Turning up the fan

Port Elizabethans have long tried to convince us they come from the “Friendly City” rather than the “Windy City” but as far as a group of golfing hack(er)s is concerned that contention has forever been blown.

Not only do golfing types in Nelson Mandela Bay not know the difference between a tempest and a zephyr they also have a malicious streak when it comes to welcoming visitors to their shores.

That much was evident when the golfing media were recently invited to experience Humewood Golf Club, ostensibly to enable them to write and talk with some authority about the challenges presented by a course where the SAA Open will be staged from December 14 to 17.

We flew in over a sea whipped into white froth by a wild wind and locals emerging from Humewood’s clubhouse, standing foursquare in magnificent and defiant solitude against the elements, wore evil smiles and rubbed their hands in glee as they welcomed us – particularly those hailing from Gauteng – to their piece of desolate scrub land.

“Hope you enjoy playing real links golf,” they said with the wickedness of an evil jailer welcoming some poor unsuspecting soul to a torture chamber – well, 18 torture chambers!

Hunched up like arctic explorers we ventured out into the tempest and if the locals had intended that we should gain some respect for the undulating dunes land over which they play every week they succeeded – terrifyingly!

The wicked wind was a westerly, Humewood’s prevailing airstream, and not only did it cause an untold number of Pro Vs to be donated to the Caddies’ Benevolent Fund in the shape of dense fynbos but every now and then it would blister our faces and turn umbrellas inside out with super chilled pellets of rain.

Sometimes the ball would veer off course so violently that what looked to be left-hand rough ended up being out of bounds right, that a four-foot putt would suddenly end up being one from 20 foot as the ball was set back in motion or a 100-metre approach would hover over the flag and then fall backwards to leave you 30 metres short!

Many were the tales of players, some boasting single figure handicaps, needing three woods to get up to a par four while coming to the conclusion that if this was golf in Port Elizabeth bridge (indoors of course) would be a much better pastime.

Stumbling back into the clubhouse in search of a hot shower and a warming drink it was gratifying to hear from club president Keith Simpson, the man who fought so hard to get the national championship back to his beloved links and succeeded after an absence of 50 years, that the conditions had been really bad – even for Port Elizabeth!

It made me just a little proud of my fellow purveyors of the written and spoken word that they had uncomplainingly (seeing as curses and sundry bits of loose clothing had been blown out to sea!) battled through to the end in weather so foul it would have sent the scions of the Sunshine Tour scurrying for cover complaining even more than they usually do.

Needless to say, having been admitted to the fellowship of the wind, we all felt an affinity with SA Golf Association official Neal Kunhardt’s wish that when the great and glorious tee it up in their quest for the world’s second oldest national championship it will blow really hard – just once.

Jokes aside, though, SAA and Saga are to be applauded for returning the SA Open to one of South Africa’s storied courses.

Often described as the country’s only true links – a contention that would be hotly contested by Cape Town’s Milnerton Golf Club! – Humewood was last host to the SA Open in 1957 when the championship was won by Harold Henning, from local member Alan Jackson, who has shot his age over his home course, with a one-over-par score of 289.

It is a course that has gained the admiration of all our champions, from Locke and Player to Els and Goosen, with holes such as the seemingly innocuous but infuriatingly wicked short 6th, described as the best short par five in the country!, and par-four 13th, normally played straight into the teeth of the thrusting westerly, often held up as two of the best in the country.

The wind is Humewood’s ally, the opposite easterly for instance making the par threes more challenging, and one of its features is that no two successive tee-shots are ever played in the same direction.

Tales of destruction are legend – Locke is said to have once used a putter off the tee at the 6th to hit his ball down the pathway to ensure it stayed out of the clutching claws of the wind – with Sid Brews having won two of his eight championships with scores of 319 (31 over par) in 1934 and 305 (17 over par) in 1952. Locke himself was five over (293) when he won there in 1940.

In response to the length-off-the-tee boom five of the holes, particularly the three (normally) down-wind par fives 7, 11 and 15, have been considerably lengthened in preparation for the SA Open (which happily will feature all four of Goosen, Els, Immelman and Clark) while a number of strategic bunkers have been added to force players to play down the correct line.

The wiry coastal grass has been left untended for a while now while the semi-rough, given favourable growing conditions in the next few months, could provide an ankle-deep collar to narrowed-down fairways by the time the pros arrive – hopefully to charging white horses in Nelson Mandela Bay, flags snapping and ripping and pins bent double by the wind!