The Forbidden Game

by Dan Washburn

  Zhou’s world became distorted. Everything seemed so much bigger now. The driver was massive and unwieldy. The 225-yard marker was barely legible, it was so far away. The tree-lined hill seemed like a distant village, and the crowd surrounding him now numbered in the thousands. Everything was huge! Everything, that is, but the ball. The ball was a white speck of dust on the green mat beneath Zhou’s wobbly legs. How could he possible hit that?

  “Come on, security guard, what are you waiting for?” the general manager taunted.

  Zhou blinked repeatedly, trying to bring his world back into focus. He took a deep breath and settled himself the best he could. He lined up his shot, and swung.

  Whiff.

  Zhou missed the ball completely. He heard chuckles in the crowd. But he picked the ball up and carefully placed it back on the rubber tee. He swung again.

  Whiff.

  More laughter. Zhou felt his face go flush. The hill was no longer the goal. Contact. Just make contact, Zhou told himself. Again, he lined up the ball.

  Whiff.

  Baseball was another sport Zhou was unfamiliar with, so three strikes didn’t mean he was out. Although some in the crowd said they had seen enough, Zhou wasn’t going to leave unless someone forced the club from his hands. He had waited so long for this chance. He had to at least hit the ball. He couldn’t let Wang down.

  Zhou called on his wushu training, one of the only things he remembered from his short stint at military police school. He focused on his yi, or intention, remembering something his instructor had said: It is the thought which guides the movement. He blocked out the crowd from his mind. Blocked out the jeers, the yardage markers, the hill and the trees. He focused only on the small white target. He just wanted to hit the ball. He stared at it with so much intensity his entire field of vision became white and dimpled. He saw nothing but the ball.

  Zhou raised the driver and swung. At the bottom of his motion, he heard a pop. Suddenly, Zhou felt as though he had been transported to one of his dreams. His hands tingled. His body filled with warmth. He wasn’t exactly sure what had happened – but he knew he wanted to feel this again.

  At first there was silence. Followed by a gasp or two. Then cheers. Any laughs were now those of disbelief. The security guard had done it. He had hit the ball. Long. Straight. And over the trees. No one, including Zhou – who stood there, dumbfounded, his hands still welded to his three-thousand-yuan weapon – could believe it.

  “I was happy, and I was proud,” Wang recalled, nearly a decade later. “I was right about choosing him. But none of that matters. The most important thing is that he hit the ball over the hill! He had so much explosive force. To hit the ball past the trees on the hill, more than 280 yards – I’ve worked at the course for ten years and I’ve only seen three to five people do that.”

  Some in the crowd thought it was just dumb luck. That’s what the general manager from Taiwan said. He told Zhou he’d never be able to do it again.

  “I didn’t dare take another swing,” Zhou said. “To be honest, I was scared I’d have to pay for the club. It was much too expensive for me.”

  Zhou retrieved his hat and his tie and floated all the way back to the workers’ dormitory. He sat on his metal bunk bed, his body still trembling.

  “That was the moment I started thinking that, if I worked hard, maybe one day I could become good at golf,” Zhou said.

  But there remained one problem: Zhou was still forbidden to play. He was determined not to let that stop him, however. He had caught a fever.

  He started building up an arsenal, scouring the course’s wooded areas for lost balls, collecting broken clubs discarded by members. He dragged a worn-out driving range mat back to the workers’ dormitory, where there was a narrow swath of grass just outside Zhou’s ground-floor window. It was a secluded area. On one side was the faded green wall of the dorm, on the other was a wall of thick tropical trees and foliage. Beyond that, well, that was no longer the club’s property. In his free time, Zhou would steal back there with his mat, his balls and some clubs he’d repaired. He’d spend hours chipping and pitching in that constricted space, the fear of losing balls and breaking windows teaching him to drive the ball straight. This, of course, did not always happen – especially early on – and Zhou worked out an arrangement with the maintenance staff: He’d fix any windows he broke, in exchange for their silence.

  At night, Zhou would hop out of his dormitory window and sneak over to a practice green with just a ball – no putter. Under the moonlight, he’d roll the ball, again and again, and study how it moved atop the curves of the closely cropped grass. He read any golf book he could get his hands on, and watched golf videos (John Daly’s Grip It and Rip It, to name one) in the driving range office when he was off duty. He may never have been a good student, but Zhou taught himself golf.

  He took every opportunity to watch the golf instructors as they practiced at the driving range. He’d scrutinize their mechanics carefully, and then race back behind the dormitory and try to mimic them. On Monday evenings, club managers gathered at the driving range to drink beers and hit a few balls. Zhou, while not a manager, would often tag along, like a dog waiting for scraps of food to fall from the dinner table.

  “He always went with me, and he always asked me to let him have a try,” Wang said. “I knew it disobeyed the rule, but I’d let him take several swings. At first I did not really see his talent – I only knew he had explosive power and could hit the ball very far.”

  Even then, Zhou had a very compact, aggressive swing. Much of his power came from his strong legs, which he’d bend in an exaggerated fashion. This unique stance wasn’t something Zhou had picked up from a book or a video. It was a technique borne of necessity – many of the second-hand clubs he was using were much too short for him. He also swung with a certain amount of anger and resentment. He hated that other staff members were allowed to play golf, yet he had to practice in secret. During his infrequent opportunities to hit balls at the driving range, Zhou would picture the Taiwanese manager and swing with fury.

  “I still didn’t know what a professional golfer was at that time, but everything about it was so interesting to me,” Zhou recalled. “The leaders sometimes played videos showing a guy called Tiger Woods. I said, ‘Wow! Look at the atmosphere.’ So many people watching. I wanted to be under the spotlight like Tiger Woods. I knew I couldn’t reach his level, but I wanted to attend my own tournaments. I wanted to have that feeling.”

  In early 2001, when Zhou returned home to Qixin for the first time in more than five years, he brought back ten golf balls, and the villagers looked at the strange foreign spheres with wonderment and curiosity. His mother bounced one, and everybody clapped. Then some neighborhood children took the balls, and they played with them like marbles. Zhou figured he’d choose another time to explain his new dream to his family.

  *

  Martin Moore’s team had put the finishing touches to the Mountain Course at Spring City in December 1996. The driving range and clubhouse were completed the following year, and in November 1998, Spring City celebrated its official grand opening, with leaders of the Yunnan provincial government and the prime minister of Singapore in attendance. Construction on the club’s Lake Course, designed by Robert Trent Jones, Jr., began that same month. In 1999, Golf Digest magazine named the Mountain Course the No. 1 golf course in China and Hong Kong.

  It was a nice thing for Martin to be able to put on his resumé, but by that point Spring City, and China to some extent, were already in his rearview mirror. Throughout the ’90s, China had remained a mystery to most Westerners in the golf scene. “It just wasn’t on people’s radar,” Martin recalled. “Nicklaus was actually very active then, but there were definitely a lot of people in the industry that wouldn’t have a clue.” After Spring City, Thailand and the Philippines were still seen as the boom markets, and Martin was fully on board to go back where things were easier. He got jobs in both countries managing projects fo
r Paragon Construction International, part of the mighty Nicklaus empire, for what promised to be a steady flow of work. But that came to a crashing halt with the Asian financial crisis of 1997. As Martin put it, “the whole shit hit the fan.”

  When the crisis hit, Martin was working on a Greg Norman course in the Philippines. The peso plummeted from 26 to the US dollar to 41. “We stopped getting paid by the client, and it just really fell apart,” he said. Nicklaus shut down operations in the Philippines in 1998 and laid off everyone there, except for Martin. They offered him a gig in Mexico, but he balked at the opportunity – if he was going to move that close to home, he might as well go home, was his thinking. He had spent nearly a decade in Asia. He had met his wife in Thailand. They now had two sons. His eldest boy was almost old enough for school. It seemed like a good time to move the family to the United States. There’d always be golf courses to build there, he thought. And at that time, he seemed to be right – more than 750 new courses would open between 1999 and 2000, the biggest golf construction boom in history.

  In August 1998, Martin, his wife and his two sons moved to Gulfport, Mississippi, where Martin took a job as an independent shaper on a Nicklaus course while he figured out his next move. He began talking to two American golf course designers about a possible business opportunity. Lee Schmidt, who Martin had met in Thailand while they both worked for Jack Nicklaus, and Brian Curley, who at the time was president of golf design at Landmark Golf Company in Indian Wells, California, had worked together at Landmark in the ’80s, and in 1997 they decided to join forces once again. Their partnership would eventually be known as Schmidt-Curley Design. They were looking to form a golf course construction firm that would focus solely on their designs, and Martin was the first person they reached out to. “I jumped all over that,” Martin said. “I was shaping all day, and opening this company all night.”

  The trio formed Flagstick Golf Course Construction Management, and landed their first project in late 1998, in Indio, California (then called the Landmark Golf Club – today it’s called The Golf Club at Terra Lago). Within a year, the course was open and playing host to the 1999 Skins Game between Fred Couples, David Duval, Sergio Garcia and Mark O’Meara. Over the next few years, Martin, along with Schmidt and Curley, worked on a dozen or so courses in the American Southwest.

  They thought this could be the start of something big. They had no idea just how big it was about to get.

  *

  Despite all of his stealthy preparations, Zhou Xunshu wasn’t able to start playing golf regularly for years. Things began to look up in April 2001, five years after he had arrived at Guangzhou International, when the Taiwanese manager left the club. The rules changed, and after hundreds of clandestine practices, Zhou could finally see how his skills translated to an actual golf course. It was like a dream. But it only lasted three months.

  “It was my fault,” Wang Shiwen, Zhou’s boss, said. “I made a mistake when I was playing on the course. I teed off too soon at hole No. 9. It didn’t hit the members playing in front of me, but it scared them. The course punished me and the whole security department. Banned us from playing.”

  Bans like this would happen with annoying frequency. They could last anywhere from a couple of months to a half a year. And Zhou became extremely frustrated. “He was very depressed,” said Lu Zhan, Zhou’s old friend and roommate. “By then, his goal was to be a pro golfer. We talked about that a lot.”

  During one such low point, Zhou rounded up some shafts from broken clubs and fashioned his own set of practice drivers. To make the club heads, he’d cut water bottles in half, fill the bottoms with a concoction of cement, water and soil, and then stick the shafts in the mixture until it dried. To further bind the shaft with the cement head, he wrapped the joint with iron wire. Zhou was afraid of being laughed at, so at night he’d carry his weighted Frankenstein club up a metal staircase to the dormitory roof. “I wouldn’t go to sleep without practicing a hundred swings,” he said.

  In autumn 2001, Zhou received his first partial set of proper golf clubs, after he’d led the security department to victory in the club’s interdepartmental basketball tournament. As a prize, Frank Lin, the Singaporean who had hired Zhou in 1996, offered Zhou a barely used set of MacGregor clubs he’d originally purchased for his wife. He told Zhou he could have them for whatever price he wanted. Zhou was too proud to take the clubs for free, so he offered eight hundred yuan, more than half his monthly salary.

  “I cherished those clubs,” Zhou said. “I used to watch the instructors clean their clubs with a special foam. It made them so shiny. I didn’t have access to that foam back at the dorm, so I used a toothbrush and soap. And then I polished them with a rag. I did this almost every day.”

  At this point, he was allowed to play on the course twice a month. He considered this unacceptable. How could he become a pro golfer by playing only a couple of dozen times a year? He approached his bosses with a proposal. He’d work without pay in exchange for free access to the course. His younger brother, who was working as a cook at a nearby construction site, had offered to pay Zhou’s daily expenses, which were minimal. Zhou said he’d do any type of job they wanted – caddie, gather balls at the driving range, clean them – all he wanted to do was golf. He made the offer twice. Twice he was turned down.

  In spring 2002, Zhou approached Wang with an ultimatum: Let me play, or fire me. Wang had always liked Zhou. He admired his determination and realized, although he was very good at his job, Zhou had little interest in being a security guard for the rest of his life. “Okay,” Wang said to Zhou. “This is what we are going to do. But you have to promise not to tell anyone.”

  Zhou started working the night shift. Every morning after his shift, at 6:30 a.m., before most of the customers would arrive, Wang and Zhou would play a round. Because they didn’t use caddies to carry their bags, it was obvious Wang and Zhou weren’t members, so they had to sneak around the course like cat burglars. Wang was risking his job with the arrangement.

  “Sometimes, if someone was coming, I’d have to go hide in the bushes,” Zhou said. “And before each swing, I’d have to look around to make sure nobody was looking. If the coast was clear, I’d swing quickly and race after the ball.” After a year of racing around the course like this, he was hitting in the 70s.

  “He made great progress,” Wang said. “At that time, we were developing lots of players, including some teams, and they were all jealous of Zhou’s fast improvement.”

  Zhou started playing in amateur tournaments, putting even more strain on his work schedule. Lu often covered for him. “We are like brothers, so I’d do anything to support him,” Lu said. “We all hoped he could achieve something. Most of us had the same dream he had. But he was a little bit crazier than us, and he was also more talented. He was our hope.”

  But something always got in the way. In April 2003 it was local peasants. The club’s tee boxes were marked with decorative metal golf balls, oversized and painted in a variety of colors. They were about the size of grapefruits and stuck into the turf with metal spikes. Late one night, a group of local farmers sneaked onto the course and stole the tee markers to sell as scrap metal. The entire security team was blamed, and Zhou was banned from golfing. He was crushed.

  He again offered to work for free. “Just let me golf,” he pleaded.

  No.

  “I can’t live without golf. Leader, please reconsider.”

  No.

  “If I can’t golf, I’ll have to quit.”

  Are you sure?

  “Yes. This time, yes. Either I golf or I quit.”

  Then quit.

  After seven years at Guangzhou International, that’s exactly what Zhou did.

  ‌3

  ‌Keep Moving

  Martin Moore was confused. He was back in China, in the thick of the most ambitious golf course construction project in history, and trying to figure out what the rush was. He had already assembled the largest team ever for
a single golf construction job. He had already come up with the most aggressive schedule anyone in the industry had ever heard of. But it never seemed to be enough for David Chu and his son Ken, the men behind the massive Mission Hills golf complex near the southern city of Shenzhen. They were always pushing him to move faster, faster, FASTER. Martin knew every detail about the project – right down to each bulldozer and every grain of sand – but he couldn’t help but feel there was a lot of information beyond his grasp. Why the unreasonable deadline? Why all the secrecy? Why the late night meetings and sleepless nights? It was as if the Chus knew something no one else did.

  When Martin first learned of the job from his business partner Brian Curley he was intrigued, but he was also taken aback. Not only did Mission Hills Vice Chairman Ken Chu want to build five courses simultaneously, he also wanted them to be built in one year. Nothing like that had ever been done before. Not even close.

  “I thought it was unbelievable,” Martin said. “I mean, just to build five courses at one time, and then to say you’re doing them in one year? Unbelievable.”

  Mission Hills already had five courses, which were built over a much more manageable nine-year period that started in 1992. For the second batch of five, Martin initially put together an eighteen-month plan for Chu, and he thought that was still a tad unrealistic. He explained to Chu that while building five courses simultaneously, especially under such strict time constraints, would normally be next to impossible, building one course in a year-and-a-half is a realistic goal. So, the only way they would be able to turn Chu’s vision into reality would be to treat the five courses as separate projects. Five different teams building five different courses that happened to be part of the same golf club. Martin presented Chu with a spreadsheet listing the roster of talent he thought would be necessary to get the job done – it was the longest such list he’d ever seen in his life. Dozens upon dozens of names, representing much of the world’s golf course construction industry. The cost would be colossal.