danpetegoffe-woodDan joined MasterChef judge Pete Goffe-Wood and a celebrated group of former Springboks for the 2014 Battle of the Banks, an annual challenge that this year saw a cook-off added to the usual golf challenge that pitted Absa, FNB, Grindrod, Nedbank and Standard Bank against each other for a fiercely contested trophy.

Just ahead of the third season of MasterChef getting underway, Pete and Dan – a graduate of the celebrity chef’s Kitchen Cowboys cooking course – put non-golfers to a culinary test, attempting to recreate menu as accurately as possible. The cook-off ran adjacent to the golf challenge, which played out on Blair Atholl’s award-winning course, designed by Gary Player.

Amateur chefs and golfers then joined together for the prize-giving dinner, which included a question and answer session with Dan and the gathered rugby luminaries, who’d each played in one of the competing fourballs. Former Springbok coach Nick Mallett, commentary great Hugh Bladen, and Springboks Stefan Terblanche, Gary Botha, Wickus van Heerden, Hennie le Roux, Krynauw Otto, Jannie de Beer and Jaco van der Westhuyzen, looked ahead collectively to next year’s Rugby World Cup, at which MasterCard is an official sponsor. General consensus from the players was that the Springboks have a very good chance of winning the World Cup – the perfect note on which to end the MasterCard Battle of the Banks 2014.