you’re not going to get everything right but you strive for a level of excellence. And you have to find a way to make it work. Things are not ever going to go all smoothly, and when things are not great, that’s when you have to overcome the challenge. You have to keep finding ways to be successful. There’s always a way and you can’t feel sorry for yourself,” Nkwe said.

You can imagine the exact same words coming out of Mark Boucher’s mouth. To be courageous also seemed to be second-nature for the gritty Eastern Cape product.

“You need courage and consistency to promote your vision and the confidence to go into a new environment and not compromise your beliefs because then you will lose the team. If you want to be liked, then coaching is not the industry for you,” Nkwe said frankly.

Boucher himself has spoken positively of their burgeoning relationship.

“Enoch and I have had some great conversations and I think we understand each other. We certainly have the same ideas and agree on how to do it. We know we’ll have hard calls to make but we’re not scared to make them.

“He has a good relationship with the youngsters I don’t know properly yet and he takes a load off my hands. I appreciate it and we will just keep working hard together and drive our vision together,” Boucher said recently.

Nkwe has also been a great respecter of new Director of Cricket Graeme Smith, ever since their paths crossed as schoolkids. Nkwe played for St Stithians and Smith was at King Edward VII. The future national captain would skipper Nkwe in the Gauteng Schools side of 1999, Smith’s second year of Khaya Majola Week cricket and the first of three years in which Nkwe played. Interestingly, both Smith and Nkwe scored centuries on their first-class debuts.

“Graeme was always a great example to me, he worked out at 15 years old that he needed to make peace with his technique. He knew he was not the best-looking batsman but he had a clear vision of what his strengths were and he made sure he thrived on that and his mental strength. I remember at Khaya Majola Week in 1999 just trying to understand how he could score so many hundreds at such a young age.

“Graeme found a way to make it work, he didn’t fight his technique. It was pure mental strength and he was lucky to have a coach that encouraged that,” Nkwe said.

I would dare to predict that South African cricket will realise in future just how lucky they were to have Smith, Boucher and Nkwe working together to steer the Proteas out of their current turmoil.