GOLF: Jon Swift
YOU HAVE to hand it to Brent Chalmers in many ways. Chalmers, who carries the title of tour commissioner of the South African PGA — one would have thought that the association with a commission in the South African context is not a wholly healthy one — does tend to get things going.
Take the latest boost to this summer’s FNB Tour, a whopping R2,3-million European Tour-sanctioned tournament scheduled for Sun City from February 8- 11 with computer group Dimension Data — more familiarly known as the bankrollers of Transvaal cricket — picking up the tab.
“It was a straight marketing decision,” said Jeremy Ord of the sponsors. It would have to be and, while Ord admitted somewhat tongue in cheek that he had had to ransack the group’s marketing budget to make the deal pay dividends, it looks to be a winner.
Far more surprising than the huge sums of money involved in converting our slimline local rand into a worthwhile amount in European currency for the tournament, is the format which gives the new event its title, the Dimension Data Pro-Am.
This format sees 180 professionals — 90 from the European Tour and 90 from the local Order of Merit — in there for four full days against a matching number of amateurs. The first two days will alternate with half the Pro-Am field playing the Lost City course and the other half taking on the Gary Player Country Club layout, the two “halves” switch venues for the second day’s play. The amateurs will play negative individual bonus bogey — “We have simply switched polarity,” says the tour commissioner in a characteristic Chalmerism — and be subjet to the same 65 and tie cut as the professionals after the second round. The final two rounds will be played over the Gary Player layout.
‘No,” says Chalmers in his normal forthright manner, “we had no trouble convincing Ken Schofield (the executive director of the European Tour) to agree to the format.” Probably not. Chalmers is nothing if not an innovative salesman. Schofield, while he expressed “delight” via fax at the Chalmers initiative, was not there in person to answer.
“The Europeans already have a pro-am tournament in Jersey,” says Chalmers, “although the pro’s and amateurs only play together for the first two rounds.”
Certainly, the new tournament adds a huge cash impetus to professional golf and, coming as it does the week before the other co-sanctioned tournament on this season’s schedule — the R1,73-million Dunhill PGA at Houghton — shifts the golden peak of the game in this country dramatically away from the lone high that was the Sun City Million Dollar Challenge.
It also confirms the FNB Tour as very emphatically part of the European circuit and should go a long way to ensuring that the field is of a substantially higher general standard than the rag, tag and bobtail who contested the last PGA when it represented this country’s sole European date.
Chalmers, typically, is not content yet and, if you pardon the expression, is “quietly confident” that the FNB Players Championship scheduled for Country Club in Durban the week after the PGA will also have European Tour status.
With the local tour already at a new pinnacle of over R12-million, and the minimum for a European Tour event standing at Stg 300 000, that would raise the ante by close to another million rand.
It’s not small change. But then Chalmers is not a small character in anyone’s company, language or currency. He has often been accused of talking a better game than he plays. Personally, I do not subscribe to that even if the adjective “quiet” is a little hard to swallow.
And somehow you get the feeling that Chalmers will get what he wants. His history would prove that to be so.