Last year, third on the Sunshine Tour Order of Merit would have been enough to get Darren Fichardt into the World Golf Championships-CA Championship which gets underway in Doral, Florida next week.

But the WGC organisers have followed the US PGA Tour’s fear of foreign golfers by shutting off one of the places available to each of the member tours from South Africa, Japan, Australasia and Asia.

It’s especially poignant for Fichardt, who had three wins on last year’s Sunshine Tour and has eased into the 2010 top 10 with his victory in the Dimension Data Pro-Am.

And the ploy is not even giving more US golfers a shot at the $8.5-million purse, with people from outside the US dominating the world rankings: 36 of the world’s top 50 in the March 1 Official World Golf Rankings are from other countries – and the world number one is not going to be there anyway.

The situation won’t be much different by the time the final cut-off on March 8 arrives, either, so more than half the players in the field will be non-Americans.

And that reflects the nature of the game of golf, but the field would be enriched if the entries were opened back to the level where players like Fichardt could get into the event – and the players from the other Tours who have lost out too.

As it is, South Africa will have Retief Goosen, Ernie Els, Charl Schwartzel and Tim Clark in on the basis of their world rankings, while Rory Sabbatini will have to hope for something seismic to happen to those rankings to get into the top 50.

As it is, despite a good start to the year, he’s not in the top 10 in the 2010 FedEx Cup standings, and neither was he in the 2009 top 30.

Besides Fichardt, the unluckiest South African is Louis Oosthuizen, who just misses on a number of counts: He’s ranked 67th in the world, and he finished 31st in last year’s European Tour Race to Dubai despite a fast start. So he can’t get in on that basis.

Last year, Thomas Aiken got a spot in the event on the basis of his third place on the 2008 Sunshine Tour Order of Merit.

He finished in a share of seventh, ahead of Tiger Woods, and he went on to share eighth in The Open behind winner Stewart Cink.

Though we might not be able to predict Fichardt would have done that well, it’s sad he doesn’t have the chance at Doral.