Sports stars add flavour to tournament

Highlander Marty Banks, pictured playing in a Super Pacific rugby match between the Highlanders...
Highlander Marty Banks, pictured playing in a Super Pacific rugby match between the Highlanders and Hurricanes at Dunedin’s Forsyth Barr Stadium in 2022, will look to defend his golfing title at this weekend’s Cromwell Golf Club’s annual legends tournament. PHOTO: PETER MCINTOSH
Former Highlander Marty Banks will lead the way for the defending champions, but the competition he will face on the fairway this weekend includes legends from rugby, cricket, boxing and rodeo.

The Cromwell Golf Club’s 30th annual legends tournament this weekend boasts three former All Blacks, a past Black Cap, a two-time national boxing champion and the 1982 New Zealand steer roping champion.

The two-day Legends tournament tees off on Saturday.

In 1997 then-Cromwell Golf Club manager Doug Harradine, a former Otago golf representative, imagined a weekend where friends from different sporting backgrounds could reunite, enjoy each other’s company and still test themselves on the course.

That balance between social enjoyment and genuine competition has remained at the heart of the tournament.

The simple but unusual rules require every four-person team to include at least one sporting "legend" — a national or provincial sporting representative, current or former, from any sport.

In a statement yesterday Cromwell Golf Club president Peter Williams said 61 teams would hit the fairways on Saturday.

Mr Williams said Banks was making one of his final sporting appearances in Otago before shifting north.

Harradine would keep his now 30-year tradition alive and play with the same team-mates mates — former Otago No 1 and New Zealand team player Kim McDonald, past Otago representative Bruce Marshall and long time Cromwell member Evan Dickie.

They were the winners in 2004.

Springboks assistant coach Tony Brown and former Black Caps spin bowler Mark Craig were on the same team, arranged by Craig’s father-in-law Alan Rose, the professional at
the Wānaka Golf Club, Mr Williams said. — Allied Media