Seven names: Santi Tarrio, Dylan Frittelli, Louis de Jager, Carsey Jarvis, Andrea Pavan, Jeong Weon Ko and Clement Sordet. All seven are present this week at the Jonsson Workwear Open, the last tournament of the African tour and the second swing of the DP World Tour season (which already has a winner, Rory McIlroy: no one can dethrone him, not even by winning). And all seven have something in common: at this point in the season they have already played up to ten tournaments of the European circuit, that is, they are preparing to start their eleventh week of competition tomorrow. They are the only ones who have come this far.
In other words: they have played everything, since that Joburg Open at the end of November, with the only exception of the Dubai Invitational, where none of them had entry (if they had, they would have been there for sure), and the two tournaments in Australia, which were held at the same time as the Joburg and the South African Open, which they did play (and that’s because so far no one has discovered how to be in two different places at the same time, thousands of kilometers apart, because that way they might have considered it, it could be added with some humor).
Special mention deserves Frittelli, who won in Bahrain and even this fact did not make him change his approach, as he has continued to play absolutely everything. On the other hand, in the case of Casey Jarvis it is necessary to open a parenthesis, since he has actually already played eleven tournaments, one more than the rest of the seven, as he played the Dimension Data Pro-Am, from the Challenge Tour, in the week that was free between the tournaments in Qatar and Kenya. In fact, Jarvis is chaining this week his eighth consecutive week of competition at the Glendower Golf Club (Dowerglen, South Africa), venue of the tournament, about twelve kilometers northeast of downtown Johannesburg. As you can see, his fiery youth, he is only 20 years old, can handle that and much more.
In reality, except in the case of Jarvis, we are not talking about an unbearable marathon. They all played consecutively the first four tournaments of the season, still in 2023 (Joburg, South African Open, Alfred Dunhill and Mauritius), but then, at Christmas, they enjoyed four weeks off before playing the Dubai Desert Classic. In addition, as already mentioned, between Qatar and Kenya, they also had a week off. But the fact is that only seven players, these seven, have played everything.
Tarrio, for example, has not done badly with the strategy. Right now he has almost two hundred points in the Race to Dubai, a figure that he did not even approach in the first ten tournaments of his first two seasons on the European circuit (2022 and 2023), and that leaves him a good part of the work done to achieve the first goal, that of maintaining the playing rights, which we usually place around 475 points. “I have to say that the fact of playing so often in South Africa and Mauritius, at the start of the season, had a lot to do with the fact that in Galicia the weather was very bad and you couldn’t train, it was raining all the time,” admits the Galician with his usual sarcasm. Santi, in any case, is not going to play in Singapore or India, which are the next two stops of the DP World Tour, so he is going to have almost five or six weeks of rest and training at home.
Now it’s time to finish this first big job with a good performance this week, on a course that can suit the Galician’s profile very well, as it is of classic design (its first design dates from 1937) and where again the altitude (it is more than 1,600 meters above sea level) will have its influence.
