The Forbidden Game

by Dan Washburn

  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.)