The Forbidden Game

by Dan Washburn

  “Confirmed!” was all Chu had to say. “But I need it done in one year.”

  Martin still thought it was implausible. But he didn’t know “Mission Hills’ style” yet. And he certainly didn’t know what to expect from the twenty-nine-year-old Ken Chu. Martin told Chu that the ball was in his court. There were approximately forty million cubic yards (thirty million cubic meters) of dirt that needed moving before Martin’s guys could get started.

  “When the contractor pulls out three hundred dump trucks and sixty excavators, you can get anything done,” Martin said. “They’re working twenty hours a day.”

  Martin had always held up what his team did with Landmark Golf Club in Indio, California, as a benchmark. They broke ground on the thirty-six-hole layout in December, and finished construction in nine-and-a-half months. By the following November, the course hosted a nationally televised tournament. That feat was beginning to look like child’s play compared to what he was witnessing at Mission Hills.

  “Probably three or four months into it, it’s like, ‘Wow,’” Martin said. “That’s when I started to become a little bit of a believer in it.” Chu could not be stopped.

  *

  At a press conference in November 2002, Mission Hills announced its plans to expand from five to ten courses, a move the club claimed would vault it past North Carolina’s fabled Pinehurst Golf Resort – where eight courses were built over more than a century – as the largest golf resort in the world. A few months after the press conference, in early 2003, the Mission Hills website stated: “Pinehurst, currently the largest golf club of the world, will soon be replaced by Mission Hills, the only private golf club in the world to own 180 holes. Mission Hills has made a name of itself in the world of golf and has created its own legend.”

  Indeed, there is a little legend (and perhaps some myth) behind Mission Hills’ story. The tale starts with Hong Kong entrepreneur David Chu, who is commonly credited as the mastermind behind the operation. By most accounts, he was a self-made man. He owned a successful cardboard packaging factory in Hong Kong and, according to family members, began operating in mainland China even before Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, which kicked off in late 1978. Many say it was during these early years operating in Guangdong province that Chu learned the rules of guanxi, or connections, that determine who is able to do business in China, and who is not. No one would take the word of a stranger, but the word of a friend or relative of a Party official – that was another matter entirely.

  In the 1980s, David Chu had decided to move his family to Toronto, buying a house in a golf community, Glendale Golf and Country Club, despite having little interest in the game. But something about the experience must have clicked with him, because by the end of the decade he was itching to build a golf community of his own, less than an hour north of Hong Kong in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, which in 1980 was named China’s first “special economic zone” with lenient free-market-style policies designed to attract foreign investment. “Back in the early nineties, prior to China taking over Hong Kong in 1997, Deng Xiaoping wanted to expedite Shenzhen’s development,” Ken Chu explained. Shenzhen was seen as the “first door to Hong Kong” – the place where East and West would meet. Traditionally, associates in China would congregate with karaoke, or “do business [at] the mah-jongg table,” Ken said, and the new wave of investors arriving in Hong Kong, and even the special economic zone, didn’t fit comfortably into either setting. In Toronto, David Chu had seen how businessmen used golf as a networking tool, and although only a handful of people on the mainland played golf, he figured it was only a matter of time before the practice would become commonplace. Guanxi and golf seemed like a perfect fit. But land in Hong Kong was scarce. Shenzhen was the ideal location for his golf venture, within reasonable driving distance for 150 million or so people, including wealthy Hong Kongers.

  Mission Hills occupies a large swath of mountainous woodland in Guangdong province that spills over into Shenzhen and another major manufacturing city, Dongguan. The entire sprawling complex takes up 4,950 acres, nearly six times the size of New York City’s Central Park. The resort even has its own public transportation system, with a bus system shuttling members, guests and employees from one side to another.

  When David Chu identified the tract of land that would become the home of his golf empire, many were highly skeptical. “Yeah, today everyone compliments us as visionaries, but back then people thought we were crazy,” said Ken, years later, who was just a teenager when his father purchased the remote expanse in one of the poorest parts of Guangdong. “I also thought it was crazy. Why choose this land? It’s so underdeveloped. You hardly see people on the street, even in nearby Guanlan town. There were less than ten thousand people in the town back then.” And none of them played golf.

  Indeed, that posed a big problem for the site – there were no major roads connecting Mission Hills with… anything. “Shenzhen city to here used to take four hours,” Ken remembered. “Back then, in the early nineties, it was all bicycles. Definitely, we had really hard times in the earlier days. I mean, as low as a hundred players per month.” Ken crammed four years of study into two at Western Ontario University so he could race back to Hong Kong to help his father steer the fledgling golf club.

  The Chus said the club’s growth was organic. “We built as the demand grew,” Ken recalled. “We did not build it for the ego. Purely for the market demand.” But he also doesn’t shy away from saying that Mission Hills played a large role in driving that demand. The family likes to claim that the number of golfers in China doubled after the World Cup of Golf was played at Mission Hills in 1995, and that the number doubled yet again after they brought Tiger Woods to China in 2001.

  Tiger’s first trip to China, back when he was just twenty-five and coming off his second win at the Masters, almost didn’t happen. It was scheduled just two months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and security concerns had already forced the cancellation of an Evander Holyfield–John Ruiz boxing match scheduled for Beijing in late November. It was determined, however, that China at that time was just about the safest place in the world to be. So the show went on, much to the relief of the Chus, who had been planning the spectacle for nearly eighteen months.

  The weekend event, scheduled to coincide with the announcement of China’s ascension into the World Trade Organization, was intended to stimulate the growth of golf in a country barely aware of the sport’s existence. “We wanted to spark interest in the game, especially among junior golfers,” explained John Cappo, former managing director of China operations for IMG Golf, one of the event’s organizers. “It was our belief that to do that, you must first create major golf events in China, so people have something to aspire to.”

  On the first day, Tiger held a clinic for a few dozen local golfers and played in an exhibition stroke-play match against four of the top pros from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The following day, he played another round, this time paired with a different group of amateurs at each hole.

  It proved to be a hot ticket – and a pricey one. Entry was around $130 per day, and while it’s unclear how many of the 100,000 or so attendees (estimates vary greatly) actually paid face value, local news reports called the exhibition the most expensive sporting event in Chinese history.

  Tiger received some $2 million for his time, and paid $500,000 in local Chinese taxes, according to media reports. The following year, it was widely reported he was the top taxpayer in Shenzhen for 2001. Many thought the statistic was more a commentary on the rampant tax evasion among wealthy Chinese, than on the size of Tiger’s paycheck.

  To be sure, Tiger was not the only person at Mission Hills that weekend with deep pockets. Well-heeled amateurs paid as much as $80,000 to play a single hole with the world’s best golfer. Wealthy parents paid anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000 per hole to give their children a chance to go toe-to-toe with Tiger. And Duan Yongping, chairman of Guangdong-based BBK Electronics, signed his compa
ny on as title sponsor of the event with the stipulation he could golf all eighteen holes with the superstar. (Five years later, Duan would make headlines for spending $620,100 to have lunch with Warren Buffet.)

  There were distractions galore for anyone carrying a golf club. Mission Hills was a madhouse. Traffic was backed up for miles on the highway leading to the golf club. Parking lots were overflowing, and hundreds of ticket holders raced to the venue on foot.

  The scene inside was just as crazy. Golf in China was only seventeen years old at the time, and golf etiquette was just as foreign as the game itself. Spectators barreled through bunkers. Kids rolled down hills and played in the sand. If people weren’t snapping photographs, they were shouting into their mobile phones. Organizers made repeated announcements pleading with the fans to settle down: You don’t want to embarrass China, they said.

  *

  This was all part of the Mission Hills legend. But there are other aspects of the company’s story that are rarely discussed. There is the scandal from 2002, when, according to the South China Morning Post, an investor called Harry Lam Hon-lit was “executed” just two days before a “hearing of a multi-million-dollar legal dispute between Lam’s Digger Holdings and the Mission Hills Golf Club in Shenzhen.” Lam was killed “gangland-style,” according to the AP’s report, with a single shot to the head as he took his breakfast at his usual teahouse in central Hong Kong. He had recently filed a request to stop construction at Missions Hills, citing a fight over the valuation of his shares in the development. It was very bad timing. The Chus found themselves fielding calls from reporters, and with the legal case still moving forward, chose to make no detailed public comments. Rumors spread that the killers were linked to the People’s Liberation Army, or a kung fu movie actor-turned-tycoon. Eventually, six people were convicted – including the tycoon – but no motive was ever established for the murder.

  Other omissions are less sensational. Nowhere in the official Mission Hills history will you learn about the club’s Thailand connections, or its two additional founding partners, men who appeared to be just as integral, if not more, to launching the club as David Chu was. They’ve been erased from the official record. For instance, a South China Morning Post story from early 1993 says it was Elmer Yuen, described as a Shanghainese man “who made his money from a digital electronics business in Hong Kong,” who acquired two thousand acres of land near Guanlan town in 1992 with the goal of creating the “best suburb of Shenzhen.” Yuen told the paper he estimated an investment of $700 million would be necessary to develop the golf course and luxury housing development.

  The story mentioned Yuen’s successful golf venture in Thailand, Mission Hills Golf Club in Kanchanaburi, which opened in 1991 with a Jack Nicklaus-designed track “touted as one of the best courses in the country.” Thailand is where the third piece of the Mission Hills puzzle resided, a former Hong Kong boarding school classmate of Yuen’s who is credited with convincing him that “golf was synonymous with riches.” That man, the other original partner, was a wiry Thai-Chinese tycoon with sunken cheeks and a temper: Suraphan Ngamjitsuksri.

  In fact, David Chu gets third billing in the story. A 2001 court document related to Yuen’s divorce from his second wife, on the other hand, paints a different picture. It states that the Mission Hills development in China was Chu’s idea, and suggests the trio’s initial investment totaled ten million dollars, with 55 percent to come from Chu, 30 percent from Suraphan and 15 percent from Yuen. The document also mentions that “relations between the partners were becoming strained” by the end of 1994. The reasons for this were partly due to “a dispute over the timing of the sale of properties built at Mission Hills, but also because the project had cash flow problems.” (Harry Lam Hon-lit allegedly held 3 percent at the time of his murder – or so he was claiming to the court.)

  Given the order in which the Thailand and China Mission Hills projects opened, even the origin of the club’s name is up for debate. Ken Chu maintains it was inspired by the Shenzhen property itself. “We had a vision, we had a mission, and then there’s lots of hills,” he offered. “We pasted that together.” Whether spawned in China or Thailand, many in the golf industry always assumed the name was inspired by, if not outright copied from, well-known golf courses in the United States. There’s Mission Hills Country Club, founded in 1926, in Northbrook, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. And then there’s another unrelated Mission Hills Country Club in Rancho Mirage, California, that since 1983 has been home to the Kraft Nabisco Championship, one of the five annual major tournaments in women’s professional golf.

  It’s not uncommon for Chinese clubs to borrow the names of well-known golf courses from the West. For example, China has its own Pebble Beach and Pine Valley – but Ken says his club’s familiar name was a coincidence. “Back in the early 1990s, internet was inaccessible,” he said. “We did not even know that club [in California] existed.”

  Still, it’s clear the Mission Hills name and logo were in use in Thailand years before the brand ever landed in China. Indeed, Martin Moore had helped build one of the original Mission Hills courses for Suraphan in Thailand – Mission Hills Khao Yai, his first job in Asia.

  Martin recalled a day in 1992 in Thailand when Suraphan pulled him aside and said, “Martin, come have dinner with me tonight in our village home. I have some friends from Hong Kong I’d like you to meet.” Elmer Yuen was the first person Martin was introduced to. The other man in attendance, Martin was told, owned a cardboard box factory in mainland China, just outside of Hong Kong. It was David Chu.

  Martin’s first impression of David Chu was unremarkable. He just seemed like a regular Chinese businessman. He didn’t carry himself as though he had a lot of money – there was no hint he’d one day be one of the biggest golf developers in the world. In fact, it was clear to Martin that Suraphan was the driver of this particular train. Yuen and Chu appeared to occupy secondary roles.

  “I want to build a Mission Hills in Shenzhen, China,” Suraphan later confided in Martin. “With those two men you met last night.”

  He paused, then added, “Do you want to go to China?” He was trying to steal Martin away.

  “I’m staying in Thailand,” Martin said definitively.

  The first course at Mission Hills Shenzhen, the World Cup Course, was a Nicklaus design, and many of the workers on the project reported that Suraphan was the one primarily calling the shots. But once the World Cup Course was complete, sources said, the trio began to butt heads – not difficult to believe with Suraphan in the mix. The Thai “enforcer” was forced out. The China operation got to keep the name and logo, and Suraphan, according to someone familiar with the deal, got “a boat load of cash.”

  Suraphan did manage to leave his imprint at Mission Hills Shenzhen, however. The original clubhouse there was designed by Suraphan’s architect. In fact, it’s almost an exact replica of the clubhouse at Mission Hills Khao Yai, the course Martin built for him.

  Ken Chu acknowledged the existence of three original partners, but of Yuen and Suraphan he simply said, “They left.” He added, “By 1994, when the club pretty much opened, they didn’t have faith in this project.” It’s clear David Chu, now referred to by some as “the father of golf in China,” was the last man standing. And that was all that mattered.

  *

  Ken Chu was attending the University of Western Ontario in Canada when the first course at Mission Hills opened, and was not yet thirty when they opened their fifth. By the time plans for the next batch of five came to pass, he wanted to make sure it was clear the torch had been passed. He wanted to be the guy calling the shots. Some onlookers felt Ken Chu thought he had something to prove, to his father and everyone else. The first five courses were built in nine years? Well, he was going to do the next five in one.

  Ken was by far the most vocal and visible member of the Chu family during the project, but some suspected David Chu was still the mastermind behind the growing family business and that the
desire to be the biggest and the best at everything started with him. It was rare to see David out on the work site during construction, however. Although he lived nearby and was bankrolling the project, he only showed up about once a month. Instead, Ken would meet with his father with daily updates. It was clear to Martin he was being groomed to take over the empire. “He would’ve been the most mature thirty-two-year-old you’d ever meet in your life,” Martin said. “His father was polishing him early.”

  Ken Chu had a confidence and business savvy that belied his age. He was driven, photogenic, well spoken. He was always immaculately dressed, with a vast wardrobe of tailored suits, as well as luxury watches and designer eyeglasses matched to each ensemble. Even when he was just wearing trousers and a golf shirt at the job site he looked put together. When he walked into a meeting, he commanded – and frequently demanded – respect.

  Ken was “a pusher,” Martin said. He was the kind of guy who “expected eighteen hours a day from you.” He was fond of calling last-minute, late-night meetings he’d routinely show up an hour late for. “I think he thrives on six white guys and ten other Chinese guys having to wait on him,” another person familiar with the meetings said. It was not uncommon for him to arrive to these meetings in a designer suit. The rest of the guys, wearing shorts and T-shirts, would smile every time they caught him adjusting his tie in the mirror.

  Ken mandated a record-breaking construction schedule that was difficult enough, but it was the mountainous terrain that really made things tough. Designer Brian Curley called it “one of the most brutal properties” he’d ever seen.