Tuesday, 6th March 2007 at 10:23 pm

Humewood bares its teeth

Feverpitcher was in Port Elizabeth this past weekend, taking in the South African Men’s Amateur Championship. Saturday’s golf at Humewood was testing, but not as nasty as last year’s SAA Open media launch, where several of the more slightly built caddies were picked up by the raging wind, and discovered in Madagascar several days later…

…and similar weather had hit PE by Sunday morning, as the tournament officially got underway. But while Feverpitcher’s sensible ed was happy to hang out at the St. Francis Links clubhouse down the coast with Director of Golf Jeff Clause, and the Compleat Golfer team of Simon Turck and James Ferrans (and several bottle of Diemersfontein Pinotage), the aspiring amateurs at Humewood were taking on links golf at its most demanding.

Tough enough if you’re a local, and acquainted with Port Elizabeth’s spiteful weather (almost as attractive as the city’s architecture); imagine a 17-year-old amateur from the Free State, arriving in PE for the first time having seen rain and wind in movies, but never in real life. Nightmare? And then some. Conditions, as the photo illustrates, were bad enough for day two to be cancelled; Humewood may have played benevolent host at the Open in December, but its penchant for foul moods remains undiminished.