Win at Mount Edgecombe ends long wait for Otto
That was his first win in South Africa since the 2011 South African Open Championship in November that year.
HE’S come close a few times, but it took Hennie Otto eight full years to pick up his 13th Sunshine Tour victory. He won the Sibaya Challenge recently by a single stroke as he raced through the field at The Woods at Mount Edgecombe.
He started the day six strokes off the lead, but a closing eight-under-par 62 with not a single bogey on the card saw him edge James Hart du Preez by a single stroke, with Daniel van Tonder, Anthony Michael and Malcolm Mitchell a further stroke back. That was his first win in South Africa since the 2011 South African Open Championship in November that year.
“It is just my second full season back after surgery,” he said. “It’s a long road. It takes longer than you think. It has been coming. I’ve been playing really nicely. The scoring didn’t show that the last couple of weeks. If I can break 30 putts average for a round then I can be up there and it showed.”
For Otto, it’s a shot-in-the-arm for his desire to get back onto the international stage, where his last win came in the Open d’Italia on the European Tour in 2014.
“Confidence-wise, this is a boost,” he said. “I’m not a guy that rides on it much, but I knew it was going to come. Patience is not my thing, so this is a boost. I’m not going to the European Tour Q-School, but I’ll go to the Asian Tour Q-School. I just missed out on Japan. There are a lot of things to sort out, but it’s time to go overseas.
“The big events are coming here in South Africa and you never know what’s going to happen. I don’t have expectations that are too high, but I’m just going to try and keep on doing what I did now over the last couple of months and then see what happens in the summer.”
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