Calm before BoP storm

PRESSURE is something Waka Donnelly has devoured in large quantities over his impressive amateur career.
It is why he has an arm’s-length list of titles, why he has retained his place in the Freyberg masters national interprovincial title-holding North Harbour team, why he holds seven Poverty Bay Open crowns.
So when the former Gisborne man is asked about the prospect of facing the best Bay of Plenty can throw at him in the 2011 FMG Poverty Bay Open, starting tomorrow, it’s no surprise he seems pretty relaxed about the challenge.
“No two ways about it, they are going to be sharp,” he says of the eight-strong BoP representative contingent featuring New Zealand senior and junior representatives.
“My attitude is just go out and play as well as you can — if you win, you win, if you don’t, you don’t.”
Auckland-based Donnelly, 41, is chasing Frank Gordon’s record of eight Poverty Bay Open titles, collected from 1952 to 1969.
Donnelly won his first in 1989 at the age of 19 and his seventh last year when he beat nephew Steve Donnelly in the Keiha Cup top-16 matchplay final.
The defending champion is looking forward to escaping Auckland for a weekend and, he hopes, enjoying a Poverty Bay course and weather conditions more conducive to quality golf.
Donnelly was 10th at the Auckland masters strokeplay in horrendous weather last weekend. Rounds of 81 and 84 on a Royal Auckland course felt like par golf, he said. The winner, Brent Patterson, shot 77 and 82.
Donnelly’s effort was good enough to secure his place in the Harbour team to defend the Freyberg masters at Levin, starting on October 31.
Former Te Puia Springs and Poverty Bay member Donnelly, now at Peninsula, expects he will need to be near or at the top of his game to have a chance of seeing off the BoP challenge.
“Six rounds might be a bit of a struggle,” he said of two rounds of strokeplay qualifying, followed by four of matchplay.
“I haven’t been playing as much as I would have liked.”
As to the BoP players, he will take them as they come.
“I can only end up playing a couple of them . . . I’m just hoping for a kind draw. That will be up to how I go in qualifying.”
It was only a year ago he beat one of the top BoP players, now-professional Kieran Muir, in the Open semifinals.
For the BoP group, the Open is crucial in their bid to make the five-man team for the national interprovincial at Poverty Bay next month. It is both a trial and a chance to familiarise themselves with the course.
The eight — Brad Kendall, Sam Davis, Andrew Stewart, brothers James and Craig Hamilton, Hayden Beard, Landyn Edwards and Victor Janin — are all members of the Tauranga-based Golf Fusion Performance Academy.
Bay of Plenty coach Jay Carter, one of the academy’s three coaches, has stressed to the players this is a great opportunity to impress selectors.
“I told them ‘any of you could make the team with ease, and any of you could miss out’,” said Carter, who will come through with the players,
“While they are going down as a group, it is a good opportunity for them to front up and show how good they are against their peers. Hopefully they will all qualify (for the top 16) and we’ll see them go head to head.”
Poverty Bay senior club champion Andrew Higham and Waikohu teenager William Brown head the local challenge.