Guitar-playing van Rooyen hoping for strong start to season

If Erik van Rooyen were handicapping his prowess playing the guitar, he’d modestly tell you he’d be somewhere in the single digits.

Those aren’t boastful words, either. A Google search brings up multiple videos on social media of the South African rocking the electric guitar, as well as performing more subtle acoustic numbers – and the talent is evident. In fact, he might even be underestimating his ability.

There’s even one made during quarantine earlier this year where he’s trying to see how many balls he could chip off the bedroom carpet into his golf shoes before he gets finished playing “Sweet Child ’O Mine” on the guitar.

“It just always kind of tickled my fancy, I guess,” van Rooyen says.

Van Rooyen has been playing guitar since he was 14 years old and is essentially self-taught. He grew up listening to Dire Straits and Neil Young and the Rolling Stones with his dad and had always wanted to play. After taking lessons for a month, he was on his own -- but it’s apparent van Rooyen has put in the time to progress.

His favorite music to play is basically anything by the Foo Fighters but he likes AC/DC and Guns N’ Roses, too. More recently, the 30-year-old has gotten into the blues, thanks to his father-in-law’s extensive collection of music, and he challenges himself with some Jimi Hendrix riffs.

“When you get back home from a three-week stretch or just from a day of practice at home, it's nice to kind of immerse yourself in that and get away,” van Rooyen says.

Van Rooyen, who is making his first start as a full PGA TOUR member this week at the Safeway Open, hasn’t started bringing his guitar on the road – yet. For his birthday in February, van Rooyen’s wife gave him a foldable guitar with a neck that pops out and can fit in a carry-on backpack.

Still, he knows where his real talent lies.

“I play golf for a living, so it's really just a past time,” van Rooyen says.

The former University of Minnesota golfer says he was “really pumped” to get his PGA TOUR card for the 2020-21 season. He did so by earning enough FedExCup points as a non-member to finish among the top 125 – thanks in large part to a tie for third at the World Golf Championships-Mexico Open.

This year, though, van Rooyen has his sights firmly set on the Playoffs.

“All of us are competitive and then sportsman, and we want to win every time we tee it up – at least I do,” van Rooyen says. “But then the longer-term goals are to get to East Lake next year and have a chance to win the FedExCup, win my first PGA TOUR event and contend at the major championships and obviously win them.”

The California wine region where the Safeway Open is being played feels a lot like home to van Rooyen, who grew up outside Cape Town. His grandfather was a golfer, and his dad finally got a set of clubs when he was 38. Van Rooyen and his brother Francois used to go to the range with him.

“When I turned 10, my dad bought a set for the two of us to share -- my brother being the oldest would carry the clubs,” van Rooyen recalls. “I'd hit it in the right rough. He hit it in the left rough, and he’d be the one running across the fairway with the bag on his back. So that's kind of how I got into it.”

South Africans are great sportsmen, and van Rooyen was game for anything in season, rugby, cricket, track and field. But when he turned 14 – about the same time he started playing the guitar, actually -- he told his parents that he wanted to focus on golf.

“It’s your decision,” van Rooyen remembers his dad telling him. “But you know, the number one rule is that if we do something, we do it flat out and we do it with everything we've got, and we see how it goes. Because there's no guarantees in life.

“I don’t know what it was, but I guess I just always had self-belief that when I put my mind to something, I can be successful in it. Frankly, as a kid, I thought in my dreams, I always thought I'd be here sooner. But I don't have any regrets about the journey that I've had up until this point.

“And for some reason I always knew that I'd be competing against the best in the world.”

That journey to the PGA TOUR has taken van Rooyen all over the globe.

He’s won tournaments in South Africa and China on the Sunshine Tour. Last year, van Rooyen picked up his first European Tour win at the Scandinavian Invitation in Gothenburg, Sweden where he held off Matthew Fitzpatrick and Henrik Stenson, among others.

“It's a lot of fun,” he says of his days on the European Tour. “One of the coolest things for me is when you go from different events ... in a different country every week with a different culture and different cultural experience. So that's fantastic.

“But when you've got to travel from Morocco to China, back to London, it wears on you. So, it's nice to have a base here in the U.S. and an opportunity to, to play here.”

Van Rooyen and his wife Rose have settled in Jupiter, Florida, where he spent the early part of the COVID-19 quarantine hitting into a net in the living room of his house and FaceTiming his coach who was back home in South Africa. But the couple has had plenty of adventures overseas, like the time they were befriended by a group of locals dining in an outdoor restaurant outside their hotel in Kazakhstan.

“For some reason we got chatting,” van Rooyen recalls. “They probably had a few too many and were having a good time and they invited us over to the house to come have a local Kazakhstan meal. And the meal would have included having horse -- like a horse steak.

“It was too weird. We didn't end up actually going to the house, but it was a strange offer because they was so friendly and it's hard to be like, sorry, I don't want to eat your local cuisine. It just doesn't sound appealing to me. So, we played it off pretty diplomatically, I think.”

Maybe someone in Napa will do the neighborly thing and offer them a glass of wine, instead.