NZPGA golf tournament tees off in Palmerston North

Having the big ticket lures the bigger names.

An event such as the upcoming NZPGA Golf Championship doesn’t come cheaply for a city the size of Palmerston North.

And if previous city council regimes who had put less emphasis on sport had been in power, that and many other major events such as the New Zealand Grand Prix would have been lost to the province.

The NZPGA tees off in a week’s time at the Manawatu¯ Golf Club with a full field of 132 professionals.

The tournament was successfully held at Hokowhitu last year, when it finished in a three-way playoff. The club did not intend to stage the NZPGA this year. It’s a demanding undertaking for any golf club, which has to do most of the graft until the Australasian PGA and New Zealand PGA people stride into town a day or two beforehand.

Yes, even for a club that has an annual turnover of about $3 million. Manager Warren Collett and his staff have spent 85 per cent of their time working on the tournament in recent weeks.

Manawatu¯ has other priorities, such as paying off clubhouse-construction debentures to its members and fighting a town-planning battle on its border.

Envoys from NZ Golf and the NZPGA came calling at Hokowhitu last year, even though last year it was hinted the event should revolve around three provincial cities.

Obviously, though, they did not have two other options for what is the country’s second-biggest event after the NZ Open.

But the Manawatu¯ club finally acquiesced to host it again, as long as the NZPGA people put in funding. The cost of staging such an event is usually double the prizemoney, so $125,000 times two is $250,000.

Step in Palmerston North mayor Grant Smith and his virtual affiliate Sport Manawatu¯ . Without their funding, and that of the Nicholson family’s Horizon Golf, it would not have been a goer.

Last year’s NZPGA was a rush job, with just three months’ lead-in after most of Auckland Tourism’s money had flooded into the Lydia Ko LPGA tournament.

Other lofty clubs, such as Royal Wellington, Cape Kidnappers, Kinloch and Wairakei, have donated prizes.

Had the NZPGA not happened, Manawatu¯ would still have hosted a Charles Tour event.

But having the big ticket lures the bigger names, including Tim Wilkinson, over from Florida, and Steven Alker, made easier by them not now having full status on an American tour.

Fellow Manawatu¯ expatriates Craig Perks and Grant Waite were the previous marquee invitees, but, unlike Wilkinson, their playing careers were in the twilight zone and both missed the cut.

Someone has seen sense and allocated the qualifying tournament to the Palmerston North Golf Club on Monday for the 30 or so players in the overflow.

Last year, it went to Whanganui and they played only a few holes before being told everyone was in the field and they could skedaddle. That left the course superintendent, after much prep work, rightly cheesed off.

Manawatu¯ on ice at wintry Olympics

New Zealand’s ice speed skaters at Pyeongchang next week might win only our second Winter Olympics medal since skier Annelise Coberger’s slalom silver at Albertville, France, in 1992.

Three of our skaters came from Manawatu¯ – Kalon and Shane Dobbin and Peter Michael – while Reyon Kay is from Ka¯ piti. The Dobbins and Michael have bundles of world inline skating titles between them and have all done well financially as professionals. Kalon, now 40, lives in Austria and coaches in Switzerland and Germany, and he and Shane, who calls Brisbane home, run a company selling inline wheels.

Kalon is coaching the threeman team pursuit at his first Olympics, but for Shane, it will be his third. He raced in the 5000 metres at Vancouver in 2010, was New Zealand’s flagbearer at Sochi in 2014, where he was seventh in the 10,000m, and this time was lured out of two years of retirement by his team-mates.

It all started for the Dobbins when parents Roy and Joy bought a seven-day-a-week petrol station on the corner of Featherston and Waldegrave streets and the boys would blat around the forecourt on their plastic roller skates. That led to them joining the Manawatu¯ club racing on four-wheel quads, which later became inline, with five 76-millimetre wheels and, nowadays, three 125mm wheels.

Inline skating has always been blocked from the Olympics, so ice it had to be. The likes of the Dutch are born in skates and yet the Dobbins switched to ice and bodysuits in their late 20s, a tough gig. Father Roy went on to coach Shane on ice in Holland and Salt Lake City.

New Zealand will never have a 400m indoor ice arena – it would be the equivalent of covering Memorial Park.

The trio have won a World Cup on the Pyeongchang ice and are one of eight qualifiers in the 3200m team pursuit.

The Dutch will be favourites, then the Koreans and then Norway.