South African Branden Grace is part of the all-South African Stinger GC team on the LIV circuit, and was never likely to be in contention for a place on the S.A. side heading to the Olympic Games in Paris in six weeks’ time, but he thinks that two of his teammates should.
Christiaan Bezuidenhout and Erik van Rooyen have been selected to represent the South African nation as the 40th and 60th ranked golfers respectively in the world rankings, but Grace feels that Louis Oosthuizen and Dean Burmester are the two leading South African players, regardless of what the world rankings tell us.
“Yeah, I think it’s definitely — I’ll probably be getting a little bit of grief for this, but in my opinion these are the two guys that should be representing South Africa out there this year,” he said, gesturing towards Oosthuizen and Burmester who were sitting alongside in the team’s joint press conference prior to LIV Nashville, “just by what they’ve won, what they’ve played, where they’ve played, how they’ve performed, and not just in the last five months, but probably the last year or so, if not longer.
“I think that’s maybe a good call of maybe each country picking or trying to get their own solution on how they get the criteria right for guys to qualify, things like that. It’s definitely a way forward. But the system at this stage, that’s not very accurate.
“We all know that. We all talk about it, week in and week out, but these should be the two guys probably representing South Africa out there.”
Oosthuizen would have qualified for both the 2016 Rio Olympics and again for the 2020 – held in 2021 – Games in Tokyo, but elected to withdraw so he has no qualms about not being given the opportunity to say ‘no’ a third time.
“I’m probably the wrong person to talk to,” he admitted. “I think I’ve said this before, years ago when golf became a sport in the Olympics. I grew up with the four majors being your main events, and I don’t really see the fit of professional golfers playing golf in the Olympics, to me. It was never — I had the opportunity to go to one of the Olympics and I pulled out at the end. It was more getting scheduling-wise getting everything — at that time I think it was close to a major and that was my main focus always, majors, so the Olympics didn’t fit into my schedule that year.
“Looking back at that, I think it would be a nice thing to have on your CV that you could have represented your country. I’ve represented my country in World Cup and in Presidents Cup before, but yeah, look, the system is what it is. I think we’re all higher up on the World Ranking than we are right now, or we should be. But I hope the boys play well and that they perform well, and it’s still going to be a strong South African team playing.”
Leave a comment