The Forbidden Game

by Dan Washburn

  The village’s second TV arrived the following year. “It was color,” Wang said.

  *

  Martin Moore was never supposed to end up in China. That wasn’t the plan – if there was a plan at all. He knew nothing about the place. He could name Beijing, maybe Shanghai, but that was it. He’d never traveled west of the Mississippi River, and he was fine with that, so long as there were golf courses to build and cold beers to drink.

  By his own admission, he was “single, crazy, stupid and wild.” Here he was in sunny Florida during the boom-boom mid-’80s, five years out of high school and spending all his time thinking about greens and fairways, bunkers and rough. He had landed a job with PGA Tour pro and golf architect Mark McCumber, helping to build courses throughout the South, and it seemed they couldn’t build them fast enough. The job suited Martin well. He loved the outdoors, hated working in an office, and golf was pretty much the only thing he knew – even as a kid, his summer jobs had always been at courses in his hometown, Fort Myers. He had worked his way up with McCumber, and now he was driving tractors and bulldozers, becoming trusted enough to put the finishing touches on some holes. He had worked in course maintenance before, but he “fell in love with” the construction side of things. It was partly the machismo required – all the big machines, the moving of earth – but he was also drawn to the artistic side of the job. The open acreage of a course was the ultimate blank canvas, and the before-and-after, the molding of the landscape to match the architect’s drawings, lit a fire inside Martin. True, he also liked living out of a suitcase, traveling from project to project. The pay was good, too, especially for someone in his early twenties, and so was the partying. As good as any trader up on Wall Street, Martin and his colleagues worked hard and played harder. The cliché nearly killed him.

  He was on the waiting list to be enrolled at Lake City Community College in northern Florida, near the Georgia border. The school was known as “the Harvard of the golf industry” for its ability to churn out top-notch golf course superintendents. Martin, in fact, had been on the waiting list for more than three years, a detail he had nearly forgotten by the time the school called him in early 1986 to tell him he’d been accepted into their Golf Course Operations and Landscape Technology program, and that he could start studying in the autumn. His father, aware his son could be heading down a dangerous path, pressured him to go. But by that point, Martin wasn’t sure what good it would do him. He already had several years of real-world experience in an industry he knew he loved, and he was enjoying himself, perhaps too much. “I was in another world, and didn’t have any intention of going to school,” Martin said. “But my father was getting all over my shit.”

  Martin was working a job in Green Cove Springs, Florida, south of Jacksonville, when he heard from Lake City. He blew off the school. He blew off his father. He focused on the job. “In the construction industry, we work all day busting our butts,” Martin said. “And after work, someone would buy a case of beer.” It was at one of those after-work happy hours that Martin had more beers than he should have. And then he went to a bar and had a few more. This wouldn’t have been too big an issue – it wasn’t the first time Martin had too much to drink – but Martin was driving that night. He drove a brown 1982 Dodge Ram van with a carpeted interior. His father had bought it for him two months earlier, partly to congratulate him for getting into Lake City, and partly to convince him to go.

  Martin was living at a golf course in Middleburg, about fifteen miles away from Green Cove Springs along a narrow two-lane country road. It was pitch black, but that’s no excuse. Truth is, Martin was unfit to drive in any conditions. The story he’d tell the police later that night was a little different, but if we’re being honest Martin simply drove off the side of the road. He caught himself drifting right, and then overcorrected with a hard left turn and dropped hard, nose first, into a ditch on the side of the road. Martin had a fifty-pound metal Craftsman toolbox in the back, and at the point of impact it buzzed past his right ear and went straight out the windshield. “It’s pretty amazing that I didn’t get killed,” said Martin. “I think that was the wake-up call. I was lucky to be alive.”

  Lucky indeed. Martin was not wearing his seatbelt, and the van was considered totaled, but he was able to open the driver’s side door and walk away from the accident. Other than a bloody forehead from where his head smacked the steering wheel, he was okay. He went to work the following morning – although he had to find a ride, of course.

  He felt he had to prove something to his father, who, before the accident, had always been willing to pay Martin’s way through school – but no longer. So Martin enrolled at Lake City, taking classes Monday through Thursday and then working thirty-five to forty hours from Friday through Sunday building courses for Mark McCumber to pay his tuition bill. “It was tough,” Martin said, “but I got straight As in college. Everybody copied my shit. I’d already lived my stupid, crazy life. I was more responsible and disciplined.”

  Martin continued working for McCumber, now as a project manager, after graduating from Lake City in 1988. And he was happy. He liked the work, and the industry was booming. In 1989, 267 new golf courses opened in the United States, by far the highest number since the National Golf Federation started keeping track in 1985, and the graph would continue to trend sharply upwards for the next decade. “There was no indication I would ever see anywhere other than America at that stage,” Martin said. But in 1989 a conversation with an old friend got Martin an interview with one of the biggest names in the industry: Nicklaus Design, founded by Jack Nicklaus. Martin felt he already had his “dream job” with McCumber, but thought he should at least hear what Nicklaus had to say. He was a sports legend, and had been a prolific course designer since he began mapping out holes in the late 1960s. “I had no intention of working there,” Martin said. “But why not take a free flight and go down there and talk?” “Down there” was North Palm Beach, Florida, home of the recently completed Golden Bear Plaza, a multi-million-dollar office complex that bore Nicklaus’ nickname and housed his business empire. Of course, Martin was impressed.

  He was also somewhat taken aback by their offer. They wanted him to manage one of their golf course construction projects – in Thailand.

  “It was pretty good money,” Martin said. “And I was single, twenty-seven years old, so it sure made me think. I flew back the next day and went back to my other job, but the offer had my mind going a mile a minute.”

  A week after his interview, he called the Nicklaus offices and accepted the job.

  *

  It was early 1990, and about as far from a direct flight as you can get. Martin was clutching his first ever passport as he boarded the Delta plane in Fort Myers, Florida. Next stop, Atlanta. Then Portland. Then Seoul. And then finally, Bangkok. With each new city, Martin saw more and more Asian faces on his flights, and the reality of his big move began to set in.

  He landed at one in the morning, yet the Bangkok airport was packed. He was told someone would pick him up at the airport, but he didn’t see his name written on any of the signs being held up by the crowd in the arrivals area. He was tired, confused and intimidated. He couldn’t understand what people were saying to him. They couldn’t understand what he said in return. “I didn’t know what was going on,” Martin said. “I was freaking out.” Two anxious hours later, his driver arrived.

  He was taken to a hotel in the heart of Bangkok and told to await further instructions. By then, it was close to four in the morning, but he couldn’t sleep. He lay on his plank-hard mattress, trying to relax, wondering what he’d got himself into.

  At 7:30 a.m., there was a knock on Martin’s door. When Martin answered, a young man smiled and said, “Khun Suraphan would like to see you in his office now.”

  He didn’t stay long at the office, which was very close to the hotel, in an old building behind the Golden Buddha Temple. Soon he was escorted to an old but well-maintained Jaguar, and driven north, be
yond the city limits. And the driver kept driving and driving. Martin’s palms began to sweat. Where were they going?

  “I know someone told me the job was north of Bangkok, but I never thought I’d be so far out in the sticks,” Martin said. “I didn’t have any idea. I thought Thailand was Bangkok, and Bangkok was Thailand.

  “I was wrong.”

  *

  Martin was crying again. This had become a regular occurrence during his first month in Thailand. He’d sit alone in his room at night and, with nothing else to occupy his attention, he’d just cry. He was convinced he’d made the biggest mistake of his life. He had left a great job in Florida, doing what he loved, working for people who cared for him, living in places that felt familiar. And he abandoned it all – for what? Living by himself in an office on a construction site four hours north of the only Thai city he’d ever heard of (and that was only because of that song by Murray Head). There was a tiny village nearby, but it was unlike any place Martin had ever seen before, and when he went into town, the locals stared at him like he was an alien. And, in many ways, he was.

  Martin had never felt so isolated. No one in the village spoke English. Neither did anyone at the job site. The translator he was promised was nowhere to be found. Martin worked long days, but never felt he was making progress. Outside Japan, Nicklaus hadn’t designed much for Asia, and Mission Hills Khao Yai – the project Martin had been put on – was among the first batch of bids they had won in Thailand. Many of Martin’s workers had never built a golf course. Some had never even heard of the game. He would try to give directions through a combination of charades and doodles. It felt impossible.

  Often, the only friend Martin thought he could turn to was the telephone. In those early weeks, he’d make frantic, expensive calls back to the Nicklaus Design reps in Florida. “I can’t do this,” Martin would say like a junkie during his first week of rehab. “I gotta come home. I can’t handle this.”

  At night, after all the workers made their way home, the hours got longer for Martin. He was having trouble sleeping due to a combination of culture shock and jet lag. So he’d sit there, alone with his thoughts – and the shadow that lurked outside his window. It was a security guard making his rounds, and every fifteen minutes or so the silhouette of the guard and his machine gun would appear on Martin’s bedroom curtain. The sight filled him with unease. He wasn’t sure what frightened him more: the thought of a man holding a machine gun outside his window, or whatever it was the man with the machine gun was supposed to be protecting him from.

  On his irregular visits to the construction site, Mission Hills Khao Yai’s owner could sense something was amiss with his project manager. Martin had heard a lot about Suraphan Ngamjitsuksri in the past weeks. An ethnically Chinese man in his late fifties, he was said to be the biggest steel importer in Thailand. He also had his hands in the country’s lucrative road construction business, but Martin suspected there was more to the story. He couldn’t shake it: Suraphan was like a character out of a mob movie. He was tall among Thai men, an inch or two shy of six feet, and he was bone thin, with sunken cheeks and a poof of wispy dyed black hair on the top of his head. It made him look like a walking skeleton, and many of the workers seemed to be scared to death of him. Despite the large gold Buddha medallions that dangled from his neck, he was an intense man, whose moods changed quickly. He chain-smoked. He yelled a lot, in multiple languages. Martin was happy he appeared to have done something to get on Suraphan’s good side. “I think he liked me because I worked seven days a week,” Martin said.

  Suraphan made it his business to find the cure for what was ailing Martin. “I think you need to go to Bangkok,” Suraphan told Martin on his third Saturday in Thailand. “My driver will take you. I’ve got everything arranged.”

  Martin wasn’t sure what that meant, but he was eager for a change of scenery, and when Suraphan’s Jaguar – he had a collection of more than a dozen cars – showed up at around 11 p.m., Martin was ready. The driver did not waste any time, hitting 120 miles per hour as soon as they reached the virtually empty highway, driving like a man who had no fear he’d ever be pulled over. The car had a clunky car phone embedded in the front seat armrest – a luxury rarely seen in north Florida, let alone Thailand – and the chauffeur received several calls during the drive. Martin could hear Suraphan barking orders on the other end of the line. What was normally a four-hour trip was cut nearly in half. Martin had no idea what was in store for him, and was already playing out numerous hair-raising scenarios in his head.

  Once in Bangkok, the driver made a quick turn down a narrow, one-lane alleyway off Sukhumvit Road and came to an abrupt stop. A large neon sign on the building flashed, “Darling Turkish Bath.”

  “I was already freaking out,” Martin said. “I was thinking, ‘What is this place? Are they going to kill me inside?’”

  Far from it. Suraphan owned Darling, and he had clearly sent the message that Martin was to be given VIP treatment. He was greeted with deferential bows and then ushered quickly into a large dark room with one wall made almost entirely of glass. There were women on the other side of the fishbowl, thirty of them, each one more beautiful than the last – an aquarium swarming with supermodels. The women were dressed alluringly; numbers were printed on slips of paper and pinned near their left shoulders. “I didn’t know what to think,” Martin said. “I was still in culture shock, but I was a single male in my twenties. This was starting to look appealing.”

  “Choose one!” the manager, a pleasant-looking, middle-aged woman, ordered.

  Martin was dumbfounded. He didn’t say a word. The host pointed to a couple of the women and provided an overview of the services offered. She also drew Martin’s attention to the women who spoke English.

  “So, who do you like?” she pressed.

  “I guess No. 63 looks nice,” Martin mumbled.

  “63!” the host yelled, and the woman came out from behind the glass.

  “Pick another one!” cried the host.

  Another one? Martin thought.

  “I think this one is fine,” Martin said politely.

  “No! Khun Suraphan said you must have two.”

  “Um, I don’t know.”

  The manager, growing frustrated with Martin’s indecisiveness, chose a second attendant for him. Martin and the two masseuses were escorted to a room.

  Inside the room, the women started drawing a bath for Martin. Then there was a knock at the door. It was the manager.

  “Khun Suraphan said you must have a third one!”

  A third masseuse entered the room, and Martin tried hard to relax.

  *

  Back at the work site, things started to get better for Martin. A translator eventually arrived, and Martin began to occupy his empty nights by studying the Thai language. He’d force himself to learn ten words each evening before he went to bed, and he’d carry his vocabulary list around with him the following day and practice speaking with anyone who’d listen. Usually it ended up being the local girls who worked in the office. After six months, Martin could have basic conversations in Thai, and started to make friends. Suraphan still insisted he take monthly breaks in Bangkok, but Martin was beginning to grow accustomed to life in the countryside. He was never much of a big city kind of guy anyway.

  Still, the job wasn’t without its frustrations. Several white-knuckle moments made Martin wonder why he’d ever left Florida. Many of them involved Suraphan, who was proving to be a hair-trigger personality in more ways than one.

  Sometimes when Martin was in Bangkok, Suraphan would invite him over to his office. Initially, it didn’t appear to be the kind of office one would expect of a man who owned a Jaguar, a Mercedes and a Porsche. Tucked in that old building behind the Golden Buddha Temple, where Suraphan often prayed, the room was dingy and dark, with water-stained walls. It had once been the office of Suraphan’s father, and had the feel of an antique shop. The furniture – including Suraphan’s unusually large desk –
was in the classic Thai style, dark wood with intricately carved detail. Gold, jade and ivory statues, many of them Buddhas, adorned nearly every flat surface in the room, and the walls were covered with portraits of the Thai kings. Suraphan, like many of his countrymen, seemed especially fond of King Rama V.

  In the morning, Martin would watch as women brought in suitcases full of money, the takings from the previous day’s customers at Darling Turkish Bath. This was before Thailand introduced the one-thousand-baht note – up until the mid-1990s, five hundred baht (roughly twenty US dollars) was as big as bills got – so Suraphan’s piles of cash grew to be cartoonishly tall. Suraphan would open up some sliding doors on the wall of cabinets behind his desk and place his bounty of baht alongside even more cash, in every currency Martin could imagine. It wasn’t all banknotes, either. He thought he saw several bars of solid gold.

  Every couple of weeks, Suraphan would fill up a few suitcases with cash and head out to the work site at Mission Hills Khao Yai. He’d ask Martin to be present when he doled out payments to subcontractors. In theory, Martin was there to confirm that the agreed work had been done to his satisfaction. But it was clear only one opinion mattered during these proceedings, and that was the opinion of the man with the loaded gun.

  Subcontractors would queue up outside Suraphan’s office at the course, waiting to be paid in wads of cash. He’d make them wait for hours, and when they did make it to his desk, Suraphan would never pay them what they thought they were owed. For 100,000 baht’s worth of work, he’d pay 80,000 and say, “That’s enough.” Few subcontractors complained. With all the cash lying around, Suraphan had two armed guards at the door and a nine-millimeter pistol on his desk; it could be intimidating. “It’s not a negotiation,” Martin said. “If he says you didn’t do something, you’re not getting fucking paid.”

  One instance in particular stuck with Martin. It was late, close to 10 p.m., and the subcontractor responsible for building the cart paths on the course had been waiting to be paid since sundown. When the man finally got his turn, he presented Suraphan with a bill for five holes’ worth of cart path, calculated by the square meter.