The Forbidden Game

by Dan Washburn

  “Those sites, you couldn’t even walk them,” Curley said, noting the land’s steep “up and down” slopes. “You’ve got to manhandle the property just to get it to something that resembles land that would tolerate golf. So you can argue that, sure, it was open space. Sure, it was covered in trees and all that, but now that we’re done with it all, the thing is still open space and still covered with trees. It’s just that you’re playing golf through it.”

  Before-and-after photos of the property are hardly recognizable as the same location. Curley said it wasn’t unusual “to find a mountain gone overnight.” A massive team of laborers, using heavy machinery, moved thirty million cubic meters of earth in just eight months. Curley said the site often required dynamite blasts three times a day and that “it would rain rock for huge distances.”

  Martin recalled that Curley impressed Mission Hills with master-planning and “big picture stuff.” Few architects could manage the mammoth challenges that came with working with a client like Ken Chu, where everything needed to be big – bigger than anything else in the world – and done yesterday. Curley was efficient, adaptable and fast as hell. “Brian will pull out a fucking napkin at lunchtime and route eighteen holes,” Martin said. “If that guy would have given him a ‘topo’ right there on that table, Brian would’ve given him about two routing options during lunchtime. He’s just got an eye for that.”

  Then Curley would go back to his office and have one of his assistants draw it up in color, complete with cart paths, roads and housing, and have it delivered to the potential client in twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Martin said Curley had been successful in China because of this approach. Other foreign designers might say, “We’ll get that to you in thirty to forty-five days.” Chinese businessmen don’t want to wait that long. People who can turn around plans in a day or two have a decidedly upper hand. “In China, they want that shit, man,” he said.

  But Brian Curley’s speed alone could not handle every obstacle Mother Nature threw their way. From May to September 2003, Martin’s crew had to work through southern China’s summer monsoon season and large amounts of rain. To make matters worse, the construction calendar also overlapped with the outbreak of the SARS epidemic. At least three people on the work site came down with the virus.

  The Mission Hills mythology even goes so far as to credit SARS for helping the game gain traction in China. Ken Chu likes to tell the story that during the outbreak, golf courses, thanks to their fresh air and open spaces, replaced boardrooms as places where business deals went down. This, the Chus say, was just one more reason Mission Hills needed to expand.

  Part of the plan was to have the five new courses designed by some of the biggest names in golf. The five original courses at Mission Hills had been attached to names like Jack Nicklaus, Vijay Singh, Jumbo Ozaki, Nick Faldo and Ernie Els. Those eighteen-hole layouts were completed over the course of nine years, a timeline that allowed for a good bit of back-and-forth between the big-name designers and Mission Hills regarding the look and feel of the course.

  This was not the case with the following five courses, which had to be built in a fraction of the time. There was little way the celebrity designers would be able to have much input into the courses that would bear their names. And, for the most part, they didn’t. Using his handy napkin as a start, Curley and his partner Schmidt routed and designed all ninety holes. Construction began even before the involvement of Annika Sörenstam, David Duval, David Leadbetter, Jose Maria Olazabal and Greg Norman was finalized. A few of the celebrities made some site visits and talked strategy with Curley. But others rarely even looked at the plans, only showing up for the grand opening and to pick up their check. Despite what the signposts read, these were all Schmidt-Curley designs – except for one.

  David Chu insisted that Greg Norman be one of the names attached to a course, a move that threw the construction schedule somewhat of a curveball, because Norman was the sole designer to demand considerable say on the actual design of his course. Normally this wouldn’t have been much of an issue, but the courses were nearly halfway complete by the time Norman got involved.

  Norman, who was given first pick of the courses, sent his top designers to Mission Hills to scope out the property and determine which track deserved the Greg Norman name. Norman’s team did not appear to be in a hurry, and their relaxed Down Under temperament did not mesh well with the project’s manic timeframe. They spent a few days moseying around the place, but instead of making an immediate choice, said they had to go back to Australia to talk things over. The clock was ticking.

  After several weeks, Norman’s team made its choice: perhaps the most picturesque and challenging layout available, it snakes through steep ridges, severe hills and dense forests. They asked for some slight changes to the routing, and indicated that they would provide a new plan for grading the land (which, for the most part, had already been graded according to a different design). One month went by. Two months. Three months. In this building frenzy, it felt like an eternity.

  When the grading plan eventually arrived, Mission Hills learned that Norman’s team wanted the course to be as many as five meters lower than it currently was. That meant three million cubic meters of dirt had to find a new home. That’s a lot of dirt, a whole golf course’s worth. It was moved to a nearby layout, one bearing David Leadbetter’s name. That course had to be completely reshaped to take on the dirt. Everyone was feeling the pressure.

  Mission Hills was determined to avoid any more delays, and hoped there wouldn’t be any last-minute changes coming from the course designers. So, after one of the final site visits by Norman’s team, a construction crew was ready to pounce. It wasn’t the typical golf course construction crew – it was the largest one ever assembled. Two thousand people were assigned to that one course, and they worked on it almost nonstop for two months straight. What would normally have taken months happened in mere days. Mission Hills was keeping to its deadline, no matter what came its way.

  Twenty-one days later, grass was growing on the entire course. When Norman’s team returned, they were amazed. They expected to see a landscape of dirt. Instead, all they saw was green.

  The reasons behind the hurried timetable remained a mystery to almost everyone working on the project, and the niceties-be-damned approach to getting things done sometimes led to crossed wires. Midway through the project, Martin learned that a group of Mission Hills’ security guards had started spying on his workers in a bizarre effort to make sure they were putting in enough time on the job. The guards kept logbooks, documenting the hours each person worked – or at least that is what they thought they were doing. One day a dumbfounded Martin got chewed out for not being organized, for having a lazy team. Martin had no idea what they were talking about, so out came the notebooks. It turned out none of the numbers in the books were accurate – the guards couldn’t tell the Thai shapers apart. The worksite was hot and dusty, and the shapers often covered their faces with scarves. Even Martin, who had known the workers for years, had to yell, “Who’s that?” before approaching someone behind the wheel of a bulldozer.

  Martin wasn’t sure where the distrust stemmed from. “I guess it’s a China thing, I don’t know,” he said. “These guys were working their asses off. We’re already seven or eight months into the project and we’re on track to break the record for building five golf courses. What is there to complain about?”

  *

  When Zhou Xunshu first arrived at Yiganxing Golf Club in Guangzhou, workers there assumed he was the boss’s new bodyguard. That was before they saw him put on a display at the driving range. “Back then, my irons were very accurate,” Zhou said. “I think they were impressed.” Not long after he walked away from Guangzhou International, Zhou scored a job as Yiganxing’s driving range supervisor. It wasn’t his dream job, but he viewed it as a step in the right direction. Keep moving forward, Zhou told himself. Keep moving.

  Zhou soon learned that the China Golf Associatio
n had two official designations for golf professionals: “pro golfer” and “pro coach.” The titles had only existed for a decade in China, and either one represented another step up for Zhou, with the promise of a better job and better pay. “Pro golfer” was the more prestigious of the two, and while there were a variety of ways to achieve this coveted status, most seemed unrealistic for someone like him. You could become a pro by being selected to represent China in an international team event like the Asian Games, but Zhou thought, at thirty-two, he was likely too old to be considered for something like that. Or you could earn the title by finishing in the top three of an official CGA-sanctioned tournament, but Zhou wasn’t aware of too many of those open to domestic players – it seemed far-fetched, out of reach. There was a third option, however, and that was to take a test.

  The test was expensive, and notoriously difficult. It was four rounds of play on one of Guangdong’s toughest courses, and it was almost always scheduled during monsoon season, when wind was often a factor. Golfers who averaged a score of 74 or better for the four rounds passed the test – a very rare occurrence. Zhou didn’t have much money at the time, so he decided instead to take the test for pro coach certification, which was both easier and cheaper.

  He passed. He was officially on his way.

  Zhou’s new distinction was followed quickly by a new job. Dragon Lake Golf Club, a beautiful course nestled amongst lush mountains about an hour north of Guangzhou, had recently opened, and Zhou was among its first hires. He was given a dual role: golf instructor and manager of operations. His new salary, which included housing, was five thousand yuan a month, five times more than he was earning as a security guard just two years earlier. The extra cash would come in handy, because soon Zhou would have someone else to spend it on.

  Zhou and Liu Yan started work at Dragon Lake on the same day, but they didn’t really talk until later in the summer. It was July 21, a Wednesday, and the sun was bright in the sky. Liu Yan was a caddie, still in her teens, more than a decade younger than Zhou.

  Zhou’s boss had asked him to take photographs of every hole on the course that day. A caddie was expected to travel with him to hold an umbrella and protect Zhou from the powerful sun. That morning another girl had been scheduled to hold the umbrella, but she was nowhere to be found. Liu Yan happened to be standing nearby, and a foreman asked that she accompany Zhou. She protested at first – holding an umbrella for a boss on such a hot day did not sound like fun – but the foreman insisted.

  As it happened, this was not the first time Zhou had taken notice of Liu Yan. She stood out among the other female caddies: tall, slender and beautiful, with a big friendly smile that put him at ease. The two started chatting during their trip around the course, and, hole by hole, Zhou got slower and slower at taking the photos so they would have more time together. At the end of the day, he asked Liu Yan for her phone number. Not one to play games with personal matters, that night he sent her a text message asking if she wanted to have dinner with him. Liu Yan knew Zhou was technically her boss, and she thought it would simply be a meal between coworkers, a thank-you for filling in for her AWOL colleague. So she brought a friend along – might as well have Dragon Lake pick up the tab for both of them, she thought.

  “I did not expect we’d start dating,” Liu Yan said. Later, she would say that being assigned to the last-minute photo session was yuan fen, or fate.

  Liu Yan was more independent than many Chinese girls her age – she had gone off on her own in search of a job, after all – but she was from a small village in Hunan province, and wanted some aspects of her life to have a traditional feel to them. The courting process lasted months. When Zhou and Liu Yan would go on “dates,” usually dinners near the course or shopping trips to Guangzhou, they were never alone. Even though it was now clear they were more than colleagues, Liu Yan always brought one of her friends along to chaperone.

  “I spent lots of money!” Zhou recalled good-humoredly. “I had to buy dinner every day, for three people.”

  To add to Zhou’s frustration, their three-person outings were always cut short by the 10 p.m. curfew in place at Liu Yan’s employee dormitory. The dorm was only five hundred yards or so away from where Zhou lived, but after curfew she might as well have lived in Hong Kong. The nights grew longer and longer for Zhou, who anxiously awaited each dawn and the chance to lay eyes on the caddie he was falling in love with.

  By the autumn, it was clear to both Zhou and Liu Yan where things were headed, and during a conversation – between just the two of them, finally – they decided to make their relationship official. They became boyfriend and girlfriend. Their talk was on November 11 – 11/11, celebrated by young people in numbers-obsessed China as “singles day.” The following day, Zhou sent Liu Yan ninety-nine red roses.

  Half a year after an umbrella brought them together, Zhou and Liu Yan decided they had had enough of tradition. Without telling either set of parents, Liu Yan moved in to Zhou’s apartment in the curfew-less managers’ dormitory, which had air conditioning and laundry facilities, luxuries not available in the caddies’ quarters.

  The couple were now living together, but there was much they had yet to learn about each other. For example, much of Zhou’s past remained a mystery to Liu Yan. He seemed reluctant to talk about where he came from, or what he had done before he came to Dragon Lake. It seemed out of character for such a straightforward person.

  “When we asked him where he was from, he seemed embarrassed,” Liu Yan said. “But we kept asking him. He just smiled and asked me to guess. So I said, ‘Hunan?’ And he said yes. But I didn’t believe him – he’s the kind of person that it’s easy to tell when he is not telling the truth.”

  *

  Ken Chu pushed Martin and his team hard until the very end. And he made it clear each and every day that what they were doing was “top secret.” They weren’t supposed to tell anyone what they were building. It didn’t matter that the Mission Hills website, for the better part of 2003, had proudly proclaimed that, with 180 holes, Mission Hills would soon overtake Pinehurst as the largest golf club of the world. Or that in November 2002 Mission Hills held a press conference entitled “Mission Hills Golf Club on the Road to World No. 1 – Champion Golf in China.”

  Martin’s crew finished the five courses – all ninety holes – in fourteen and a half months. Faster than he ever thought possible. Not long after, Mission Hills held a lavish press conference and ceremony in which the Guinness Book of World Records proclaimed the ten-course facility the largest golf club in the world. Within months, the Chinese government would announce its ban on the construction of new golf courses.

  “Those guys amaze me,” Martin said of the Chus. “Dr. Chu, he seems like he knows shit like a fortune teller.”

  David Chu is said to have played an integral role in helping secure the 2008 Olympics for Beijing, and most who knew him assumed his connections within the Party were significant. One person who worked on the project said it was widely assumed the Chus were tipped off about the government’s plans for a moratorium, which led to the project’s mad dash to the finish line. “I think somebody said something to them,” said the source. “‘There’s going to be a crackdown, so if you are going to do something, do it – and do it big.’”

  ‌4

  ‌Playing the Game

  NOTICE FROM THE GENERAL OFFICE

  OF THE STATE COUNCIL ON SUSPENSION OF BUILDING NEW GOLF COURSES

  (No. 1 of the General Office of the State Council, promulgated on January 10, 2004)

  “The people’s governments of all provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the Central Government, all ministries and commissions under and all institutions directly subordinate to the State Council:

  “Since the reform and opening, golf courses have been developed rapidly in China, which played an active role in improving sport facilities and developing golf sport. However some serious problems have arisen in recent years. In some places, g
olf courses have been built excessively, taking up a large amount of land. In other places, the collective land of the peasants has been requisitioned and occupied in violation of the legal provisions. Unauthorized occupation of cultivated land has seriously damaged the benefits of the state and the peasants. Additionally, in some cases real estate development has been conducted surreptitiously under the guise of building golf courses. For the rational use and protection of land resources and to curb the blind construction of golf courses, the State Council hereby notifies relevant issues as follows:

  “I. New golf course construction shall be suspended. From the date of issuance of this notice up to the time when new relevant policies come out, no local people’s government at any level and no institution under the State Council shall approve the construction of any new golf course project. Projects already in progress that were started without following the standard procedure of obtaining approval of planning, project initiation, land-use and assessment of environmental impact, etc., must stop construction immediately. All planned projects that have not yet started construction must be canceled. As for golf course projects with approved project proposals and feasibility study reports, but without approvals for land-use or project initiation, approvals for land-use or project initiation shall not be granted. For those projects with approval of planning, land-use and project initiation, but whose construction has not yet started, those projects must be abandoned.

  “II. Cleaning up golf course projects that have been built or are being built. The local people’s government at all levels should immediately clean up and thoroughly inspect the golf course projects that have already been or are currently being built within their respective jurisdictions. The emphases of the cleanup and inspection lie in: whether the procedures for approval of golf course construction projects are complete, whether the construction project conforms to the overall planning on utilization of land and urban planning, whether the land use conforms to relevant laws, regulations and provisions stated in the ‘Notice of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council on Further Strengthening Land Administration and Earnestly Protecting Cultivated Land’ (No. 11 [1997] of the Central Committee of the CPC).