When Guido Migliozzi won the Magical Kenya Open on Sunday in Nairobi, the PGA Tour’s annual stop in Jackson, Miss., probably wasn’t at the front of his mind. But Migliozzi’s win unwittingly sealed the Kenya Open as the European Tour’s version of the Sanderson Farms Championship.
The two events occur more than 8,000 miles apart, but they share an unusual number of parallels, going back almost all the way to their beginnings. The Kenya Open has been held annually since 1967; just one year later, the Sanderson (known in those days as the Magnolia State Classic) hit the PGA Tour’s schedule. Both events have traditionally been lower-profile tournaments, but both recently got significant promotions: the Kenya Open was a Challenge Tour event until being elevated this year to the European Tour, and in September, the Sanderson will avoid opposite-field status for the first time since 2010. And both the Kenya Open and the Sanderson are held in destinations that are…shall we say, remote.
Both the Sanderson and the Kenya Open have been proving grounds for first-time winners: Migliozzi was the Kenya Open’s fifth first-time champ since 2009, and the Sanderson has been its winner’s first PGA Tour victory in each of the past five years.
Most importantly, there is also the matter of the events’ trophies, which might be the best on their respective tours. The Sanderson’s winner takes home a beautiful, life-size, painstakingly crafted chicken (it even has a name, Reveille). And on Sunday, Migliozzi took home what is undoubtedly the most coveted rhinoceros trophy in all of professional sports.
Hopefully, the two events share at least one final parallel. The Sanderson’s ascendence up the hierarchy of PGA Tour events (its purse is growing this year to $6.6 million, up from $4.4 million) raises the question of whether it can improve its attractiveness to Tour pros while preserving the quirkiness that make it such a fun event. The Kenya Open certainly seems to have struck the balance between growth and fun; hopefully the Sanderson can too.