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‌Playing the Game

NOTICE FROM THE GENERAL OFFICE
OF THE STATE COUNCIL ON SUSPENSION OF BUILDING NEW GOLF COURSES

(No. 1 of the General Office of the State Council, promulgated on January 10, 2004)

“The people’s governments of all provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the Central Government, all ministries and commissions under and all institutions directly subordinate to the State Council:

“Since the reform and opening, golf courses have been developed rapidly in China, which played an active role in improving sport facilities and developing golf sport. However some serious problems have arisen in recent years. In some places, golf courses have been built excessively, taking up a large amount of land. In other places, the collective land of the peasants has been requisitioned and occupied in violation of the legal provisions. Unauthorized occupation of cultivated land has seriously damaged the benefits of the state and the peasants. Additionally, in some cases real estate development has been conducted surreptitiously under the guise of building golf courses. For the rational use and protection of land resources and to curb the blind construction of golf courses, the State Council hereby notifies relevant issues as follows:

“I. New golf course construction shall be suspended. From the date of issuance of this notice up to the time when new relevant policies come out, no local people’s government at any level and no institution under the State Council shall approve the construction of any new golf course project. Projects already in progress that were started without following the standard procedure of obtaining approval of planning, project initiation, land-use and assessment of environmental impact, etc., must stop construction immediately. All planned projects that have not yet started construction must be canceled. As for golf course projects with approved project proposals and feasibility study reports, but without approvals for land-use or project initiation, approvals for land-use or project initiation shall not be granted. For those projects with approval of planning, land-use and project initiation, but whose construction has not yet started, those projects must be abandoned.

“II. Cleaning up golf course projects that have been built or are being built. The local people’s government at all levels should immediately clean up and thoroughly inspect the golf course projects that have already been or are currently being built within their respective jurisdictions. The emphases of the cleanup and inspection lie in: whether the procedures for approval of golf course construction projects are complete, whether the construction project conforms to the overall planning on utilization of land and urban planning, whether the land use conforms to relevant laws, regulations and provisions stated in the ‘Notice of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council on Further Strengthening Land Administration and Earnestly Protecting Cultivated Land’ (No. 11 [1997] of the Central Committee of the CPC).

“III. Regulating the operation of completed golf courses. We should regulate the golf courses that have been built and put into operation based on clear and verified information, and in accordance with the relevant laws, regulations and policies of the state. The local people’s government at all levels shall take effective measures to strengthen the management of existing golf courses, to strictly control the consumption of water resources by golf courses and to supervise and implement the construction of peripheral environmental protection facilities, so as to ensure environmental protection in accordance with the relevant laws and regulations.

“IV. Strengthening supervision, inspection and guidance. The local people’s government at all levels should strengthen the cleaning-up and regulation of golf courses, where unauthorized construction and illegal use of land are to be punished by the law. The people’s government of all provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the Central Government should submit the results of the cleaning-up and inspection of golf courses to the State Council by February 15, 2004. The Development and Reform Commission shall, in joint efforts with the Ministry of Land and Resources, the Ministry of Construction, the State Administration of Environmental Protection, the General Administration of Sport, the State Tourism Administration and other departments, pay close attention to research and propose measures on regulating and guiding the healthy development of golf sport and construction of its facilities.”

*

This was not the first time China had banned the construction of golf courses. On May 26, 1995, the “Circular of the State Council Concerning the Strict Control of High-End Real Estate Development Projects” introduced a series of measures intended to curb what the government saw as a looming luxury real estate bubble. One of the document’s directives stated that the odd trifecta of “new golf courses, replica ancient cities and amusement parks” was to be “strictly forbidden.” But then, two years before that, Nicholas Kristof had written in the New York Times that, “Pressing ahead with its clampdown on runaway economic growth, the Chinese Government has banned new golf courses and announced that work on some luxury hotels and villas will be halted even though they are already partly built.” It was all beginning to sound rather familiar.

In fact, the 2004 ban was merely a rehash of a ban already in place, one that had gone largely ignored for more than a decade. Still, it signaled a shift. While the previous prohibitions had lumped golf courses in with a variety of other luxury developments, the 2004 directive targeted golf specifically. It appeared the government was ready to get serious. And this time, when news of the moratorium got out, “everything went cold,” Martin Moore said.

Well, not quite everything. This was China, after all. One course designer, who’d been working in China since the early ’90s, said his client told him to ignore the ban and carry on with his work. How could the client be so brazen? “My client was the central government,” the designer explained. The course was part of a resort in southern China known to be a holiday retreat for government officials. “I was working on a pet project of the central government, right while they were doing the moratorium,” the designer said. “They were talking out of both sides of their mouth.”

Few in the industry were spooked by the moratorium. According to Martin, there was an assumption there’d always be someplace building golf courses. Who cared about China? Martin himself had a few projects going forward in Thailand, and golf development in the United States was still “booming full speed.” “I didn’t think much of it,” he said. “I didn’t even think I’d make a career in China. I had no idea I would even do any more courses there.”

Building golf courses in China was a headache. Thailand was easy by comparison. So, in the years following the big job at Mission Hills, Martin’s focus turned elsewhere. He worked on Schmidt-Curley and Nicklaus jobs close to home, in California, Nevada, Montana and Nebraska. Business wasn’t going gangbusters – he never had more than a few jobs going at once – but it was steady. “I didn’t pay any attention to China,” he said. “I don’t think anyone in their right mind had any idea that China was going to boom. I thought it was all over. I wasn’t going back over to Asia, other than to just vacation.”

*

Zhou Xunshu started 2005 with a partial sense of satisfaction. Some months, once he tacked the coaching fees on to his base salary, he earned as much as seven or eight thousand yuan, a fortune to those he’d left behind back in Qixin village. He was living with the woman he loved, who loved him back. It didn’t hurt that he also thought she was the most beautiful employee at Dragon Lake Golf Club.

But it wasn’t enough. There were still pieces missing, some more jagged than others, and they stabbed at his backside like spurs, pushing him forward. First, there were his parents, with whom he’d had his differences. He’d always blamed the village for that. They are a product of their environment, he told himself, their harsh, antiquated environment. And he desperately wanted to get them out.

Then there was Zhou’s deep-seated desire to become a certified pro golfer. He knew it was just a title, but if golf was to be his profession, Zhou wanted to be considered among the top in his field. He wanted to compete with the best. Zhou considered himself an athlete, a fighter. He knew how quickly he had advanced in the three years he’d been playing regularly, and he was convinced that if given the opportunity, he could match the country’s top players stroke for stroke. It might take him a few years, but Zhou believed he could win a tournament in China, or, at the very least, finish in the top three, which would earn him his pro card. But there were only a handful of tournaments a year, and they were often poorly organized, with little advance warning.

When Zhou was feeling hopeless, there was someone he could look to for proof that being a successful Chinese professional golfer was actually feasible. For most of China’s recent history, one man had been known as the nation’s best: Zhang Lianwei. Zhang, like Zhou and many other first- and second-generation Chinese golfers, had stumbled into the game relatively late in life. In 1985, his javelin career over, he was working for the government sports bureau in Zhuhai, Guangdong province, painting lines on soccer fields, racking up snooker balls and doing other odd jobs. He was then presented with the opportunity of working at a new enterprise in the city – the second golf course in Communist China. For three years, Zhang caddied, mowed lawns, raked bunkers and practiced, practiced, practiced. Nearly twenty years later, in 2003, Zhang, who says he is “90 percent self-taught,” became the first Chinese player to win a European Tour event, fighting off Ernie Els to take the Singapore Masters. In 2004, he became the first Chinese player to tee up at the US Masters.

Zhang may have been a pioneer for golf in China, but he often felt the country did not give him the support he deserved. In April 2005, Zhang got emotional during a press conference following a round of the BMW Asian Open, an international tournament in Shanghai. He announced to the assembled media that he’d never received any state funding during his career; he’d had no domestic sponsors, either. “It’s such an ordeal playing golf in China over the years,” he said, his voice cracking. “It’s tough, it’s difficult, and it’s lonely. I know golf is not an Olympic sport, but I think the sports authorities should at least have shown some kind of support, like air tickets or something, to show their appreciation of my contributions.” Zhang went on to propose that the sport’s governing body in China allocate 10 to 20 percent of its budget to supporting golfers. “Over these twenty years, I have made a lot of money if you look at the checks,” he said. “But you don’t know how much money I have spent to support myself. My sponsorship all comes from foreign companies. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable being supported only by foreign brands. Wherever I go, people look at me and think I represent China. But they don’t know that I haven’t received support from China. With this opportunity, I call for sponsorship from Chinese enterprises.” Zhang closed by saying he felt he “had nothing to lose” by making the statement. His remarks came in response to a question about what life was like outside of China’s state-funded sports system. (Moments later, the same question was posed to twenty-six-year-old Liang Wenchong, then a rising star. Liang – perhaps calculating that he had more to lose than Zhang – declined to comment.)

Zhou knew it was possible. Zhang proved it. He just needed his own chance.

It was hard for Zhou to contain his excitement when he heard from a friend that a new professional golf tour geared exclusively toward domestic players like him was expected to launch during the summer of 2005. It was called the China Tour, and, a partnership between the China Golf Association and Singapore-based sports marketing firm World Sport Group, it was intended to be an answer to all of the big-ticket international golf tournaments that were popping up in China that rarely featured any Chinese players. “The future for golf in China – the real, long-term future – is not paying large sums to bring the world’s superstars to play here. It is creating our own stars,” the CGA’s vice president, Hu Jianguo, declared to the media.

The tour, reported to have $8 million in funding, planned to host four events that year, with $100,000 in prize money for each event – a huge amount for Chinese “pros,” even when split across the top players. “There was a need to find a place for China’s golfers,” the senior vice president of World Sport Group, Nick Mould, said. The goal was to make it possible for Chinese players to make a living at the game. The bigger picture was also important: the China Tour was “an investment in the future development of golf in China.” With a population of more than a billion, and fewer people playing golf in the United States and elsewhere, the industry desperately needed a new emerging market.

Zhou was intent on getting his piece of the action. He knew a limited number of spots would be open to pro coaches like him, and that the official entry form would be posted on the internet “some time in the future.” He wasn’t good with computers or the web. He didn’t understand how people could sit at a desk all day, and he had little patience for technology. Plus, he couldn’t type well – and his stunted education meant he had a limited knowledge of pinyin, the standard system of romanized spelling for transliterating and typing Chinese. In text messages he often got the characters wrong. Even his spoken Mandarin was sometimes less than perfect.

But Zhou could at least press “enter,” and for a chance at the China Tour, he was willing to put in a little screen time. Liu Yan helped him call up the web page that was supposed to have the registration form on it someday. Every day, without fail, Zhou would refresh the page – again and again – waiting for the download link to appear. When it finally did, he got goosebumps. He felt as though he’d won the lottery, and he hadn’t done anything yet. He and Liu Yan hurriedly filled out the form and submitted it.

His persistence paid off. He earned one of the final thirty spots in the China Tour. His competitive golf career was finally on the move.

*

In June 2005, Zhou and Liu Yan packed up and moved to Chongqing, the massive megalopolis in southwest China. Zhou had been a member of the management team at Dragon Lake for just one year, but it was long enough for him to realize the role – and perhaps the place – were not the right fit for him. He felt out of sorts. He butted heads with leadership. He found the people shrewd and calculating. Off the golf course, Zhou is not one to play games. “How can I get along with people in Guangzhou?” he asked. “I’m a very frank person, more like the people in Chongqing, I think. Things are more straightforward there. Simple and easy.”

Golf was just starting to catch on in Chongqing, and Zhou thought he’d have more of a chance being a big fish in a small pond, rather than trying to survive in Guangzhou’s crowded golf waters. He landed a job at the Haoyun Golf Club, a driving range in a new development area that had sprouted up around the Chongqing Olympic Sports Center, a sixty-thousand-seat stadium that opened in 2004 and had absolutely nothing to do with the 2008 Beijing Games. Liu Yan got a position working in Haoyun’s pro shop.

In many ways, Chongqing, famous for its hills, fog and spicy food, encapsulated China’s economic rise. Some called it “Chicago on the Yangtze,” a broad-shouldered gateway for the country’s relentless westward expansion. In another nod to Chicago, Chongqing was infamously corrupt – mafia-style gangs ran many aspects of the city, aided and abetted by crooked local cadres and a double-dealing police force. In 1997, Chongqing joined Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin as the only municipalities directly controlled by China’s central government. By far the largest of the four, Chongqing covered an area approximately the size of Austria.

Chongqing was a nation within a nation, a city on the move. When Zhou and Liu Yan arrived, it was the world’s fastest-growing urban center, and perhaps its largest construction site, as well. Its deputy mayor told the Urban Land Institute that Chongqing was “just like Shanghai, only ten years behind”; Travel + Leisure magazine had dubbed Chongqing the “city of the future.” In 2005, the city’s population was more than thirty million, with just under half of those people living in its urban core. Some estimates had Chongqing taking on as many as one million new urban residents each year.

The month Zhou and Liu Yan moved into their new home, the city’s first Wal-Mart opened. Later that year, Chongqing welcomed its second golf course, Sun Kingdom Golf Club, which the government said was part of a “green tourism” push in the southern part of the city. Zhou was heading where the action was, just as he had done when he boarded the train to Guangzhou a decade earlier.

Zhou played in two China Tour events within months of his move to Chongqing. In September he traveled to Kunming, and, fighting off his nerves, he made the cut, finishing thirty-sixth out of one hundred or so golfers. His score was relatively high – he didn’t shoot par in any round – but so were the scores of all the players finishing outside the top ten. That wasn’t surprising in a country with only two decades of golf under its belt.

Then, in November, he made his way to Hainan island. He’d heard that there were great courses there, and rumors that there were many more to come. Again, he made the cut, this time finishing thirty-seventh. His prize money didn’t even cover his travel expenses. But Zhou didn’t care. He was in the game.

*

Martin Moore’s vacation from Asia ended much sooner than he had expected. In 2006, Ken Chu and Mission Hills were eager to make history again, this time in Yunnan province, a site not too far from Spring City, the course that had first brought Martin to China a decade earlier. On this occasion, the goal was even more audacious: twelve courses, built simultaneously on a tough site, but to be completed in a “generous” thirty-six months. Supposed moratorium on golf course construction be damned.

Martin knew from past experience that it was useless telling Ken Chu his plans were quixotic. So he tried to figure out a way to make them happen. He assembled another A-team of golf course builders, but this time he recruited one twice the size as the crew that made history building Mission Hills in Shenzhen. Fifteen shapers. Five project managers. They all adjusted their schedules to take part in the biggest golf undertaking anyone had ever heard of. Some had turned down other jobs to work at Ken Chu’s beck and call. And Martin was beginning to admit that the scope of the project had him “freaking out.”

He was careful to get everything in place, the best you ever could in China, so the project could get off to a solid start. He had visited the site four times. He had the construction calendar carefully mapped out. He asked some members of the team to arrive in Kunming early so they could get used to life in China. He had done everything that could be done.

And then it was announced that twelve courses had become eight.

And then the project was on hold.

And then it was completely canceled.

The local government had got cold feet. The project was so big, so bold, it was bound to show up on Beijing’s radar. They couldn’t risk the central government cracking down on them.

Martin went to the members of his A-team and asked if they had a plan B. “I lost money, but more importantly I lost face,” he said.

The experience taught Martin valuable lessons about operating in China’s legal gray areas: Make sure your employees know everything can go belly-up at any moment. Never guarantee anything.

Later that year, Martin started to get “the vibes.” Business in the United States was cooling down, and the China market was perking up, despite the supposed moratorium on golf course construction. In the United States, the unprecedented golf course boom – which had peaked with nearly four hundred new courses built in 2000, and well more than sixteen thousand courses in total – was coming to an end. Golf course openings and golf participation were declining sharply. In fact, in 2006 golf course closures in the United States (146) outnumbered golf course openings (119.5) for the first time in sixty years.

Some in the industry tried to paint the statistics as good news, saying it was just an expected leveling-out after years of overbuilding. For too long the US golf scene had been spurred more by the desire to sell country-club housing than by any increase in demand for the sport. It was simply golf Darwinism, they argued: weaker courses were closing, and golfers in the long run would be better off with a smaller number of higher-quality places to play. But that logic, while perhaps accurate, did little to ease the concerns of those, like Martin, who made their living building golf courses.

Which explains why Martin was so excited when, in October 2006, he started hearing from developers in China again. First, it was a lead about a course in the mountains. Two months later, it was a course along a beach. The projects couldn’t have been more different, but they shared one thing in common: they were both located in Hainan. Martin didn’t read too much into it. He was just happy that, somewhere on the planet, there were jobs to be chased – and that China’s supposed golf course moratorium was apparently lacking in muscle.

A half a year later, his suspicions were confirmed by perhaps the most incredible bit of news Martin had ever heard coming out of the Mission Hills empire.

*

“You have to think like a businessman,” Zhou Xunshu said. “Itemize everything.”

But a quick look at his books would suggest the business side of Zhou’s competitive golf career was, to put it simply, failing.

By a friendly accounting, Zhou estimated he had lost nearly 20,000 yuan playing on the China Tour in 2006. Although he made the cut in four of the six tournaments, he had never placed better than twenty-first, and never earned more than 10,800 yuan ($1,350). He had finished on average twenty-six strokes behind a tournament’s winner – a mountain in golf numbers. With tournaments taking place in all corners of China, his travel expenses trumped his winnings. If the trend continued, “I try to find more students,” Zhou said, matter-of-factly.

As a golf instructor, Zhou’s methods – specifically how he charged for lessons – might, if he were lucky, help him break even. He rarely charged by the hour. Instead, he’d assess your abilities and ask you your goals. Then he’d quote you a lump sum, and he’d be your coach until you attained those goals. “That way, I am less bothered and I don’t need to keep track of how many hours and how many lessons,” he said. “My price may be a little bit high, but I don’t want too many students. I just want several dedicated students.” One student paid Zhou ten thousand yuan, and once he starting shooting in the 70s, he was so happy with the results that he gave Zhou another thirty thousand yuan on top of it.

So why even bother competing, since the odds were so surely stacked against him? He was too old to be starting an athletic career. He had no sponsors, no coach and a mounting deficit. “Even if I lose, I want to join the competition,” Zhou explained, “because I want to have something to look back on when I quit playing. I want to be able to tell people, ‘Look, I played in that tournament against the best in China.’” But he knew he needed some pragmatic goals for the coming year. He wanted to finish 2007 ranked in the top twelve on the overall China Golf Association money list. That would earn him his “professional player” classification. “And then I can attract some sponsors,” he said. “Being a certified pro golfer is the highest honor in golf in China, and once that happens, sponsors will find you and sign a contract with you.”

If Zhou were to finish near the top of a tournament or two, there was little doubt in his mind what he’d put the winnings toward. He wanted to buy an apartment, so he and Liu Yan could start a family. And he felt the pressure to buy soon – property prices in Chongqing, like many cities in China, were rising fast.

Only a handful of Chinese golfers had traditional sponsorships – money from a major brand in exchange for using a product or wearing a logo – like those enjoyed by golfers in the United States or Europe. In China, usually a sponsorship came in the form of free gear or clubs, but no money. Cash sponsorships would come from a golf course that employed the golfer, or simply a rich businessman who happened to take a liking to a certain player. Most of these sponsorships covered only the golfer’s tournament travel expenses, maybe 80,000 to 160,000 yuan a year. That was a drop in the bucket for a wealthy business owner, but a potentially career-changing sum for someone like Zhou, desperate to have his mind focused on golf and not the bottom line. “If I could find someone to support me financially, my performance will improve in a straight line,” he said, pointing his finger up and to the right.

Sponsorship or no, almost all the golfers on the tournament circuit needed a second job to survive. They also had to be conscious of every yuan they spent. For the season opener of the 2007 China Tour in Nanjing, Zhou had traveled to the tournament via a two-and-a-half-day train ride. Had he traveled by plane, he wouldn’t have been able to bring his own caddie, a luxury for most Chinese golfers, who usually use a young female caddie assigned to them by the course. He also never stayed at the official tournament hotel. He rarely ate his meals at the clubhouse restaurant; too expensive. “This place is very cheap, right?” he would say after dinner in a town or village outside the golf course grounds. “Four of us can eat for the same amount one person would pay at the clubhouse.” Little victories like this seemed to keep him going.

Zhou was not the only one. In the days leading up to tournaments, a separate competition would inevitably break out among the players – who could find the cheapest hotel? Word would spread around the practice green that one golfer found a room somewhere for thirty yuan a night, including hot water, and dozens of other golfers may try to follow him to the same place that evening. It was not uncommon for Zhou to change hotels one or two times in the lead-up to an event. Wasn’t this distracting? “It’s no problem,” he always said. “I only have one bag. I just put it on my back and go.”

When playing with one eye on the bank balance, the seemingly mundane could turn into migraines. For example, in the days leading up to the Shanghai leg of the China Tour – which was about thirty-seven miles to the west in Jiangsu province, since no Shanghai course wanted to give up a week of business for the domestic golf tour – Zhou noticed that the sole from one of his Nike golf shoes had come unglued, so much so that it flapped when he walked. For most pro golfers this would be no problem. Just go back to the hotel and unbox a new pair. But these were the only golf shoes Zhou had with him on this trip. He wore them off the course, as well.

“These were one thousand yuan,” he noted ruefully. “They’re not fake.”

The concern on Zhou’s face was obvious. He couldn’t afford a new pair of shoes. The tournament started the following day. How was he going to compete?

The small, country towns that bordered most Chinese golf courses – the places where Zhou usually stayed during tournaments – may have been ugly and boring, dirty and unrefined, but they featured an abundance of practical conveniences unavailable to those who paid the extra cash for the official tournament hotel. Out on the street, he found a cobbler, an old man sitting on a stool, wearing an apron, ready and willing to put his shoes back together – although the man may have never dealt with golf shoes before. Zhou left his shoes with the man, who assured him he’d have them fixed and ready for action by the time Zhou got back from dinner.

When Zhou returned, the cobbler was nowhere to be found. A vendor nearby said the shoe repairman wouldn’t return until 6 a.m. Zhou started to get anxious. He headed back to his hotel, wondering what he’d do if he couldn’t find the cobbler in the morning.

The man at the front desk stopped Zhou and said, “I think these are yours.” He handed Zhou a plastic bag containing his mended shoes. “The old man wanted to make sure you got these tonight. You can leave his payment with me.”

“How much is it?” Zhou asked, relieved.

Zhou’s tournament was saved for two yuan.

“My girlfriend’s mother always asks me how much money I make, and whether I can afford to buy an apartment or car,” he said during that year’s tour. “I’m honest with her and tell her I will try my best. But anyway, it’s free love. My girlfriend has the right to leave me if I don’t have enough money for her.”

Money, Zhou said, was not really the main thing that concerned Liu Yan’s mother. “Her real worry is that we have been together three years and we aren’t married yet.”

*

The Omega China Tour symbolized just how new the game of golf was to China. Each stop on the tour came with a total purse of only 800,000 yuan, or $100,000 dollars, a paltry amount by the standards of the PGA Tour, but far more than Chinese golfers had seen before. The prize money helped recruit a ragtag group of fresh-faced golf pros.

There was Zhou, of course. His rise from farmer to security guard, to obscure competitive golfer, mirrored the random trajectories of his competitors on the Chinese golf circuit. Many had spent their formative years swinging a harvesting sickle, not a 6 iron, out in the provinces. For most, their first job working at a golf course or a driving range had just been a convenient way to make money, an attractive alternative to some other form of menial labor. At one of the fancy pre-tournament welcome meals thrown by a sponsor, a Chinese guest, watching the way the golfers attacked their bowls of rice, whispered, “They eat like farmers!” At heart they remained, as one first-generation Chinese pro golfer put it, “blue collar workers.”

There was Liu Anda, who was working as a sushi chef in Dalian, a city in northeast China, when a regular customer who happened to be a Japanese golf coach persuaded him to come and work at a new driving range. Until then, Liu, who grew up in a small farming village, had never heard of golf. “After I finished my work duties, I watched them on the driving range, and I said to myself, ‘That doesn’t look hard at all,’” Liu recalled. “I picked up a 7 iron and took a swing. The ball went very far. Then I hit about five or six more balls and I did not miss. All of them went very far. I asked the Japanese coach, ‘I can support my family doing this?’ He said, ‘Yes.’” Two years later Liu had been hired as the head pro at Tiger Beach Golf Links, in Shandong province. He owned a small Chinese barbecue restaurant on the side. He believed his golf career wasn’t a stroke of luck, but a work of fate. “I am a Christian and I believe in God. He led me to golf,” he said.

Another of Zhou’s competitors was Wu Kangchun, who grew up in Zhuhai, in southern China, close to one of the early golf courses of the Communist era. He remembered all the lost golf balls he collected in the hills as a child. To make some extra money for the family, he would sell the balls back to the course. “Back then, I did not know golf,” Wu said. “I only knew the balls.” By chance, another golf course went up right beside his village, and his sister got a job there as caddie master. His older brother worked there, too. Told there was a Singaporean coach looking to train young golfers, he decided to leave school at seventeen to sign up. “I was bad at school, so it didn’t make that much difference if I kept studying,” he said. “There weren’t many other ways out for me.” Most of his income didn’t come from playing, however; it came from gambling on golf matches with local businessmen.

Zhou often also met Chen Xiaoma on the circuit. Chen’s given name, Xiaoma, means “pony,” and he came from the countryside – from the age of ten until he was twenty, he worked in his family’s rice fields along the Yangtze. Tired of that hard living, he asked his uncle to help him find a salaried job. Chen’s uncle, the only relative with a college education, was an engineer who worked in the construction of golf courses. As with everyone else on the China Tour, Chen had not heard of the sport, but he thought that he might get a good job at a course, as a laborer. Instead, he ended up working at a driving range. “At first I thought it was a pretty funny game, and that only big bosses would come and play,” Chen said. “We weren’t busy on weekdays, and that is when I got a chance to play.”

Some had a more athletic, more worldly, background. The son of an army cook, Yuan Tian had already worn many different hats by the time he was twenty-five. At age eleven, he had enrolled in martial arts school because he wanted to be the next Bruce Lee. At the age of twelve, he joined a touring acrobatic stunt motorcycling troupe called the Flying Dragons. (His parents made him quit when he was fifteen, after too many broken bones.) He spent five years doing odd jobs – stints as an electrician and as the man who slaughters oxen no longer of use to farmers – before he ended up in southern China at an aunt’s home that just happened to be near a golf course whose employees just happened to be on strike. Soon he talked his way into a job as a golf instructor, despite having never played the game. Three years later he was teeing up in his first China Tour event. “I have always been good at sports,” he explained, “but I also worked very hard. I’d play from morning until night, only taking breaks for lunch and dinner.” He was also one of the China Tour’s flashiest players. At each tournament in 2007 he arrived with his hair dyed a different color.

After graduating from university and going to work for his father’s construction company, Wu Weihuang traded his fifteen-year regimen of morning wushu for rounds of golf. “I wanted to grow my business, and I knew wealthy and well-connected people played golf,” Wu said. “I never thought I would become a pro golfer. But after playing for seven months, I was shooting in the 70s. In two years, I was the best golfer in the city.” Wu, like most of his peers, was self-taught, and it showed. His swing was stiff and stabby, reminiscent of a hockey slap shot. He tended to choke the shaft, swinging with such fury that all the muscles on his slight but sinewy frame would ripple and pop. But “homemade” was good enough to go pro – good enough, in fact, to leave the construction business to his father and start a golf equipment company.

One of the strongest men on tour, Qi Zengfa, had been a world-class youth rower in China’s state-funded sports machine before quitting at the age of eighteen. A couple of years later, in the late 1980s, he had learned that a new golf course in Shanghai was looking to hire and train out-of-work athletes. “I had never seen a golf ball or club before,” Qi said. “When I left rowing, a body-building coach saw me and my build and asked me to become a body-builder. But ever since I was a kid, I always liked ball games, so I went with golf.” In 1994 he became one of the first Chinese golfers to achieve “pro” status.

And finally, there was Xiao Zhijin, who had worked as an entertainment manager at a hotel on Hainan island. He was intrigued when his bosses bought an indoor golf simulator for the hotel’s guests to use. It was his first introduction to golf, and he soon discovered he had a knack for the sport, or, at least, the computer-simulated version of it. Before long, no one at the hotel, guest or employee, could beat him. Over one of those rounds of simulated golf, a customer – the owner of a golf course in northeast China – offered to double Xiao’s pay if he’d be willing to pack up and move to become his course’s caddie master. Xiao accepted the offer, and when he arrived at his new place of employment, it was the first time he had seen a real golf course. Though, soon enough, Hainan island would have its share of them.

With these men on board, it was clear the China Tour had soul. The game was so young in China – nine years younger than Tiger Woods, in fact – that the players lacked pretense. Golf was so unpopular in China that those who ground away at the game for a living had yet to assume the affectations usually associated with professional athletes elsewhere in the world. China Tour golfers drank. They smoked. They cursed. They said what was on their mind. They came from a far different rung on the social ladder than the elites who had thus far monopolized the country’s courses.

A small number of players were managing to cash in, but most were forced to hold down second jobs. At the tournaments, where a finish outside the top twenty meant a player probably wouldn’t be able to cover his expenses for the week, a fraternity atmosphere prevailed. Golfers shared rooms at the cheap hotels and crowded tables at the cheap restaurants. They’d smoke cigarettes and down tall bottles of cold local beer; if it looked as though they were going to miss the cut, then several shots of that foul Chinese firewater, baijiu, were ordered. While most players got serious once they hit the course, tournament life away from the game had the feel of an extended boys’ night out.

One Friday night, in the middle of one of the 800,000-yuan tournaments, China’s golf trailblazer Zhang Lianwei threw himself a forty-second birthday bash in the clubhouse restaurant. Most of the other players attended. At the press conference earlier that day Zhang had closed by saying, “Come to my party and drink alcohol. If you don’t drink alcohol, drink tea.” Zhang himself opted for the alcohol, again and again, and he took the stage to perform several karaoke songs in Cantonese until very late in the evening. With a slight hangover, Zhang went on to win the tournament by two strokes.

Everything was a bit rough around the edges. In its own way, the China Tour, and the men who toiled along its route, shared much with the early days of professional golf in other parts of the world, even places like the United Kingdom, where golf had gone through its growing pains more than a century before. Take, for instance, this passage from Mark Frost’s The Greatest Game Ever Played, which describes the pro golf scene in late nineteenth-century Britain. Change a couple words here and there, and it’s not too far from the recent situation in China:

…professional golfers were considered common laborers in Britain, sons of the working class, admired for their playing or teaching skills but in the narrowed eyes of the gentry predisposed to drinking binges and petty larceny. Professionals who harbored any hope of advancement in the game all lived an itinerant existence, traveling by third-class rail and hitching rides on farm wagons to remote tournament sites, bunking in cheap rooming houses, eating common meals, and closing the local pubs. They occupied a lowly rung on the social ladder shared by nomadic music-hall performers, a station somewhere between traveling salesman and migrant farmworker. Most were rough characters, poorly educated if at all, with thick regional accents that grated on a gentleman’s ear. Their legendary weakness for the demon rum appears to have been more than rumor, and they weren’t sipping single malt scotch; many of them brewed their own backwoods moonshine, bottles of snake venom with a razor-blade chaser.

There was no petty larceny on the China Tour, but the alcohol did flow. Indeed, Zhou often drank in the days leading up to a tournament. He also drank in the days during the tournament. One could say that beer seemed to be an integral part of his training regimen. He drank when he played well. He drank when he played poorly. He rarely drank to excess, but he’d enjoy a couple beers with dinner, and then one or two more before bed. (The one time Zhou sat at a table where red wine was served, he mixed it with Sprite in an attempt to make it more palatable.)

Beer, Zhou said, was a necessary ingredient to a good night’s sleep. “The night before last I couldn’t sleep because I did not drink any beer that night,” he said during one tournament. “I need alcohol to relax.” Another time, he complained of a restless night, this time not because he didn’t consume any beer, but because the beers he drank only had a 2.8 percent alcohol content. The next night, when a call to the front desk confirmed the hotel had cold beers available for purchase, he celebrated like it was Christmas. When the bottles arrived at his door, he inspected the labels carefully. The brand was Sedrin, and the alcohol content was 3.6 percent. These would do.

“He pijiu, hao shuijiao,” Zhou said with a smile as he opened his first bottle. “Drink beer, sleep well.” A little less than an hour later, he was snoring, the TV remote control still in his hand.

*

Zhou was friendly and polite with many of his fellow players, but he rarely let anyone get close. He admitted to being a bit of an introvert, and on tour he often appeared to be a loner, but he had cultivated a reputation for being honest and straightforward. The worst thing anyone said about him was that he was the loudest snorer on the China Tour.

Secretly, Zhou found most golfers on the tour to be arrogant or “putting on airs.” He wasn’t too concerned with clothing, and was perturbed by golfers who seemed to treat the China Tour as a fashion show. “If it looks okay and is comfortable, that’s enough,” he said. “I do not need to think about what to wear or how to dress to attract the camera everyday. Not necessary!”

He had personal grudges against several other players, some of whom he felt were two-faced, and others he believed had slighted him in some way. He didn’t always like how they passed time after the day’s play had ended, either. At one tournament, when a fellow golfer asked Zhou if he wanted to go into town with him to get a massage, Zhou politely declined. After the other golfer left, Zhou said, “Frankly speaking, he is going out to find a prostitute, and that is why I never go with those golfers, no matter where they say they are going. In a rural town like this, it is hard to find a real massage parlor, because only bosses go to places like that. Here there are only farmers.”

Zhou felt he had more in common with those farmers, or with the workers picking weeds on the course. “I like pure, simple people,” he said. And while Zhou knew many golfers on the tour had also grown up poor, he was convinced none of them had grown up as poor as he had. None of their paths to golf was as wild and random as his was. He also suspected that approximately 90 percent of the China Tour’s golfers had finagled some kind of external financial support, whereas he was struggling to make ends meet.

He had a chip on his shoulder. And it was sizable.

Admittedly, Zhou had made little effort to find a sponsor. He was not a good salesman, especially if selling himself. He didn’t believe in boasting, and didn’t like listening to others do it, either. He wanted to be recognized for his actions, not his words. “I don’t know how to ask people to sponsor me,” Zhou said. “It feels just like begging people for money. I can’t do that.”