Peter Delmar: Next week they're staging the KLM Open in a place called Hilversumsche. What has it got to do with business, you wonder? Hang on a second, I'm getting there.

The KLM Open is what used to be called the Dutch Open. Like the South African Open, an airline pitched up with lots of money to sponsor the thing and put their name on it.

The KLM Open or the Dutch Open is not in the top league of golf tournaments but it is the national open championship of a country that has given the world some pretty good golfers (not that masses of them immediately spring to mind). To win the Dutch Open, you have to be an extremely good golfer. Recent past winners include Darren Clarke, Bernhard Langer and Lee Westwood. Next week our own Louis Oosthuizen (he of claret-jug fame) will be in the field trying to win the thing.

Anyhow, the organisers of the KLM Open would be missing a trick if they didn't make something out of the fact that 2010 is the 50th anniversary of the year that Papwa Sewgolum won. Especially considering how vociferously anti-apartheid the Dutch were. In actual fact, 1960 was the second time the Indian caddie from Durban had won the Dutch Open and he would go on to win it a third time, in 1964.

Because of apartheid, black sportsmen and women couldn't get national colours for the sports they excelled in. Then, after apartheid, many codes gave honorary colours to really good players who had been the wrong colour to get official colours. But the question will always remain not quite answered: just how good were some of these people? In the case of Sewgolum, we know that he was very, very good. Good enough to beat Gary Player, who everyone acknowledges as one of the world's greats.

That victory over Player was the spark for one of the most shameful episodes in apartheid sport's history. Because of the colour bar at the Durban Country Club (and every other whites-only golf course), Sewgolum had to change in the car park and received his 1965 Natal Open trophy outside in the rain.

The really very interesting website, southafrica.info has a charming profile on Sewgolum. Here's an extract: "Sewgolum was 'discovered' by a German, Graham Wulff, who lived in Howick in the Natal Midlands. Wulff was playing a round of golf with some colleagues one day when one of the men asked Sewgolum, who was caddying, which club he should use for an approach to the green. Sewgolum advised him to select either a six or seven iron.

"The man took his advice, but played a poor shot and took his frustration out on Sewgolum. Sewgolum didn't take kindly to the abuse; he put the man's bag down and began to walk away. Wulff called him back. He asked Sewgolum whether he would have used the same iron to reach the green. 'Yes,' the caddie replied. "He then placed a ball - something the caddies were strictly forbidden to do - and knocked his approach to within half a metre of the pin."

Now this column's research department has unearthed the fascinating truth about Wulff. He might have had a German name, but he was pretty much as Sefrican as most of us. His claim to fame is that he was a chemist who invented Oil of Olay in his Durban garage.

The story goes that after he'd concocted his cream, Wulff got out the Yellow Pages looking for an advertising agency, found one and formed a life-long friendship with the agency's account executive, Jack Lowe. Lowe and Wulff sold bucketloads of the stuff and, in 1959, they took Oil of Olay overseas.

What southafrica.info doesn't mention in its Sewgolum profile is that in 1959 Wulff lent his corporate plane to Sewgolum so that he could get to the Dutch Open. Wulff couldn't get the caddie who held his clubs completely the wrong way round membership at the country club, but he could put him on a plane and give him the chance to immortalise himself overseas.

Wulff died in 2008 at the great old age of 92. Not so Sewgolum who died a broken man at just 48, predeceasing his benefactor by 30 years. Olay (they call it Olaz in the Netherlands) is a multibillion-dollar brand now owned by Procter & Gamble.

How lekker to know that its inventor was a South African entrepreneur and, by every account, a thoroughly decent one at that.