Although he's still only 14, this GolfRSA prodigy has an old head on young shoulders and is showing he's up for what lies ahead

BY CLINTON VAN DER BERG 

The difference between the two visits, he reckons, came down to hours logged rather than any single swing repair job. His practice became more structured, his game more consistent, and, in his words, his 'mental game and golf IQ' sharpened in the 12 months between.

That mental game was tested properly in December, when he won his first national title at the Joburg Junior U15 Open by a single shot. Most 14-year-olds would admit to nerves walking the back nine with a one-shot cushion. Combrinck admits to them too, but handles them with a line of pure simplicity.

'I remember the pressure. I could definitely feel a bit of it. But I just told myself, I'm 10 in front, and just play my game.'

It's the kind of self-talk coaches spend years trying to instil in grown professionals.

Nowhere was that composure tested more than at Humewood, where Combrinck played his first Open amateur event, the SA Stroke Play Championship, in conditions he still describes vividly. The range on day one was a reminder of how far outside his comfort zone he'd stepped, full of players anywhere from 18 to 40 years old. But pairing with a couple of twenty-somethings in the first round did something unexpected.

'I played with a 25-year-old and a 28-year-old, really nice guys, and I thought, I think I can compete with these guys. And then the pressure was gone,' he says.

When the weather turned savage on the back nine, rain hammering down mid-round, he reverted to a simple survival mantra: make pars, because in that weather, pars are basically birdies.

There is a wind problem he's still chasing, too. Coastal courses like George and Cape Town, where gusts can strip four or five clubs off a shot, remain his toughest classroom. Trusting a 6-iron into a headwind from 100 metres, he admits, is 'quite difficult,' and it's clearly a lesson still being absorbed.

Behind the rankings and trophies sits a family operation. When the call came that he'd made the national squad, his father Rynardt told him the news with his sister sitting alongside, and Combrinck immediately rang his mother, Jenny, to share it.

Golf runs deeper than that single phone call, too. His father once competed in long drive and played in an SA Open, and introduced Aiden to the sport at 18-months-old with a set of plastic clubs swung across the tiles at home.

School now bends around tournament golf rather than the other way around, with a tutor centre replacing a conventional timetable and a week built around gym sessions, practice and schoolwork squeezed between. Despite sitting top of the national rankings, Combrinck insists he barely looks at them.

'You get to the first tee, and everybody has a chance to win.'

It's a line that could sound rehearsed from an adult, but from a youngster who's actually living it, it rings true.

He wants, eventually, to play college golf in the United States, a realistic and well-worn pathway for South Africa's best young amateurs. For now, though, the story is simpler than that: a boy who started hitting plastic balls at home before he could properly walk, and who, whatever the scoreboard says, just keeps telling himself he's way out in front.