South Africans Ernie Els and Simon Hobday took opposite paths en route to their Open victories of a year ago.

by Teague Jackson

WHEN Americans failed to scratch in last year's four men's majors, it was one thing. But when South Africans carried off the two most prestigious United States men's trophies, it was a startling jolt to most Americans.

Although on these shores they weren't exactly household names prior to 1994, Ernie Els, defending U.S. Open champion, and Simon Hobday, holder of the Senior Open title, are not exactly strangers to golf at the highest level.

Make no mistake, Els and Hobday have paid their dues, albeit in different eras and different ways. And the fact they both come from a tough little country, obscured for so long behind a politically opaque curtain, its people steeped in conflict and stubborn self-reliance, is of no mean consequence.

Nor is it, one suspects, a single-year anomaly. There are more where these two came from, waves of 'em.

It is instructive to observe how the two men have handled the year of their reign. They did so in styles characteristic of their personification: Els, of whom further greatness is expected, persisted in his determined and quiet nature, largely out of the spotlight; Hobday, long overlooked outside small foreign circles, has enjoyed the experience of realizing a lifelong dream.

While Els continued to build the foundation of greatness many have predicted, uneasy has rested the crown.

Besides his Open victory, achieved only after an excruciating 20 playoff holes in the unrelenting Oakmont heat and even more relentless worldwide media glare, Els was fourth at the Sprint International en route to finishing 19th on the PGA Tour's money list. He missed the cut only once in 11 starts and was a shoo-in for Rookie of the Year honors. Before the year was out, he won the World Match-Play Championship in England and the inaugural Sarazen World Open back in the United States.

"I was kind of nervous about how I was going to play after winning the Open," Els says. "You know, Lee Janzen went through some down time after he won, and Curtis Strange slumped too after winning two in a row, so I was delighted about the way I've played."

A man who knows Els well, Brent Chalmers, executive director of the South African PGA, boasts, "When you watch Nick Price and Greg Norman, you get the impression they're playing pretty close to 100 percent of perfection. But Ernie, here is a guy playing at 75 percent. He hasn't come anywhere close to fulfilling his potential. I really believe that Ernie Els is the next great superstar."

And therein lies the rub, the expectations raised by a newly minted star in the hearts and minds of friends and an insatiable media. It's a burden Els seems resigned, rather than happy, to shoulder.

"I tolerate the attention," Els says, "but if I can avoid it, that's good for me. I'm a private person and maybe I'm a little shy, but I try not to let it bother me.

"As defender at Shinnecock," he adds wistfully, "there'll be a lot of tension. I hope they pay attention to the Americans, not me."

Els still bristles, quietly, about a media report that characterized his Open triumph, unfairly, he believes, as "lucky." But he's far too nice a man to either dwell on it or bring it up unless prodded. After 92 holes of grinding against the best the world has to offer, it takes a lot more than luck.

When asked, his outward shyness gives way to a core of determined strength. He refuses to accept the implication that he was perhaps undeserving of a major title.

"I've paid my dues, I'll tell you that," he insists. "I went to America the first time in 1990 as a professional, and I didn't have any playing card anywhere in the world, so I went and tried to get my tour card. I was unsuccessful, but then I got my African tour card for '91.

"I went back to America and still didn't play very well. And I tried the tour school again, in '92, and never got through the second stage that time."

So he went home and, at the age of 22, won the South African Triple -- the Open, the PGA and the Masters -- to become the first to accomplish the feat since Gary Player in 1979. With those credentials, he earned invites to a couple tournaments in Europe. He landed his tour card in Europe and played there two years until Oakmont, where, in his words, "I hit the jackpot.

"Everything that's come my way I've earned. I've really put in a lot of work."

Work certainly, coupled with a prodigious natural athletic talent. At 14 he was a scratch amateur, the Eastern Transvaal senior tennis champion, a ranked rugby player and accomplished in cricket.

As a pariah nation because of its apartheid policies, South Africa's national teams were not welcome in international competition. As an individual sport, however, golf was different, providing an outlet for a natural athlete such as Els.

"We had a strong tour here during the time South Africa was blacklisted internationally," former South African Tour commissioner Dennis Bruyns says. "We ensured we had great competition. We had the laager mentality: Stuff the world. We'll live happily in our own little world.

"But amateurs didn't fare as well. They couldn't play as international teams. And we don't have the college-level programs. So we had guys turn pro too early."

Els, who turned pro at age 20, dissents: "I'm a natural player. I felt that if I turned pro early I'd learn more. The quicker you get used to the pressures of pro golf, the better. In college you go with the coach. In amateurs you go with the team. In pros you're on your own.

"The U.S. system has stayed the same for 30 years from college to pro. [Phil] Mickelson is the exception to the rule of unnatural, mechanical players."

U.S. colleges started recruiting young South African golfers in the '70s. "I considered college scholarship offers from Arizona and Arkansas," says Els. "The guys in South Africa are giving themselves a chance now, but I think they should have gone overseas long ago."

Thus Els joins a long line of "good examples." Bobby Locke, who never saw a shot he couldn't hook, including putts, inspired Player and Hobday. Those two served as examples for David Frost and Nick Price, among others. Els saw that Player had paved the way, then Price and Frost capitalized, and now he's the Open champion.

Whereas Els has flourished on-course but struggled in the collateral world that accompanies stardom, Hobday's year has been the polar opposite. He, in fact, revels in the attention.

"Distractions?" he muses. "Being recognized on the street? Media requests? There's been a lot more of all that, and I quite enjoy it because it's not out of hand. After all, it's not like I'm Trevino or Arnie Palmer or some poor devil who can't go into a restaurant without somebody asking for his water glass. That happens to me once or twice a month. It's not in the same league as those fellows."

One of Hobday's most endearing qualities is a self-deprecating humor which manifests when he considers how his life has changed since winning at Pinehurst No. 2.

"I'm no longer a hot dog player," he says with a straight face. Say what?

"That's when two guys are sitting in the stands in back of the ninth hole, and the one guy says to the other fella, 'Who's coming up next?'

"'This is Simon Hobday.'

"'Okay. Let's go get a hot dog.'"

Unlike Els, Hobday's game has suffered. He played well from his Senior Open victory through the end of '94, but this year, with the exception of one brief spell beginning in late February, he hasn't had one top-10 finish.

"Once you've won the Open, it becomes very difficult to set goals," he explains. "Maybe I've lost some motivation. I think one of the reasons I've played so badly this year is that I'm asking myself, 'What do I do next?'"

The buoyancy of Hobday's spirit manifests despite competitive results below his considerable standards. "But I still wake up in the morning," he continues, "and know that no matter how badly I've been playing the last six months, I'm still U.S. Open champion. Even if I don't repeat, well, I've won that."

Perhaps Hobday can be forgiven for banking the competitive fires a bit, for there have been times when he might have wondered if his best years had passed him by, 17 years spent wandering in the wilderness of the European and other "foreign" tours.

Despite the couch potato fan's apparent perception that Hobday won golf's version of the lottery, he has paid his dues. It has been an "I told you so" year, a payback period of reaffirmation when he proved, albeit late in life, that what he always suspected (but never tested) is true -- that he indeed can be considered one of the world's best players.

Not once, in all those years, did he try the U.S. tour. "First of all, I didn't have the guts to come and play against these guys," he admits candidly. "Secondly, it would have meant taking all my savings and having a go at the card.

"The chances of getting your card were slim. And then, once you've got your card, you have to start making low cuts. And then on top of that, if you wanted to win a tournament you had to best all those tough guys -- Watson and Nicklaus and Player and Weiskopf and Palmer, Johnny Miller and those kinds of guys. I didn't take the gamble, though I should have. Hindsight is always 20-20, isn't it? Anyway, that's all spilt milk now."

But whatever milk is left tastes just as sweet. Now that he's beaten all those guys, this hard-core campaigner still goes mushy when he contemplates what he accomplished. After all, Player was his idol growing up.

"He's still the man in South Africa," Hobday says. "In the old days we all tried to beat him, pretty unsuccessfully. I think my record against him was probably 1 and 300.

"Now it gives me a thrill to shake his hand and hear him say, 'Well done.' After winning the Open, I got a note from him in the locker. I've got that put up in my bar at home. I've got a letter from Tom Weiskopf as well. I appreciate that kind of stuff."

But Hobday is certainly not a man to pine over what may have been, as befits a man who was a farmer until he was 28, and who learned to play on a rural nine-hole muni. "To get my brothers and me out from under foot, my mother and father would give us a club and a couple of balls and tell us to just go hit."

Lacking organized junior programs in those days, he learned the meaning of competition "playing against my two brothers. One went into journalism and the other went into the mines, and I carried on playing golf."

For such a practical man, there wasn't really a choice between playing the European and South African circuits and trying the U.S. tour. Hobday went where he could make a living playing golf.

"In the end I said, 'Let's be a bigger pebble on a smaller beach.' That way I can eat."

And a pretty big pebble he was. He won six titles, including the national championships in Germany, Rhodesia and South Africa. It also made Hobday a firm believer in the theory that playing the so-called lesser tours makes one a better golfer.

"If I was sponsoring a young pro, I'd take him to Europe for two or three years," he says. "The conditions are so much worse there than they are here. You learn to play in the wind and also in the rain and also bump-and-run shots and different shots around the green, all those funny little shots."

And when Hobday finally decided he had enough money to spare, he practiced every day for a year, 365 consecutive days beating balls, then headed for the U.S. senior tour. He was medalist in the Q-School and a top-20 finisher on the earnings list his rookie year.

Anybody who saw Hobday in Las Vegas this spring got a graphic example of how well he learned those "funny little shots." With the winds howling at near-gale force, he rolled the ball with a putter from 100 yards out, leaving it hole high in the fringe. "The casual fan might think that's luck," he smiles. "But believe me, I had to play that shot hundreds of times in Europe."

One can bet there's some youngster, even as we speak, whacking out implausibly long drives and whispering to himself, "Here's Els on his way to another major."

One of those youngsters could be Lewis Chitengwa, son of a Zimbabwean golf pro and a freshman standout on the University of Virginia team. "I drove down to Bay Hill this spring," he says, "and saw Ernie on the putting green. We kinda looked at each other. Then he gave me a little wave, like he knew who I was."

That "wave" could symbolize an avalanche of Southern Africans on their way. Player likes to include all the good sticks from that part of the world, such as Zimbabweans Price, Mark McNulty and Chitengwa, under the generic umbrella "Southern Africans."

Player, a modern-day voortrekker (South African pioneer), says, "Ernie Els may be the first of the new wave, signaling tremendous athletes coming out of South Africa."

But Els is a bit softer in his enthusiasm. "Gary Player put us on the map," he says. "Then Frost. I'd like to have young guys look up to me. I hope I can be an inspiration."

Adds Hobday, "The more heroes you get, the more youngsters you're gonna get playing."

This last year has proved Els and Hobday can play the hero role about as well as they play the game.

GOLF IN SOUTH AFRICA

WALK INTO any golf club in South Africa and the first thing you notice is a larger-than-life picture of Gary Player. Like Kilroy, he was there.

And, through some sort of sub-equatorial alchemy, his eyes seem to follow you around the room. Just as Gary has followed us around the world, demanding that we listen, that we understand his homeland.

Now, at last, we listen because his homeland has finally shrugged off the manacles of apartheid. It has finally declared itself ready for inspection.

Indeed, golf in South Africa is a work still in progress. The cross-pollination which played such a significant role in the development of the game elsewhere is only beginning to occur in South Africa. There are essentially two reasons.

Geographically, distance has effectively isolated South Africa from the rest of the golfing world. Today the speediest jumbo jet still needs more than half a day to cover the distance from the east coast of the U.S. Imagine the daunting feeling Player experienced climbing aboard a prop plane for his first trip to Europe in 1955. Ernie Els' only knowledge of commercial prop planes is likely gleaned from history books.

Secondly, South Africa's political isolation during the period that golf was becoming mainstream everywhere else provided an inbred shape to South Africa's game.

"We had our own tour here," says Dennis Bruyns, a former commissioner of the South African PGA Tour, "but it was built on the 'laager' mentality. The guys said, 'Stuff the world. We'll live happily in our own little world.'"

But that mentality, coupled with South Africa's fierce competitiveness, has produced an anomaly: From a nation of fewer than half a million golfers come Ernie Els and Simon Hobday to capture two of the world's great prizes.

Brent Chalmers, executive director of the South African PGA, sees long-fallow ground about to produce bumper crops. "The golf industry here has been in the doldrums for years," he says. "Now, with Ernie and Simon, there is again enormous interest."

Anticipating the end of apartheid, which Player equated to the fall of the Berlin Wall, entrepreneurs are streaming to South Africa, building and marketing pleasure palaces with enough glitter to rival anything at Palm Springs or Hilton Head Island. World-renowned architects are moving and shaping tons of soil, designing courses worthy of anyone's world-ranking list.

So the welcome mat is out for tourists. But such truffles don't feed the masses, and in South Africa, the masses are black.

Regardless of the motives, those in leadership roles are on the same page as Player, who is willing to put his money to work by identifying and sponsoring black youngsters with talent for the game.

Nor is encouraging the black population to play golf just a smoke screen for United Nations consumption. "My objective is to bring groups previously disenfranchised from golf into the mainstream," says Chalmers. "That's the only way we'll grow."

There are 650 professionals in the country and 100,000 registered members of the South African Golf Federation. These are the people in the establishment; they have handicaps, they play in leagues, they're members of clubs. More than 250,000 claim to be golfers, but whether they play once a month, once a year or just on holiday, no one knows. These are the disenfranchised to which Chalmers refers.

Chalmers intends to achieve this mainstreaming with two programs conducted by the newly implemented Golf Development Trust.

"First," he explains, "we're trying to get the clubs to open up more, convince them of the wisdom of easy admission programs for people who normally wouldn't be allowed in.

"We think of it as a mentoring process. Take a venerable old gentleman, a club member at Royal Johannesburg, for example, who'd mentor a young, 25-year-old black guy. Take him under his wing, as a son almost, and lead him through the mine field of unwritten rules."

But club membership for newly upwardly mobile black businessmen and women barely scratches the surface. Chalmers and the Trust want the rest of the recently enfranchised to know the joys of golf as well. To that end, the Trust is rehabilitating run-down munis such as Huddle Park, a 54-hole complex in Johannesburg.

"The grass is knee high," Chalmers explains. "The holes get cut once every two weeks. The bunkers haven't been raked the last six months. Fewer and fewer people play there, so less and less income is generated. It's costing the Johannesburg city council R2 million (about $650,000) a year."

The city, according to Chalmers, all but surrendered and asked for help. The Trust's plans call for a $100 million project, complete with a hotel, condominiums, a conference center and a Jack Nicklaus Golf Academy. Each of the three courses will be structured for a different market -- beginners, resort guests and tournament players. The U.S. PGA Tour, in fact, has been asked to help set up a stadium-type facility.

"It's all designed to generate cash into a central fund," Chalmers notes, "which will be used to subsidize the rounds of golf for Joe Public coming in there. Instead of paying R100 (approximately $30), which you pay at any other golf course in town, you pay R10 ($3)."

* * *

Sol Kerstner is the Southern Hemisphere's Charles Fraser, pioneer of the modern resort/land development concept, and Sun City its Sea Pines, Fraser's Hilton Head model.

Kerstner's marketing coup, the Million Dollar Challenge, is played at Sun City's Gary Player Club, preferred by the pros for its bushy kikuyu fairways and more forgiving style over the resort's second course, Lost City.

With a clubhouse reminiscent of the Boulders in Carefree, Ariz., Lost City offers a desert-style first nine and second nine typical of the 6,000-foot-high veld -- tight fairways strung through arid little canyons, bizarre baobab trees omnipresent.

And while most signature holes feature a pond or mountain or waterfall or some other similarly innocuous pretty, Lost City's 13th is fronted by a crocodile pit. These immense monsters obligingly open their massive jaws wide for photographers, surlyn, balata or hide.

South of Durban, Robert Trent Jones Jr. has designed a masterpiece at the aptly named Wild Coast, a casino resort. Swept by Indian Ocean winds, the course will remind aficionados of nothing less than world-renowned Waterville or Ballybunion in Ireland, or perhaps Royal County Down in Northern Ireland.

The caddie business isn't much different than that in the U.S., but players employing caddies are expected to buy them lunch -- often the only hot meal they'll get all day. This is important in Johannesburg, for example, where razor wire-topped walls surround residential compounds, keeping the well-fed in and the hungry out, perhaps the reason rental cars are outlawed in the inner city and a burgeoning crime wave features carjackings.

So what does all this mean for the American tourist with a desire for off-the-beaten-track destinations to impress his 19th-hole pals? Like the sport, golf tourism is a work in progress. Facilities are first-rate, but there are some inconsistencies and inefficiences in the infrastructure, particularly transportation.

The laager mentality may serve South Africans well in competitive situations, but in the service industries, "the customer is always right" pays big dividends. And right now, South Africa is looking for those dividends -- and it's learning how to play this even bigger game.

-- Teague Jackson