Ken Borland

DULLSTROOM (Mpumalanga) – Having pioneered women playing in a series of Sunshine Tour events, Vodacom have now increased their effort to promote gender equality in golf by giving the ladies playing in the Origins of Golf tournaments a golden opportunity to play in the Ladies European Tour’s Access Series.

Last year’s Vodacom Origins of Golf Series saw women compete with the men in the same tournament for the same R2 million prizemoney for the first time on the Sunshine Tour. This year, starting at the Highland Gate event which begins on Friday, new incentives have been introduced in order to encourage more women to take part in the series.

The response has been immediate, with nine female golfers, more than for any of the Vodacom Origins of Golf Series tournaments last year, having entered.

The incentives are based around a new mini order of merit for the ladies who play in at least two of the three regular Vodacom Origins of Golf Series events and the final. The winner of that leaderboard will receive a cash prize, automatic entrance into the 2025 Joburg Ladies Open, co-sanctioned by the LET, and three tournament invites for the Access Series.

The Access Series is the LET’s official development tour and is based in Europe. The top six on the order of merit get cards for the LET, while positions seven to 20 go straight to the final stage of qualifying school.

While the promising Brittney-Fay Berger was able to sparkle in the last two events of the 2023 Vodacom Origins of Golf Series, it was generally tough going for the women with Cara Gorlei, Tara Griebenouw and Zethu Myeki making one cut each.

But to their credit, Vodacom have listened to the concerns of the Sunshine Ladies Tour players and have taken cognisance of the fact that they are breaking new ground and their bold move will take a while to bear fruit.

“We started last year with our effort to bring more women into the game because they don’t get enough tournament opportunities to showcase their talents,” Dr Ntombi Mhangwani, the executive head of Vodacom Business Marketing, says. “But with the Vodacom Origins of Golf Series going to four different regions, it gives our ladies more playing time and more exposure.

“We must remember though that they have not played with the guys before and so we have constant discussions with our partners, the Sunshine Tour and Flooid, about how we can make this initiative better. We are always talking about what worked well and what didn’t, what can we fix?

“The women are not yet competing on an equal footing so we have asked the Sunshine Ladies Tour professionals questions like ‘what courses work for them? How can we partner with you to get you where you want to be in your golf career? The Sunshine Tour has played a central role in pulling all the sponsors together, the whole ecosystem must work together to make this succeed,” Mhangwani says.

Gabrielle Venter, a new star on the Sunshine Ladies Tour having won the Standard Bank Ladies Open, after finishing fifth in the Dimension Data Ladies Pro-Am and runner-up in the SuperSport Ladies Challenge, admits to being a convert to the Vodacom Origins of Golf Series and the 20-year-old will tee it up with the men at Highland Gate this weekend.

“The incentives definitely made up my mind, getting an Access Series invitation is a big thing because it gives you a chance to play in Europe and get experience over there. And the Joburg Open is a Ladies European Tour event so there are a lot of world ranking points on offer there.

“I was waiting to see how the other ladies did last year in the Vodacom Origins of Golf, and they did pretty well. If you’re going to play but just never make the cut then it’s not worth the R15 000 a week you’ll be paying to compete, what with accommodation and everything,” Venter said.

The Bloemfontein Golf Club representative said Highland Gate was a good venue for the women to play because even though they are not given much advantage in terms of forward tees, it is a course on which most times you have to lay up anyway on the par-fives, so driving distance does not really matter as much.

If you are a golf fan of a certain age then you will remember the Houghton Golf Club as being the regular venue for major South African golf tournaments, and the announcement that the Joburg Open will be moving there from November 24-27 will be a pleasing one.

Established in 1926, Houghton Golf Club was considered one of the best parkland courses in Johannesburg and hosted the South African Open eight times between 1951 and 1992, and the club hosted the Alfred Dunhill Championship between 1996 and 2004, after which it moved to Leopard Creek. Eight-time SA Open champion Sid Brews, South Africa’s leading golfing hero before Bobby Locke, was the pro at Houghton for 35 years.

But now, 18 years after Marcel Siem won the Alfred Dunhill Championship there in 2004, a co-sanctioned event with the European Tour will return to the course that underwent a complete redesign in 2009, becoming a Jack Nicklaus signature layout.

“We have staged Big Easy and IGT tour events since we closed in 2007 and reopened in 2019 with basically a new golf course,” CEO Robby Richardson said at the announcement on Tuesday at Houghton Golf Club.

“The greens are typical Jack Nicklaus designs and exceptionally undulating. If we can get their speed up to 12 or 13 then that will the major part of the course’s protection.

“We will try to harden and speed them up a bit, and we have also narrowed the fairways between 260 and 290 metres from the tee. It’s going to be nice to see how the pros play it,” Richardson said of a course that is by no means long, but still plays 6708 metres from the back tees, compared to the 6899 of Glendower and 7105 of Gary Player Country Club.

The course uses almost entirely it’s own water from grey sources as well as boreholes, so Richardson added that he is hoping the summer rains arrive soon.

Thriston Lawrence, ninth on the DP World Tour order of merit, is confirmed to be defending his Joburg Open title won at Randpark last November, while Dean Burmester and Oliver Bekker have also signed up, so there will be plenty of quality golf for local fans as well as the expected broadcast audience of 300 million viewers.

WorldRugby this week confirmed the hosts of their World Cup tournaments for men and women through to 2033 and proved again that, as the governing body for the sport, they are mainly concerned with making as much money as possible and not necessarily the good of the game or sporting principles like fairness and equity.

Of the nine men’s World Cup tournaments held, six have been won by New Zealand and South Africa, and yet they are the countries most unlikely to ever host rugby’s showpiece tournament again, purely for economic reasons.

New Zealand’s small population and time zone issues mean the 2011 tournament they won is likely to be the last one they ever host, while South Africa are mainly prejudiced by their weak economy. Although the exchange rate does make hosting the tournament cheaper, WorldRugby still demand a guarantee of about R2 billion from whoever stages a World Cup.

That sort of money can only really be stumped up by northern hemisphere nations and Australia.

But having put on some of the greatest sporting events ever held – Madiba’s 1995 Rugby World Cup at the dawn of democracy, the 2003 Cricket World Cup and the 2010 Football World Cup – there is no denying South African rugby fans feel tremendously hurt at being snubbed by WorldRugby.

That hurt is only made greater by the skullduggery that saw France snatching the hosting rights for next year’s World Cup, after WorldRugby’s own evaluation committee had recommended South Africa.

But when it came to the WorldRugby council voting on the issue, the powerful European bloc backed France. The worse betrayal of all came from Rugby Africa, the continental body which has its offices in Cape Town, paid for by SA Rugby, and who also voted for France.

Much like in African football, there is a growing sense of north African teams seizing power and aligning themselves with the old colonial power of France.

In a decision WorldRugby chairman Bill Beaumont, the former England captain, said would “accelerate the growth and impact of rugby globally”, Australia were awarded the 2027 World Cup and the USA the 2031 edition. The next three Women’s World Cups (2025, 2029 & 2033) will be hosted by England, Australia and the USA.

Apart from an obvious trend towards favouring the Anglosphere, the USA are hardly a rugby power. Their women may be ranked seventh in the world, but the men’s game is still taking baby steps.

Major League Rugby has been on the go in America since 2017 and the sport is growing in the world’s biggest commercial market. But the USA would be the weakest team to ever host the World Cup and they still only attract around 20 000 people to their home matches.

Sevens rugby is their most popular format, with nine million TV viewers for the Rugby World Cup Sevens in San Francisco in 2018.

One can argue giving Australia a World Cup is also helping the development of the game because Rugby Union is perpetually fighting a battle for prominence in a country that prefers Aussie Rules and Rugby League. Especially with the Wallabies slowly drifting away from rock-bottom and their union admitting that hosting the World Cup will basically save them from going bankrupt.

Having been kind enough to help Australia out of their financial hole, one hopes WorldRugby will show the same generosity and offer the same opportunities to New Zealand and South Africa, historically the most important rugby nations.

But it will be at least 40 years between World Cups for South Africa, and New Zealand are lagging in the sporting arms race when it comes to the capacity of their stadiums, the size of their population and technological advancement.

Oh, and don’t forget that both these great nations cannot pour enough of that all-important cash into WorldRugby’s greedy coffers.

When Chloe Tryon first started playing international cricket back in 2010, South Africa were not considered prime contenders when it came to ICC tournaments. Now, as they prepare for the Women’s World Cup in New Zealand, the Proteas are under ever-more scrutiny as the second-ranked team in ODIs.

It is a pressure the 28-year-old Tryon says they are growing more accustomed to all the time, having learnt plenty of tough lessons from their semi-final exits in the 2017 World Cup and the 2020 T20 World Cup.

“We’ve come close before but been disappointed, so this tournament is about taking the next step,” Tryon said on Wednesday. “We have to make sure we keep it simple, tick all our boxes.

“We will treat it as just another game, but we are used to playing in world cups now, it’s time to make that next step and take a bit more responsibility.

“There’s still a long way to go before the World Cup starts on March 5, so at the moment it’s just about putting the building blocks in place. We’ve dreamt about this for a long time, four years and then it took another year to happen,” Tryon said.

South Africa’s previous visit to New Zealand, in 2020, saw them win the ODI series against their powerful hosts, so they will be confident they have the resources for the playing conditions to enable them to push for glory.

They open their campaign against Bangladesh in Dunedin. In the Group Stage, the eight competing sides will participate in a single-league format with each side playing the other once, the format that was previously used in the 2017 tournament. The top four sides following the conclusion of the league matches will progress to the semi-finals, with the winners meeting in the final on April 3 in Christchurch.