Riviera, as many people know, is one of my all-time favourite tour venues. Well, last week this beautiful old golf course was playing about as tough as I can remember in a long while.
It was very firm and bouncy and it was also a little breezy in the early rounds. Actually it was kind of US Open-like and I’m told the average score for R1&2 was almost two over par, which is itself quite US Open-like. Being in the fairway was a big premium and the truth is I didn’t hit enough fairways. Consequently that impacted on my greens in regulation stats, which made it difficult to build momentum or any kind of score. Disappointing, but that’s about the sum of it.
So, we move on this week to start the Florida swing. We kicked off the week playing in ‘The Jake’, which is Jack Nicklaus’ charity event, raising funds for the Nicklaus Children’s Health Care Foundation. It is always a fun day and of course, more importantly, it is all for a great cause. From now the focus is onto the Honda Classic at PGA National in Florida. This is another of my favourite weeks of the year, not least because I get to stay at home and commute to and from the golf course each day. That’s a rare treat for any tour pro! I won here in 2008, too, and it is always nice to come back to somewhere where you have had success in the past.
The Honda is a really wonderful tournament and The Champion Course is one of the more demanding venues on the PGA TOUR. It was designed by Tom Fazio in 1981 and hosted the Ryder Cup matches a couple of years later – it was then that my hero Seve Ballesteros hit that famous 3-wood out of a fairway bunker on the last hole of his singles match against Fuzzy Zoeller. Jack Nicklaus was the US Ryder Cup captain that year and he described it as “(one of) the greatest shots I ever saw”. Anyway, it was Jack who got to redesign this golf course in 2001. I’d describe it as a classic Florida test of golf and I see looking at the 10-day forecast there could be some rain and strong winds towards the back end of the week; that will certainly show how tough the course can be.
We’ve also chosen this week to officially announce this year’s Els for Autism Golf Challenge, which is perfectly fitting, as The Honda Classic is one of the event’s contributing sponsors. This is the fifth year of the Golf Challenge, the largest international charity-driven amateur golf tournament in history, and consists of a series of Super Regional events at top-rated courses across the US and Canada from May through October.
The series tees off at the superb Trump National Doral Golf Club in Florida on 11 May and, as in previous years, takes in some of the country’s finest courses, among them major venues such as Baltusrol, Congressional, Hazeltine, Atlanta Athletic Club and the host of this year’s US Open, Chambers Bay in Washington. Also featuring on this year’s schedule are PGA TOUR stops including the iconic Harbour Town Golf Links, TPC Boston and Royal Montreal Golf Club, alongside our Ernie Els-designed Hawaiian gem Hoakalei.
The Foundation has taken massive strides forward in the last year thanks to the support of some amazing companies including presenting sponsor, my good friends at SAP, and organizing sponsors; Adams Golf, RBC and Wine Spectator. The Challenge is also supported by an impressive list of contributing sponsors including, as I said, The Honda Classic, alongside The Boeing Company, Southwest Airlines, ECCO, Hospitality America, IRISH LINKS and Maui Jim. They all know how grateful we are to them.
It has been pretty amazing and humbling to witness the work that has gone into creating the Center of Excellence, which broke ground last spring. We are so excited to be welcoming our first students through the doors this August and taking our global outreach programs to the next level. In addition, the Golf Challenge has already touched a lot of people through the #GameOn Autism Golf clinics. This is one initiative that is particularly close to my heart and plans are underway to develop the program even further so more individuals with autism can have access to golf.
For more information on The Golf Challenge, or to sign up and register a team, please do click here.
Just before I sign off, there are a couple of good news items from back home in South Africa. First of all, congrats to my buddy Branden Grace on winning the Dimension Data Pro-Am at Fancourt last weekend, the 20th anniversary of a tournament that a lot of us South African players have a great fondness for. Of course, as an amateur Branden was a member of the Ernie Els & Fancourt Foundation so his local knowledge there may have been a bit of a factor!
Lastly, I want to say how proud I am to have been voted on to the board of the Sunshine Tour as a non-executive member. Hopefully my experience in golf and in business will prove useful and together with the rest of the board members we can help make the Sunshine Tour even more successful. Obviously for me it’s nice to be able to give something back to the Sunshine Tour, which did so much for me at the start of my career.
That’s it for now. Follow me on Twitter @TheBig_Easy.
