His margin of victory was eventually four strokes, but Jean Hugo was hanging on for dear life as he won the Wild Coast Sun Challenge last week at the Wild Coast Sun Country Club.

It was the 19^th Sunshine Tour title for the 43-year-old Centurion golfer from The Els Club, Copperleaf, but his last in 2015 seemed a long way off as he fought to maintain the five-shot lead he started with, as Clinton Grobler, Hennie du Plessis and Ruan de Smidt did their best to chase him down while he carded a four-over-par 74.

“I wasn’t sure if you’d given me 74 at the beginning of the day that I would have taken it. I could have played better today, but it’s a step in the right direction for me. The way I played the last four or five holes, it was great. It was probably the toughest stretch we’ll get this year,” said Hugo.

It was made tough but the inevitable challenge of playing golf at the coast – a wind that made scoring very difficult on a day on which three-under 67 was the best score.

“It was a pretty brutal day. It was the first time we got the wind from that direction and it was quite heavy. To start out, it was very tough to judge how strong it was and I knew that for a few holes on the front nine it was going to be very testing. It did catch us and even the downwind holes weren’t that easy. Putting also becomes very difficult with this wind,” Hugo explained.

A bogey on his first hole would have dented his confidence, and two more by the time he reached the sixth would have reminded him that he had five missed cuts this season and just one top-10 finish – an anomaly in a glittering career.

But his experience made him grit his teeth and battle on. For Hugo, who edges closer to John Bland’s 21 Sunshine Tour victories in fifth place on the list of most wins, this was as good as it has ever been for him in his career.

“This feels just as special as the first one. I’ll remember this for a long time. It was the first one for a long while, and it was the toughest, actually. I’ll just take my career as it comes from now. I’ve put a lot of pressure on myself for the last three or four years to keeping adding to the trophy cabinet. If I was off my game today, I could easily have lost it,” he concluded.

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