The occasion of the annual $1m Sun City Challenge golf tournament in South Africa (being run away with by Sweden's Henrik Stenson, this year) always for me acts as a reminder of how recent apartheid was.
Can it really be just twenty-odd years ago that this tournament - and the occasional "rebel" cricket tour - were among the most glaring reminders of the old South African government's increasingly failing desperation to pretend it was still part of the "western world community", by paying millions of dollars to entice the likes of Johnny Miller and Seve Ballesteros to come and play at its premier luxury resort?
And odd, too, that despite that being the reason behind the tournament existing in the first place, it remains , even now, the sole reason the world's top golfers go to South Africa every December. The transition from "old" to "new" can't have impacted Nedbank and the likes that much, they seem to have carried on as if nothing of much import has happened.
Can it really be just twenty-odd years ago that this tournament - and the occasional "rebel" cricket tour - were among the most glaring reminders of the old South African government's increasingly failing desperation to pretend it was still part of the "western world community", by paying millions of dollars to entice the likes of Johnny Miller and Seve Ballesteros to come and play at its premier luxury resort?
And odd, too, that despite that being the reason behind the tournament existing in the first place, it remains , even now, the sole reason the world's top golfers go to South Africa every December. The transition from "old" to "new" can't have impacted Nedbank and the likes that much, they seem to have carried on as if nothing of much import has happened.
Comment