Stunning South Africa

A few years ago, while I still entertained ambitions of becoming a European Tour golfer, my winters were spent beating muddy balls on driving ranges, grinding on sodden short game areas, and bemoaning the lack of daylight hours. For the majority of the off-season this was the glamorous reality, but for a couple of weeks each year the opportunity arose to jet off to the warmth of South Africa.  Here, golf doesn’t get much better, with southern hemisphere summers providing the perfect antidote to our winters and the courses providing perfect playing conditions to warm even the coldest of form.

Coming from Europe, what makes South Africa even more inviting is the small time difference (GMT +2hrs).  I once read that Cape Town was a superb but rarely considered destination for a weekend break and it’s true (if you have the money).  OK, it’s a long haul flight, but the argument makes perfect sense as flights to South Africa are invariably overnight, so you leave in the evening and arrive in time for breakfast the next morning.  You may not have had the most restful night ever but no jet lag to worry about.  In truth, though, you’ll want at least a week, and even then they’ll have to drag you off the course kicking and screaming.

My fondest memories of golf in South Africa stem from one particular extended winter trip. In preparing to qualify for the South African Amateur Championship we flew out a couple of weeks early to acclimatise to the conditions and style of courses, and to find some form (or have a jolly, depending on whether you buy into my attempts to portray a professional attitude). As you’d expect then, my game was in dreadful shape when it came to the Qualifier.

The trip began inauspiciously.  We played in Johannesburg on the first morning we arrived, but it was so soon after landing that my clubs hadn’t recovered from the cold air swirling around the aeroplane hull, and the first time I used my 60 degree lob wedge it snapped clean in two – an incident that would soon come back to haunt me.

In the two weeks that followed I was fortunate enough to play golf at some of the best courses in South Africa, and they remain unquestionably some of my most enjoyable golfing experiences. The coastal stretch at Arabella, the triumvirate at Fancourt (The Links, Montagu, and Outeniqua), the spectacular Pezula on the cliff tops at Knysna, and the world famous desert courses at Sun City (Gary Player, Lost City), all offer something unique and equally compelling. The hardest part for most people is finding enough time to fit it all in, but when this constitutes your ‘job’ it’s a little easier to justify.

The golden ticket at the end of our trip was the knowledge that qualifying for the South African Amateur would mean another fortnight in this sunny wonderland just one month later. What more incentive do you need to play well?  Sadly, my game wasn’t listening.

My qualifying round itself can be broken down into three distinct parts:

Part One: Disaster. Ordinarily, a couple of gentle par 4 openers wouldn’t present too much of a problem, but when inexplicably kicking off with a double bogey and then compounding the error with a triple, the scale of the task ahead hit me squarely between the eyes.

Part Two: Miracle. Quite how I shuffled the ball around the next 14 holes a couple under par will always remain a mystery to me. There was nothing pretty, no tales of ‘total golf’ to write home about, but after 16 holes I somehow found myself on the bubble of qualification, with the simple matter of two benign par fours standing in my way.

Part Three: Fate (I guess?).  I made a par on the seventeenth with a driver, full 5 iron and two putts. But if I tell you my second shot was one of the two putts, you’ll realise this wasn’t regulation golf. Instead my drive had found some tree roots from which I had to putt back on to the fairway, leaving a full five iron followed by a single putt to make my par. Text book.

I then followed those antics by ‘skying’ my tee shot barely 100 yards on the eighteenth, leaving a career-defining three wood to be threaded between tall pines and across a pond, to land delicately on a small distant green. I didn’t get close. Instead, I ingloriously nudged a low hooky one 30 yards shy of the green to a bare lie in front of a pond. A few feet to play with on the other side, and a par being the only option for qualification, the only shot was a Mickelsonesque flop. Cue the broken 60-degree lob wedge peering sheepishly from the recesses of my bag.  Somehow, and more by luck than judgement, I managed to nip the ball perfectly and moments later holed a nervy 5 footer for a place in the South African Amateur. The rest is history. I returned for the main event a month later and strolled to victory…..oh, no, sorry, that was how it was supposed to happen.  In reality, I returned to comfortably miss the cut following a predictably inconspicuous performance.

Every cloud has a silver lining though, and in this case an early exit from the South African Amateur permitted a couple more days to revisit more of the golfing delights in South Africa. When it comes to golf in this part of the world, I’ll concede that I’ve been fortunate to enjoy more than my fair share of experiences, but this just fuels my appetite to return. With new and lauded venues opening over recent years (St. Francis Links, for example), there is now even greater reason to head to South Africa for a golfing foray that I can’t recommend highly enough.  Just make sure you pack a spare lob wedge!