– Festival of birdies and big scores at the East course of the Royal Johannesburg Golf Club, where today the Alfred Dunhill Championship has kicked off. A magnificent course, to be sure, but probably not enough to not miss Leopard Creek, the usual venue for this tournament…
– A festival, as we said, with an exceptional Spanish protagonist on this first day, Eugenio Chacarra (-9), who signed a 63 in the morning session, his best record on the European circuit. Only one player managed to catch him in the afternoon session, the young South African Christiaan Burke (-9), World Number 712 and therefore not too well-known yet outside his country. Others, however, came close, most of them, like Burke, also belonging to the vast and powerful South African armada, which today has already displayed a beastly power that multiplies when playing at home, as is the case, on these kikuyu courses and at altitudes almost never below a thousand metres.
– We have them in all colours, profiles, and even sizes. To begin with, let’s say that three of the four top 100 world players present at the event were South Africans and all three are already perfectly placed in the hot zone: Thriston Lawrence (-8), Christiaan Bezuidenhout (-5) and Aldrich Potgieter (-5). Other illustrious players like Branden Grace (-7), Louis Oosthuizen (-5) and Dean Burmester (-5) haven’t started badly either; they are not in the top 100 worldwide, thanks to LIV, but as if they were… Additionally, up there we also find in-form veterans like Shaun Norris (-5) and Oliver Bekker (-6), young talents like Jayden Schaper (-5), Casey Jarvis (-5) or Samuel Simpson (-7), and players like Brandon Stone (-7), with enormous class who haven’t quite lived up to expectations, but still have time… That’s how the South African Armada rolls. It’s almost a sin to even imagine that a player not from the country will claim victory on Sunday, and that’s the challenge facing Chacarra, Jorge Campillo (-5) and some other brave souls…
– Among those other ‘dreamers’ we have Pablo Larrazábal (-5) and Ángel Ayora (-4), who have also climbed into the hot zone of the leaderboard during the afternoon session of play.
– Larrazábal’s performance deserves a separate chapter, as his finish was truly dreamy. The Barcelona native stepped onto the 14th tee with an aggregate of PAR, a clearly insufficient result on a course and a week where it’s likely necessary to sign cards around 67 or 68 strokes each day to aspire to something big. Moreover, he had just gone into the water off the tee on the 13th and made a bogey, but geniuses have these things, suddenly igniting without prior warning…
He played the 14th hole by the book (drive, wedge) and sank a two-metre putt for birdie. On the 15th, another good drive, another wedge, and a five-metre putt in. On the 16th, a par 3, he was about to make a hole-in-one after hitting a magnificent 8-iron from the tee (180 metres to the flag, but with those 1,500 metres of altitude) and leaving the ball literally two fingers from the cup. And, after making par on the 17th, he was still going to make a spectacular eagle on the 18th, a par 5: off the tee, he went into a fairway bunker, but with the ball well placed in the sand, he hit a hybrid and went into a green bunker, finishing with a great bunker shot, a trademark move, to take the ball straight to the hole.
– Ayora, on the other hand, went from less to more, missing more irons and wedges than usual on the first nine holes, but finishing very solidly with birdies on the 17th and 18th holes. The best part is that this young man continues to give the impression of being capable of producing very good scores without seemingly doing anything extraordinary.
– Additionally, we must appreciate the more than correct start of Rocco Repetto (-3) with a round of 69 strokes that currently puts him on the right track. The young Andalusian comes from comfortably making the cut in both events on the Australian tour in his first two tournaments on the European circuit. Change of scenery, abrupt change of setting, and Rocco remains perfectly engaged… Sebas García (-2), Alejandro del Rey (-2), Iván Cantero (-1), Nacho Elvira (-1), Ángel Hidalgo (PAR), Quim Vidal (PAR) and Manu Elvira (PAR) complete the Spanish participation.
