Future is now for Tour winners
Stone and Porteous are in Abu Dhabi to play with the world’s best
HOW quickly – and dramatically – life has changed for two of South Africa’s young golfing talents. By respectively winning the last two European Tour events – the SA Open and the Joburg Open on consecutive weekends – Brandon Stone (22) and Haydn Porteous (21) will find themselves in stellar company when one of the tour’s flagship events, the Abu Dhabi HSBC Golf Championship, tees off in the UAE tomorrow.
They will join a number of South Africans in a field that also includes Rory McIlroy, Martin Kaymer, Henrik Stenson, Ricky Fowler and for the first time in the tournament, world No 1 Jordan Spieth.
It will be McIlroy’s first appearance of the new season, while Spieth has already laid down a marker for the 2016 season by winning the Tournament of Champions in Hawaii a few weeks ago.
Some of the other South Africans in the field in Abu Dhabi include George Coetzee, Trevor Immelman, Brandon Grace, Ernie Els, Trevor Fisher jr and Darren Fichardt.
But with Stone and Porteous getting their breakthrough wins over the last two weekends, at Glendower and Royal Johannesburg and Kensington respectively, they can expect to be closely watched in the coming days. But there is no doubt they will be relishing the opportunity of playing alongside some of the big guns of world golf.
Stone only got his tour card last year, while Porteous missed the cut at both the Alfred Dunhill Championship in November and at the SA Open.
“It’s such a contradiction over a space of two or three weeks, where it’s gone from a category that was, I think, 48th reserve for Abu Dhabi, to now saying that I need to take off Qatar to take a break,” said Stone last week after being crowned SA Open golf champion. “Because I obviously want to play Dimension Data because they’ve done so much for me as an amateur and when I started playing.
“I (also) want to play the Investec Cup because they’ve supported the Sunshine Tour so much.
“It is unfathomable how things have changed in the course of five days, four days. To think I was so worried on Wednesday (before the SA Open) about how I can’t get into Abu Dhabi and how it’s such a big event, and how you can’t miss those three (in Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Dubai) because it’s such a good way to get a good start to the season. It takes so much pressure off of you, and now it’s like, ah, I might go here, are you going to go to Malaysia? No, I’m going to play Dimension Data.
“Are you going to go to India? No, I don’t need to go to India. Are you going to Thailand? I might go to Thailand, take the girlfriend with, have a little holiday afterwards. It’s that kind of thing.
“The perspective on tour and life has completely changed in the space of a week.”
Indeed, it has for Stone and Porteous. They can now both pretty much pick and choose where and when they want to play. They’ve both got off to winning starts this season so there will be less pressure to make cuts to bank some money and get into tournaments.
As Porteous said: “All the doors that have opened up ... it’s a dream come true.”