China's revolution

By Tim Maitland Last updated: 2nd November 2009

It depends how old you were and where you were living as to what exactly rocked your world in 1984.

Twenty five years ago Michael Jackson was at the height of his powers winning a record eight Grammy awards including best record "Beat It" and Album of the Year "Thriller" and Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean scored 12 perfect 6.0 marks for their interpretation of Ravel's Bolero in the Sarajevo Winter Olympics.

In sport, China remembers 1984 as the year of their return to the Olympic family, shooter Xu Haifeng claiming their first ever gold medal at the Los Angeles Games and the team returning to a heroes' welcome with a total of 15 gold medals that surpassed their wildest dreams.

And anyone in the region at the time would certainly recall the United Kingdom and the People's Republic of China signing the initial agreement to return Hong Kong to China.

But, wherever you were, the opening of Chung Shan Hot Springs Golf Club roughly 80 kilometres across the Pearl River Estuary from Hong Kong would not have registered as an event of any great global importance.

Yet, when Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson join the world's superstars teeing off in the WGC-HSBC Champions, the first World Golf Championships event to be staged in Asia, at Sheshan International Golf Club in Shanghai this week, the 25th anniversary of China's first modern golf club takes on a new significance.

In less than a third of the average human's lifespan China will go from golf-free to WGC.

It's hard to truly capture in words just how far and how fast Chinese golf has developed. The fact that Arnold Palmer - the designer of that first modern course and a man so famous in his playing days that, like Elvis Presley, he was known simply as "The King" - went completely unrecognized doesn't begin to tell the story.

However, Palmer's tale of one of his early visits to the site of Hong Kong billionaire Henry Fok's groundbreaking course, goes some way to creating the contrast with today's step up to the WGC. In his memoires the seven-time Major winner recalls offering a golf ball as a gift to one of the workers.

"He stared at it for a few moments, then tried to take a bite out of the cover," Palmer wrote.

"When I explained through an interpreter that this ball would be used to play the course (he) was building, his eyes lit up and he took the ball from me as if I'd just presented him with the crown jewels of China."

"To call the experience eye-opening would be a gross understatement," Palmer says.

"By our initial calculations we would move around four hundred thousand yards of dirt, not a huge amount by today's course design standards but still a healthy earth-moving project. What I didn't know at the time was that every ounce of dirt and rock would be moved by hand. The only bulldozer on that the project was a WW1-vintage machine that belonged in the Smithsonian (museums). The engine still worked, but nothing else moved, so for weeks thousands of Chinese workers moved the better half of a half-million yards of soil with shovels and burlap sacks."

China has moved metaphorical mountains to get from that point, the opening of the first golf course, to where Chinese golf is today with several hundred courses, estimates for the current number suggest over 500.

Many, like the HSBC Champions host venue Sheshan and Spring City in Kunming, which were both judged to be in Golf Digest's "100 Greatest Courses Outside the US" this year, are of the highest quality imaginable.

The growth of tournament growth and China's tournament professionals has also been remarkable, considering that the first pros weren't ordained until 1994 when a small handful of men, including Zheng Wengen and John Xiao Chenghan, became the first to pass the Chinese Golf Association's newly-created exam.

Xiao was a product of Henry Fok's programme to unearth the first generation of Chinese talent, which would later produce China's current number one Liang Wenchong. Invited to the as yet unopened course with his school, he struck his first balls on Chung Shan's driving range, but recalls by the time he took the historic exam in 1994 the idea that China would one day host a tournament with the status of a World Golf Championships event was unthinkable.

"It was unimaginable at that time. It was all so new to us. At that time we had little idea what it all was," Xiao says.

Although the pro-am event staged at Chung Shan in January of 1986 is considered within China to be the first international golf tournament staged there, what most in the golf industry would consider to be true international golf didn't arrive until the first Volvo China Open was staged at the Beijing International Golf Club in 1995. That Cheng Jun should become the first winner of an international event by lifting (and infamously dropping) that crystal trophy just two years later is near-miraculous considering the embryonic state of golf coaching and teaching at that time.

"There was no coach, no magazines, no videos, no anything!" laughs Jackie Zhang Jun, now a 36-year-old teaching pro at the Jack Nicklaus designed Nanhu Golf and Country Club in Guangzhou.

Back then, like all of his contemporaries and many who have followed him since into making their living from the sport, Zhang had discovered the sport by accident when he took up a job selling memberships in his early twenties for the Golden Lake Golf Club in the capital of Guangdong province.

Long after Korea's "KJ" Choi Kyung-Ju had taught himself to play by copying a Korean translation of Jack Nicklaus's book Golf My Way, information or help to improve was hard to come by for China's first generation of home-made golfers.

"Only in Shenzhen and other places close to Hong Kong could you learn things at golf clinics with Hong Kong golf coaches. If you were further away like me, or in places like Beijing, there were no foreigners coaching. We learned from watching TV in sports bars. We learned from watching Tiger Woods, Ernie Els and Davis Love and anyone else we could see playing on TV. If our swing was wrong, there was no-one to tell us what was wrong or how to put it right. We were blind."

Zhang says it was only around nine years ago that Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysian coaches started appearing in the Guangzhou area. Meanwhile he has his tickets booked to spend the week at the WGC-HSBC Champions watching Tiger and Phil Mickelson lead the highest-quality field in Asia and gives a wonderful insight into just how unlikely this moment must have seemed as recently as 2001 when Tiger made his first visit to China - a challenge event at Mission Hills in Zhang's native province.

"When Tiger came to China I gave up a good job in Shanghai; a really good job as a golf director," Zhang explains.

"I said to my boss "goodbye sir!". I went back to Guangzhou. I thought it would be my only chance to see Tiger in China. Until then I had thought I would only ever see him on TV and then I had what I felt was my only chance to see him in real life so I gave up my job! Tiger is my hero and golf is an important part of my life."

When one considers how far China has evolved its golf industry in such a short period of time, the only thing that is more stunning is thinking what will happen in the next 25 years, especially now that Olympic status takes golf right into the mainstream of sport in the Middle Kingdom.

"What China will achieve in golf now that the sport is part of the Olympic movement is almost beyond imagination. We know it's going to have an exponential effect on the HSBC China Junior Golf Program and we feel privileged to be playing such a core role in developing and growing a sustainable grassroots structure and nurturing the future generations of China's golfers," explained Giles Morgan, HSBC Group Head of Sponsorship.

"Having said that, it still stuns me to consider how far China has come in such a small period of time. It's a testament, not only to the golf industry, but also to the overall growth and development of China as a nation. I wonder whether we will ever see golf explode in the same way, because I'm not sure we will ever see another country evolve in such a rapid and dramatic fashion."