Sunshine Tour, South African PGA Tour, It's Golf and It's Great!

One of the perquisites that comes with bumping out a weekly e-newsletter is the need to follow all the golf tours of the world. The Sunshine Tour is a tour seldom viewed by the USA golfing public (and who knows, perhaps by Europe and Asia as well?) It is producing not only some terrific, early-season golf, but a fresh look at web coverage as well.

Today, for example, Adilson da Silva of Brasil led the Vodacom Championship by one stroke with three holes to play. Three holes later, da Silva had parred in … and lost by two. James Kingston, a winner earlier this year, birdied the final three holes to finish two up on the South American. How fun is that (at least for Kingston)?

The Sunshine Tour has a live-scoring feature that is much more compact than the USA PGATour.com one. It does bump open a new window, even in Firefox, but the two-column paradigm is worth the extra layer. On the left, you find your tournament leader board with position, score, tournament par, name, hole, daily par, and last three holes. The right column lists the top players of the day, relative to par. Even though Tyrone van Aswegen (really, that’s his name) finished out of the top twenty overall, he tied for low Sunday with Kingston. That’s a nice feature not found on other tournament sites.

If you’re trolling the web and cannot decide between Second Life and something else, choose the something else and head to the Sunshine Tour.