Triumphing over the rules of the game

Ernie Els and Retief Goosen are not the only golfers who have faced down Tiger Woods in a tense situation – add to the list the name of Theo Manyama.

In what is recognition of a truly remarkable achievement the Sunshine Tour’s tournament director has received the Compleat Golfer magazine’s award for his lifetime contribution to the golf industry.

Manyama joins such luminaries as Gary Player, Denis Hutchinson, Herbie Prout and Reece Hughes to be so honoured and during the Dunhill championship he recalled the rocky road he travelled from Alexandra to find himself face-to-face with arguably the world’s most famous athlete.

As the Sunshine Tour’s senior rules official Manyama was at the Robert Trent Jones course in Washington D.C. for the 2000 President’s Cup and appointed to referee the match between Woods and Carlos Franco.

“In fact, I was the official with Tiger twice that week and I don’t mind saying it made me nervous in my pants,” laughed Manyama, mixing his proverbs but capturing exactly what it must have felt like setting off with Woods and his fervent American gallery.

“As luck would have it both Tiger and Carlos needed a ruling at the very first hole. Tiger asked whether some imbedded stones were movable obstructions and I said no, he had to play the ball as it lay. Sometimes the players can argue a bit, but Tiger just accepted my ruling and punched his ball out of trouble.

“Franco was in the same place and funnily enough it was his caddie who had a few things to say. I stood my ground though and Carlos told his caddie back off and also went ahead and played as instructed. Fortunately there were no other incidents after that,” recalled Manyama.

Manyama tells the tale as though it were the most natural occurrence, rules-official-stands-up-to-Tiger-Woods, but in truth the chasm between the dusty streets of Alexandra and the dollar-green fairways of a top American course is so vast as to make his story a fairytale.

In fact Manyama’s journey is the stuff of the cinematic storybooks that first drew him to the game of golf.

“As a kid in Alexandra I used to wonder where my friends disappeared to at weekends and I soon discovered that they were going to this thing called golf. They explained that at this place, Huddle Park, a white man would come in a car, give you a bag of clubs to carry around and for this you would earn 25c plus 15c from the club.

“Forty cents was a fortune in those days when a ticket to the cinema cost 5c. I started to join them at Huddle Park and I really fell in love with this game.

“The pro at Huddle was Eric Moore and I used to love lying on the practice tee watching him hit balls. Soon I was asking the golfers I caddied for, for their castaway clubs and I became a golfer myself.”

In the years of apartheid being a golfer meant playing in the scrub and on sand greens in the townships around Johannesburg. Manyama won his first tournament by carding a 68 at Pimville, but when in 1970 he was given an invitation to be one of four blacks to play in a PGA championship at Huddle Park, which would include black American professional Lee Elder, he declined.

Manyama, however, based his decision on golfing reality rather than objecting to the blatant window-dressing contained in the invitation. “I turned it down because I had never played on lawn greens and I was worried I might embarrass myself, he says.”

Race restrictions eased gradually and by 1973 Manyama was the leading black player in the PGA at the Wanderers – won by Tom Weiskopf. He was already into his 30s however and even though he dreamed of one day playing on the seniors tour the practical streak in his nature caused him to start, and operate, a taxi business.

He kept his hand in, however, playing on the tour until in 1989 he decided to take up an offer by the then Sunshine Tour director Mauritz Leen to take up a position as an assistant tournament director. “That’s when the rules came into my life big-time,” says Manyama. “I didn’t want to be just a worker seeing to the ropes and the pins and realised that to be successful I would have to study the rules and become a proper golf official.”

He admits that it was a difficult quest. He had not had the benefit of an education with English as a major component – which made written exams especially hard – while in certain quarters his reception from the players was hostile and mistrusting.

Manyama resolved to draw strength from his own pride. “It was not that I wanted to prove the players wrong; rather that I wanted to prove myself right,” he says.

His solution was to make the R&A’s book of decisions his bible and every night he would sit with his wife, Cecilia, and get her to fire questions at him. “Tony Gray of the European Tour was a great help, sending me papers to study and shooting trick questions at me but it all paid off when I wrote the R&A’s exam and passed.”

Manyama says his greatest satisfaction today comes when players ask for a second opinion and ask that he be the official sent out on the course. “It is important that the players must be confident in the man giving the rulings and I believe I have won their trust.”

Apart from the President’s Cup he has officiated at the British Open, the Masters, the Players’ Championship and a number of other European and US Tour events and has been afforded the distinction of being appointed as the joint Tournament Director, with Mike Shea of the US Tour, of the President’s Cup to be held at The Links in November.