One of the Sunshine Tour’s nearly men is tired of settling for top-10 finishes. He wants to win, writes MIKE GREEN in Compleat Golfer.
He’s a guys’ kind of guy. Jared Harvey makes no apologies for the kind of movies he likes, or the fact this interview is conducted while he watches his ‘pride and joy’, his Golf 6R, being washed.
Harvey is chasing his first win on the Sunshine Tour with renewed vigour this year.
For all the rough edges, he is a pure golfing thoroughbred. His father, George, won the South African Amateur Championship twice, and has since become a coach of some renown, winning the Compleat Golfer Coach of the Year award in 2009. And Jared’s godfather is David Leadbetter, who caddied for George when he played at The Open Championship
some 40 years ago.
With three top-10 finishes on the Sunshine Tour in the 2017-18 season, Jared is closing in on the win he so earnestly desires. ‘I don’t want to be remembered as a player who had so many top-10s, or who finished second so many times,’ he says.
‘I had a good record as an amateur. I was SA Amateur champion. I was captain of a four-man team and if I look at that team, which was just before I turned pro, I had Ruan de Smidt, Brandon Stone and Haydn Porteous in it.’
Of course, Stone has gone on to win the European Tour co-sanctioned South African Open Championship and the Alfred Dunhill Championship. Porteous won the Joburg Open to become a European Tour winner, and De Smidt has won four times on the Sunshine Tour.
Harvey hesitates when asked whether he thinks he belongs in that league.
‘I like to think I do,’ he says. ‘That thought keeps me sane when I look back on my four second-place finishes on the Tour. It can be inspiring as well as frustrating.’
Plying his trade on the Sunshine Tour instead of in the more exotic climes of Europe means Harvey sees more of De Smidt than of Stone and Porteous, and has become closer with the former. ‘The things he says and the way he handles himself have inspired me even more,’ he says.
For an apparently gung-ho kind of guy, Harvey can get sensitive, and analytical.
After a pretty ordinary 2016 during which he managed just two top-10 finishes, he decided it was time to take stock.
‘There were other factors that impacted on my year,’ he says.
‘One of them was that I got fed up with being on the road, which is kind of tough in my line of work. I’ve never been
the best traveller and I was missing home more than I usually do. When you take how much I travelled as an amateur, together with the time I spend away as a professional, I’ve been on the road for the better part of 10 years.
‘Then, after I missed the cut at the Alfred Dunhill Championship, I was having a round of golf with my mates in the early part of December, and I got one of them to record my swing.
‘I didn’t like what I saw. I was crossing the line badly, my club was long and very much over my head, and it didn’t look pretty. That was the seed that made me realise I had to find the time to work on my swing. When you’re playing in tournaments week in and week out, it’s very hard to make little tinkers. Flattening out my swing was a big change for me.
‘I worked very hard with my dad at Zimbali. He slugged me very, very hard after I showed him my swing. I practised six or seven hours each day. I worked at getting a much better position at the top of my swing.’
When Harvey looked back on 2016, he was struck by how he no longer recognised himself. ‘After I’d made some very good swing changes, I did some soul-searching,’ he says. ‘I’ve been consistent on the Sunshine Tour for most of my six-year professional career. I’ve been a regular top-10 finisher. So I told myself that I needed to make some changes. It just wasn’t good enough.
‘I had to ask myself if I was really happy with where I was going with my career, or was I going to get back on track and try to improve. That bit of introspection was definitely a help.’
The new season on the Sunshine Tour has started with a bang for Harvey, most notably characterised by yet another second-place finish – this time to Oliver Bekker at the Zambia Sugar Open in Lusaka in April. ‘It was frustrating to come second again, but it was a strong indication that all the hard work was paying off.
‘Too often you can feel as if you have nothing to show for all the grind, but I had come second, and I felt like I was back in the mix.
‘It was also good to be up close with Oliver and to see how he did things in the final round at Lusaka. He kept so calm; there was no shouting or throwing clubs, he just ground it out – made the crucial putts for par. It was good to see.’
Harvey is seeking that elusive balance between what he projects and what he needs to do to get that first win.
‘I’m into my action movies,’ he says. ‘I like Jason Statham and The Rock – the manly kind of figures. I like action and I like cars, so car movies are definitely my favourites.
‘And the way I play golf – fast and aggressive – has a lot to do with my personality. It helps me to be upbeat. If I get too bogged down, it won’t work for me.
‘I used think I was Johnny Bravo as a kid, but I couldn’t quite pull off the blond hair,’ he laughs.
Coming second is getting real old real fast for Harvey. Something’s going to have to change.
IN NUMBERS
13 – Most consecutive cuts made on the Sunshine Tour
21 – Top-10 finishes in his Sunshine Tour career, although he is winless
62 – Lowest score recorded in his Sunshine Tour career
2.6m – Sunshine Tour career prize money in rands
BEST FINISHES
2012 Big Easy Tour – Royal J&K (1st), Big Easy Tour – Gary Player CC (1st), Big Easy Tour – Maccauvlei (2nd)
2013 Big Easy Tour – Roodepoort (4th), Sun City Challenge (2nd), Lion of Africa Cape Town Open (4th)
2014 Investec Royal Swazi Open (T2nd), Zambia Sugar Open (T5th), Vodacom Origins – Euphoria (4th)
2015 South African Open (T5th), Lombard Insurance Classic (T5th), Sun Windmill Challenge (5th)
2017 Zambia Sugar Open (2nd), Lombard Insurance Classic (T3rd)
– This article first appeared in the July issue of Compleat Golfer
