Over eight years – almost to the day – since his last professional golf victory, Haydn Porteous won the Sunshine Tour’s Vodacom Origins of Golf title at Gowrie Farm on Sunday to resurrect a career many thought might have been dead and buried.
He won the D+D Real Czech Masters on the DP World Tour on September 3 2017, over a year after he had won the Investec Cup on the Sunshine Tour back in March 2016. He reached a career-best 166th on the Official World Golf Ranking lists in January 2018. And while it wasn’t exactly downhill from there, it was eventually abundantly clear that a glittering career was slowly rusting away.
Playing on an invitation in the R2-million event that would have been something he could have walked into in his heyday, Porteous overcame the seemingly interminable delays caused by mist, and ran out a one-stroke winner at seven-under-par for the tournament shortened to 36 holes from the scheduled 54.
It started well enough for the 2016 Joburg Open winner, with a five-under-par 66 in the first round, good enough for an eight-way share of third, two strokes behind Dylan Mostert.
And when it was decided that the uncooperative mist necessitated the shortening of the tournament to 36 holes, he was well into his second round. He made four birdies and two bogeys and then had to endure hours of waiting while some players made a run at the top of the leaderboard, and others fell from the summit.
The implications for him so deep into a career that must have felt as if it had run its course are substantial: As a winner on the Sunshine Tour, he has the remainder of this season as well as the whole of the 2026-27 season spread before him as an opportunity to regain something of the sparkle of his earlier fame. That eligibility includes access to the tournaments co-sanctioned by the Sunshine Tour with the HotelPlanner Tour and the DP World Tour, which are invaluable as stepping stones back to a life that must have seemed unattainable again.
All that comes in literally his first start of the season. He’s now 11th on the Sunshine Tour Order of Merit, with opportunities to climb that list in search of the opportunities that offers.
Two of the players who finished in a share of second at Gowrie Farm, one stroke behind him, are in first and second on that Order of Merit: Herman Loubser is first, and he also carded a closing 69, and last week’s winner on the tour, Austin Bautista of Australia, is second after he fired a three-under 68 in the second round.
Porteous has been through enough to know this might not herald his second coming, but, at the same time, it is a sweet pay-off for all those hard times.
And he can dare hope – again.
