Recent Lockdown Diaries guest Ryan Cairns, who features as a monthly contributor to Compleat Golfer, discusses his place in the game and the new standard of golf with WADE PRETORIUS.
WADE: The beauty of golf, it’s like, you’ve been all over the world and you’ve played in lots of different events and tours. But your story is not even close to being finished because you are still at it … you might moving in a different direction or two but you’ve still got that inner drive. Won’t you tell me what the next sort of two- to five-year plan is for Ryan Cairns?
CAIRNZY: We’ve got a family business up here, The Pro Shop franchise from South Africa, and we’ve got the pro shop in Zimbabwe at Royal Harare Golf Club. It’s myself and my dad and two family friends of ours, another father-and-son combo. And the business is doing really well. We’ve got a great customer base, people love the store, and that’s also opened my eyes in a couple of different directions.
And then, yeah, I reached out to David Leadbetter last year, I actually just threw a ‘submit enquiry’ form on the website and wrote him a sort of bleeding-heart message about the state of golf in Zimbabwe and the lack of competitiveness in the junior ranks and in the amateur ranks. I just said, you know, we’re going to be doing our bit and would you like to do something; would you like to join us? And he wrote back and he said something along the lines of, ‘Let’s do it!’ and then he signed off, David L.
And the rest is history.
We’re opening up a Leadbetter Academy over the next couple of months. They’ve been amazing to us, actually. They’ve really reached out through this time and extended anything that they can. I mean, I was on an Instagram live video-chat with David and Stewart Clayton, who’s David’s head of instruction. So, the journey is just kind of, I’ve always had this attitude that if you don’t ask, you don’t get. Rather get told no, or that’s not possible, than not even try. And that’s really my dream, that David’s going to be involved with us in Zimbabwe.
And my golf, I’m playing a lot of good golf, and fortunately, the competitiveness out there on the Sunshine Tour these days is next level. I mean, you see it just from looking at the scoreboards. I tell the story of when I won at Simola in 2012, I was five under par after two days and then I shot 10 under in the final round and got into a playoff with Vaughn Groenewald.
This year, I was six under par after two days and biting my nails as to whether I was going to make or miss the cut, and I made the cut on the number – six under par. Same golf course, same hole locations – I mean, it’s crazy … the new level, that the cut lines have literally moved three to four shots over the last five or six years on the same course, the same set-ups, everything. So now, the guys are really good out there.
I had a really terrible summer now. SA Open, I started off great. I was five under after 15 holes, on Firethorn, and then kind of blew it. And then the next four tournaments, I missed the cuts. I worked out what is my stroke average and it was 71.2 or something like that. So, it’s not horrible golf, I didn’t feel like I was playing awful, but you know, you walk away and you’ve cost yourself R35-40,000 in expenses over five weeks: it hurts a bit.
WADE: I get that … that’s golf in a way because for every guy that comes on the scene and makes millions of dollars, there’s hundreds or more around the world trying to make it, having bad breaks here and there. Justin Harding must be proof that if you stick at it, you believe in yourself, you do the right things … it can pay off.
CAIRNZY: Hack’s an amazing example of what is possible and especially how fine the lines are on the Sunshine Tour as well, because, you know, we see it in the co-sanctioned events. Actually, I wrote a column a couple months ago about the other co-sanctions.
People just think, oh, the European Tour players are going to come here and dominate. And then you look at the scoreboards every week you’re like, wow, there is a whole lot of Sunshine Tour regulars in the top 10, in the top 15, every single tournament.
And even our guys, our great players who recently graduated on to the European Tour – guys like Erik [van Rooyen, Haydn [Porteous] and Burmy [Dean Burmester] and also Christiaan Bezuidenhout. When they come back and play a regular season event, it’s not like they just walk in and win the trophy. The guys are really good. There’s so many talented youngsters, you can see guys like Thristan Lawrence now and Garrick Higgo; he’s a good kid.
WADE: It’s a little hard to believe the talent out there right now. Golf has never been in a better place from top to bottom, I don’t think. The PGA Tour … the guys at the top are so good, obviously. Rory’s playing phenomenal golf, Brooks Koepka, Tiger Woods comes back and wins The Masters last year. And it just filters down.
They write off the Europeans, they win the Ryder Cup. As you were talking about on the Sunshine Tour, the guys are just so competitive and so good. I mean, one guy you didn’t mention was JC Ritchie, I mean, he looked fairly invincible in this Challenge Tour section recently.
CAIRNZY: Yeah, I mean, he’s just on a ridiculous run of form over the last 15 months or maybe a bit more, and you know, my favorite story of JC … it’s still, I think it will always be actually, when he won the Zim Open. He hadn’t won a tournament on the circuit yet and he started off on the first hole at Royal Harare Golf Club and made a nine on a par four … I mean, he started off like that: five over par after one hole, and he ends up winning the tournament on minus 16. I think from that moment, you could just sense this whole, sort of, this confidence just washed over him then. And he’s been almost unstoppable since then. I think he’s won another six times plus in the last year and a bit, and he’s just outside the top 100 in the world golf rankings. And he’s a good guy. He’s one of those guys who’s not going change no matter what success he has along the way.
Photo: Shaun Roy/Sunshine Tour/Gallo Images
