Staff WriterStanding on the lush fairways of Durban Country Club this week, Brandon Stone looks like your textbook touring pro – logoed cap, smooth swing, the lot – but scratch the surface and you find a man far more interested in the four-letter word at the heart of his partnership with Jonsson Workwear: work.
This isn’t just another sponsor-on-the-sleeve arrangement. It started in a boardroom, not on a driving range, when the South African sat down with Jonsson Workwear CEO Nick Jonsson and the conversation drifted, surprisingly quickly, away from birdies and towards graft.
“Golf started with workwear”
Jonsson has built his business on celebrating the graft of the everyday worker – the men and women who haul, weld, lift and stack to put food on tables at home. So when Stone reframed golf’s origins in the language of workwear, he had his attention.
“I said to Mr Jonsson, if you look at the history of golf, it started with workwear clothing. When golfers wore three-piece suits and ties on the course, they wore the long socks over their trousers purely because they needed to keep their trousers clean for work afterwards.
Jonsson Workwear have launched their new golfers’ shirts, and while designed to play golf in, at the same time you can go to work in them because they look smart and respectable while being purpose-designed for work. Mr Jonsson looked at me, and it made sense for him,” Stone said as he walked the fairways of Durban Country Club in a practice round for this week’s R6-million Jonsson Workwear Durban Open on the Sunshine Tour and HotelPlanner Tour, which tees off on Thursday.
In one neat history lesson, Brandon Stone had joined the dots between St Andrews and the shop floor, between the original working man’s game and a modern workwear brand trying to build something that looks sharp in the office and holds its own on a par four.
It’s why he now wears the Jonsson Workwear logo with a measure of pride that goes beyond the usual commercial handshake. For him, that little red mark is less about style and more about solidarity.
The grind behind the good life
From the outside, Stone’s “office” looks outrageously cushy – sunshine, kikuyu and the odd complaining seagull. But if you think that means he doesn’t understand the man on the Durban docks, he’d like a quiet word.
“I’m fortunate that my work takes place on a beautiful lush golf course. But everybody is fighting their own battles – whether that’s the man working on the Durban docks or the professional golfer trying to make par from the bush at Durban Country Club.
Obviously there are different levels of struggle, but I’ve gone through my own struggles of losing my card on the DP World Tour and having to start from the beginning and earn my privilege to play again. I’ve done that.”
There’s no overtime rate for a lost tour card. When the invitations dry up and the courtesy cars disappear, you either fold or you clock in again at the bottom rung. Brandon Stone chose the latter, rebuilding his career with the same stubborn persistence you’d expect from someone doing the night shift on the waterfront.
That shared sense of battle – different tools, same pressure – is precisely what Jonsson Workwear has tapped into with its move onto the fairways, and what Stone is trying to embody inside the ropes this week at the Jonsson Workwear Durban Open.
Work ethic in the blood
If you want to know where Stone’s attitude comes from, don’t look at the scorecard. Look at his parents’ alarm clocks.
“This week, my mom is the CEO of Durban Country Club and my dad works with the Matkovich golf course maintenance group, and they’ve both been here at 4am every morning to make sure this tournament goes according to plan.
That work ethic from them has been passed down to me. I’ve always felt I need to put in the work and earn the right to play out here. Hard work is the essence of the Stone name and I’m proud to carry that.”
While most of the field is still drooling into hotel pillows, his mom is already in the clubhouse making decisions and his dad is out on the turf making sure the course is worthy of a R6-million event. If you ever wanted a living, walking definition of “family business”, Brandon Stone’s week at Durban Country Club is it.
The CEO in the clubhouse, the greens man on the fairways and the tour pro between the ropes – all three wearing the same surname and pulling in the same direction. It’s almost industrial in its efficiency.
Life happens between the tee shots
If comparing a professional golfer to a dock worker feels like stretching a metaphor tighter than a new glove, life has a habit of levelling everybody eventually. Stone knows that as well as anyone.
“A few years ago my mom had life-threatening health issues. It’s no secret that everybody out there is going through something. My mom’s started playing golf now. In December my brother was visiting and we played a round of golf as a family. My mom never thought she’d ever be able to play golf with her boys. That was a special moment for all of us.”
There’s a detail you won’t find on any strokes-gained chart: the value of an ordinary family fourball after a health scare that threatened to take it away.
For Brandon Stone, that round in December sits right up there with any trophy – a quiet, personal major tucked away in the memory bank every time he laces up his shoes and heads back to work.
A golf course built on graft
This week at Durban Country Club, work is stitched into everything.
There’s the sweat equity Nick Jonsson has poured into reviving the grand old layout, personally overseeing a full-scale revamp that’s turned faded glory into something even better than its original self. There’s the Sunshine Tour’s belief – emblazoned in their mantra that “GreatnessBeginsHere” – that the hours invested on these fairways will launch careers rather than just host another tournament.
And then there’s Brandon Stone himself: one man, one bag, and one more chance to prove that turning up early and putting in the yards still matters, even in a sport that loves to dress itself up in luxury.
Out on the fairways, the red Jonsson Workwear branding on his golf shirt ties it all together – the dock worker, the greenkeeper, the CEO and the touring pro – under a single idea: good work, done well, has value far beyond a pay slip.
For himself, for his family, for every worker
When the Jonsson Workwear Durban Open gets under way on Thursday, Stone will step onto the tee with more on his mind than a number on the leaderboard. This week, the job description runs deeper:
Do the work. Honour the people who taught him how. Show that a golfer’s grind isn’t as far from the Durban docks as it might appear from the grandstand.
For Brandon Stone, the assignment is simple enough to write down, brutally hard to execute and instantly recognisable to anybody who’s ever punched a clock:
This week, it’s about doing the work. For himself. For his family.
And somewhere on the docks, there’s a man in a red Jonsson Workwear shirt who understands that perfectly.
