It’s already a good season for Michael Hollick on the Sunshine Tour, and he starts as one of the favourites in the Vodacom Origins of Golf event at Gowrie Farm which tees off on Thursday.
In just five starts of the 2025-26 season, he has won once, been runner-up once, and finished 17th in a third tournament. He also finished in seventh in the non-Order of Merit Waterfall Tournament of Champions. That’s a great start in anyone’s language, even given the two cuts he has missed.
He lies sixth on the Order of Merit, after finishing seventh in the 2024-25 season when he bookended his year with victory in the first and last events on the schedule. It was comfortably his best performance since his debut season in 2012.
“My aim is to win the Order of Merit,” said Hollick, “and I feel pretty bullish about it after I made all the cuts in the HotelPlanner Tour co-sanctioned events last season, and two of the four DP World Tour co-sanctioned events.
“While I didn’t play as well as I might have in them (he had a best of a share of 19th in MyGolfLife Open at Pecanwood in January), I do feel more confident about my game now and I’m hoping to produce something that gets me up the Order of Merit in those events.”
In addition, he is also something of a ‘local’ when it comes to the course on which this week’s tournament is being played. “I was the course record holder when it was still a nine-hole course,” he said.
While he hasn’t played it as frequently as he used to, especially since it has become an 18-hole layout, he still feels comfortable around it. “I am a KwaZulu-Natal boy,” he said, “and I used to get to Gowrie Farm quite a lot. I played the course again last week, and although I don’t like the new holes as much as the old ones, I’m still very happy to be playing there.”
The turnaround in Hollick’s career fortunes came after he had made the decision to step away from the treadmill of being a touring professional to earn his living from coaching. “I wanted to keep my hand in and play in some events on the tour, those which I could pick and choose because they were convenient for me,” he said.
“I wanted to keep playing tournaments because I am a competitive guy, and it worked out even better than I hoped.”
He won the FCB Zim Open in May 2024 to set in motion his great season in 2024-25, and the whole process of earning a living from coaching while playing tournaments for something other than money fell neatly into place.
“I listen to a lot of podcasts,” he said, “and on one of them, this guy said that people who are successful in businesses are always doing something connected to their business. Even if it’s not directly related, something that is tangentially connected polishes up an aspect of the core of the business.
“And I’ve found that with coaching: I’m constantly involved with golf, talking about it, demonstrating it, and thinking about the right way of doing things. And when the tour takes a break, like it did mid-year this year, for those five or six weeks, I’m grafting, while I’ll bet the other guys were resting, or on holiday in the bush, or something.”
So, after his share of 17th in the Gary & Vivienne Player Challenge at the end of May, he came back at the beginning of August to win the FNB Eswatini Challenge for his fourth career title on the Sunshine Tour.
He goes into this week coming off a second-place finish last week at the Wild Coast Sun, where he was beaten by an astonishing 62 in the final round by Australian Austin Bautista.
He’s in a good space, but he will be up against the likes of Bautista, as well as other recent winners like Herman Loubser, who currently leads the Order of Merit. Also in the field is Daniel van Tonder, back from some time in Europe on the HotelPlanner Tour, where he seems set to regain his DP World Tour card.
For Hollick, with three of his four career victories having come from the period during which he has been coaching, and being in such obvious good form, the Gowrie Farm event is an opportunity to head for the top of the Order of Merit.
