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Andy Capostagno Golf
The Alfred Dunhill PGA Championship returns to Houghton Golf Club in Johannesburg this week and, festive season ennui and geographical impossibilities notwithstanding, it marks the beginning of both the Vodacom Southern African and the Volvo European PGA Tours for 1999.
This is the fourth year that the event has been co-sanctioned by the two tours and two of the three past winners are here again. Zimbabwe’s Tony Johnstone will be looking to recapture his form after a disappointing 1998. After winning at Houghton last year Johnstone never again managed to ignite the creative spark and he finished the season 60th on the Volvo Tour.
Fellow Zimbabwean Nick Price won two years ago, but the Million Dollar champion is taking some time off before playing two events in South Africa in February. Sven Struver of Germany made his breakthrough on the European tour by winning in 1996, beating Ernie Els among others on a Monday morning after the event had been dogged by electrical storms and rain, forcing the players to stay for an extra day.
The bad news for the organisers is that something similar could be on the cards this week. Torrential rain soaked the pre-qualifying event at Crown Mines on Monday, causing 22 players to decline to return a score. The same rain made Houghton soft but playable for Tuesday’s practice rounds, but any more significant precipitation will not find favour with the greenkeeper.
The problem, of course, is that Johannesburg in January attracts thunderstorms as day/night cricket attracts girls in bikinis. The bigger problem is that the European Tour organisers are a lot more sensitive to electrical activity than their colleagues on the Southern African Tour. Last year the event also carried over to Monday, but this time it was not rain, but a rather too sensitive lightning detector which was the reason for the players spending as much time in the canteen as they did on the course.
One disgruntled visitor who moped through the breaks last year was Greg Norman, and when play resumed on Monday he was nowhere to be seen, having flown out in his private jet on Sunday night in order to make an oh-so- vital fund- raiser for the Republican Party.
Out of contention in the event, Norman had no qualms about leaving despite being paid rather more to attend than Johnstone received for winning.
It goes without saying that Norman is not here this year and there are a number of big-name absentees, among them Colin Montgomerie, Lee Westwood and Darren Clarke, who battled it out for supremacy in the order of merit on the Volvo Tour last year.
But this being a Ryder Cup year there are a number of players pegging it up who would not normally venture this far south this early in the year.
The English World Cup-winning combination of Nick Faldo and David Carter are both in town. For Faldo 1999 is the year that the six- time major winner hopes to rekindle his game through the acquisition of a new coach.
He is also, for the first time in 20 years, not an automatic qualifier or captain’s choice for the Ryder Cup, and that more than the winner’s cheque is what brings him here.
For Carter, however, it is a sentimental journey for a fast improving player who was born and bred in Johannesburg and learned the game at Parkview Golf Club.
Carter finished 19th on the Volvo Tour in 1998 and if he were to play out of his boots for the next six months he could become the first Afrikaans speaker to play in the Ryder Cup; if nothing else, it’s something to think about.