The Forbidden Game

by Dan Washburn

  Zhou did buy a membership at a gym a short bus ride from home, and he worked out for a few hours each afternoon, learning how to master the equipment there. He said he used this exercise to “balance his life.” After the gym it was time for dinner, followed by an hour or two with Hanhan – rare moments of happiness for Zhou – some TV and then bed. It was the same routine every day.

  Yet, for the first time in more than a decade, that routine did not include golf. Pride would not allow Zhou to return to Haoyun, his old driving range. And he had little motivation to find another place to practice. The tournament schedule was nearly empty, save for the annoying pro-am that had brought him to Beijing, and a couple other events he had no chance of winning.

  “If I had the money, I would emigrate to Hong Kong, Taiwan or Macau,” he said, pouring another glass of Yanjing beer. “That way I could attend more tournaments. Many Chinese winners in international sporting events say they feel proud of China, but I don’t think so.”

  The restaurant was empty now. Even the kitchen workers had wrapped up their card game and left.

  “I’m very happy to be drinking beer,” Zhou said. “I have finished three bottles now. Last night, I drank two bottles of beer, and today I shot 2-under.” He ordered another bottle, betting four beers would mean 4-under in round two.

  “If I can finish second here, and make a cut in the two tournaments in South Korea, I have great opportunity to be in the top twelve at the end of the year. Finally get my pro card.” He sipped his beer. “I know that is impossible, but I still can daydream like that.”

  He finished his fourth beer and a taxi was called. Outside, everything but the flicker of restaurant neon and the glow of two taxi headlights was black. It was not yet 10 p.m., but that was late for this neighborhood on the outskirts of Beijing, which, aside from the golf courses, comprised farms, small factories and a few villages.

  Zhou sighed as he got into the taxi. “After drinking some beer, I will sleep well, I hope,” he announced to no one in particular.

  “I think you are right,” the driver said, and drove off.

  Zhou shot 1-over, not 4-under, in the second round at Beijing, but by the end of four rounds he had managed to finish in seventeenth place and earn a 24,000-yuan pre-tax payday, his best haul of the season. But his daydream was not to be realized. Later that month, he missed the cut at both tournaments in South Korea. In October, he finished sixty-first at the Midea China Classic in Guangzhou, earning a measly 1,040 yuan. And the Omega China Tour never started up again. The abbreviated four-tournament schedule marked the end of the tour’s five-year run.

  China Tour organizers said the tour folded because Omega, the title sponsor, had backed out. Omega said they hadn’t backed out and were just as confused about what was going on as the players. One person close to the situation simply blamed the “global economic situation.”

  “It was a low valley in my life,” Zhou later said. “No tournaments, no job. I felt like a failure without any future.”

  *

  Zhou may have been struggling to find a job, but Martin Moore was overwhelmed with them. According to the National Golf Federation, fewer than fifty new golf courses opened in the United States in 2009, down from a peak of nearly four hundred openings in 2000 and the lowest total the NGF had on record since the early 1980s. Meanwhile, in China, it was estimated that as many as 250 courses were under construction, with some 600 more in various stages of planning. It was unclear exactly what percentage of new courses China accounted for globally, but one leading course designer said the figure was sure to be “staggering.”

  So too were the sizes of the projects being discussed, one after the other featuring numbers that would have been unheard of before the likes of Mission Hills. “This year alone I have probably heard of ten projects that are ten-course deals,” one golf design professional said. “All over China, from Beijing to Kunming to Qingdao to Hainan to Chengdu. Ten-course deals are like the magic number now.”

  China was propping up the entire industry. Like it or not, if you weren’t working in Hainan or somewhere else in China, you probably weren’t working at all. And, in 2009, no one was working more than Martin.

  Martin had bought out his Flagstick business partners, golf course architects Brian Curley and Lee Schmidt, who by then, with their special focus on Asia, were among the busiest designers in the world. Flagstick had begun as the construction arm of Schmidt-Curley Design, and was intended to focus primarily on building Schmidt-Curley courses. But Martin wanted to get more projects on his plate. More and more designers were looking to China, and Martin wanted Flagstick to build their courses, too. Schmidt and Curley weren’t crazy about the idea. They saw it as helping the competition and suggested it would be best if Schmidt-Curley and Flagstick parted ways. “I paid a pretty penny to them,” Martin said.

  Over the years, he’d realized some people just didn’t have the right temperament for China. There was a project manager, someone he would hire in a second in the United States, that Martin felt sure “wouldn’t stand a prayer” in China. He wouldn’t have the patience for Chinese politics. He wouldn’t be able to self-censor. “He’d get in a meeting with the Chinese and tell them all to go fuck themselves,” Martin mused. “He’d say, ‘You guys are stupid. That’s not what I said.’ You know, that kind of guy. He’d do that in a meeting in America and get respect from people. But, he’d get killed over it in China.”

  Martin had put in the hard spadework, and it was time to reap the rewards. After the buyout, he went on what he called a “splurge.” “Fuck everybody,” he said. “I’m going to sign every job I can get.” He spent the majority of his time chasing down new projects, sending out letters to every golf course architect he knew. This hustling paid off. He went from three jobs in China to fifteen.

  China, of course, was the only place in the world where numbers like that were even possible. Everyone in the industry was knocking on China’s door, and Martin was getting a lot of calls. “Do you need help?” underworked colleagues would inevitably ask. Big firms started coming to him for advice, too. They knew they wanted to be in China, but they had no idea where to start. Would he be willing to give them some pointers? Martin was reluctant to give up his “secrets,” but he did tell them what he had long been telling everyone else all these years:

  It ain’t like America.

  Getting your money is harder than hell.

  They don’t know what they’re doing.

  They don’t listen to you.

  It’s frustrating.

  Some of the conversations Martin had with potential competitors actually reassured him. China was going to eat these executives alive. For example, one person heading to the Beijing Golf Show for the first time had sought out Martin, who prepared himself for the usual “Business in China 101” line of questioning. Instead, he got something like this:

  So we land at the Beijing airport?

  Are there buses that can take us to the hotels?

  How do we get around?

  How about hotels?

  Are there any you can recommend?

  How about eating over there?

  I’ve heard you’ve got to be really careful over there because what you eat can make you sick.

  Is that true?

  “It’s like, come on,” Martin said. “We’re talking about flying into Beijing, not Changbaishan or Changsha or someplace like that. We’re talking about the biggest city there is, where there’s three hundred taxis waiting outside the airport, where there are more five-star hotels than any city you’ve been, where there are some of the best restaurants in the world. I mean, he better not ever leave Beijing, you know?”

  The person who worried about taxis, hotels and food was not the only China rookie at the Beijing Golf Show that year. The number of American golf architects pitching their wares alone had increased fivefold from the previous year. The competition for new jobs was going to be fierce. But Martin felt confident about his track reco
rd of building golf courses – and not just any golf courses, but high quality ones – in the challenging environment. “The owners want to know what you’ve done in China,” said Martin. “The owners know how their business works here. And they know the ‘green’ guy doesn’t stand a chance.”

  At an introductory meeting with a developer, Martin would invariably whip out his map. It was large and printed in color, designed to make a splash. He would fold it out and show the developer all of Flagstick’s projects in China, each marked with a flagstick, of course. “That impresses clients,” Martin said.

  Price was important in these early discussions, but perhaps not in the way most people would expect. Martin often heard that Flagstick was too expensive, and even some of his staff suggested they should start offering a cut-rate package to better compete with local Chinese construction companies. “I’m not doing it,” Martin would reply to such proposals. “You know, that’s not who I’m competing against. They want to hire them for half the price, let them hire them. That’s not the same service we provide.”

  Just as often, he was being told his prices were too low – especially when he was talking to some of the high-end builders. Golf was still new to many Chinese developers, and they often had no idea how much it should cost to build a golf course. Really, they had no idea what services a golf construction management firm offered. They just knew they needed help. So if one firm came in with a bid of forty thousand dollars a month, and another came in at twenty thousand dollars, the Chinese owner might actually lean toward the more expensive option. “A lot of the Chinese mentality is that they want the best, and they’ve got the money,” Martin said. “They think if they pay them more, they are going to get a lot better service. That might not necessarily be true, but a lot of them think that way. I know we’ve worked a bunch of jobs where we were the most expensive bidders.”

  Sometimes, the lack of experience building golf courses inspired Chinese developers to make strange requests. Martin recalled one owner who wanted to build a water-themed golf course. No golf carts. No cart paths. Golfers would travel from hole to hole by boat. Another owner wanted to build a villa right in the middle of a par-3 fairway. And then there was the guy who wanted a hole to be a giant funnel – anyone whose ball landed within thirty feet of the pin on this par-3 hole was guaranteed a hole-in-one. “Mini-golf on a professional golf course,” Martin sighed.

  To show potential clients the company was established and serious about both golf and China, Martin opened an office in Kunming. He also set up a legal Chinese company, Kunming Flagstick Consulting and Management (unsurprisingly, they were advised not to have “golf” in the name), enabling him to offer contracts in yuan, which gave customers added convenience and allowed him to work with businesses that didn’t have large amounts of US dollars at their disposal. He said that being able to sign contracts in yuan “was huge.”

  An office and a map weren’t enough to land a job in China, however. He had to invest a large amount of time and money in pursuing prospects. There was usually a long, drawn-out courting process. Every golf course, he came to realize, was a potential girlfriend who liked to be spoiled, and enjoyed playing hard to get. It wasn’t abnormal for Martin to meet with a potential client six or seven times before everyone signed on the dotted line; one client played hard to get for more than a year. At least half of the time they would meet over big dinners that merged into baijiu-fueled drinkfests, Martin picking up the tab. He would make sure to come bearing presents, too. Maybe a nice golf club, or a Flagstick shirt, or a hat signed by Jack Nicklaus. If he was getting really deep in the process, he might break out something a bit bigger, like a set of Jack Nicklaus golf clubs.

  He had learned that the key to these pre-deal dialogues was simple: he had to be sure he was meeting with the right person. “You can waste a lot of time and effort… if you’re talking to the No. 3 or No. 4 man, and you don’t know he’s the No. 3 or No. 4 man,” Martin said. “He’ll let you believe he makes the decisions, but all he wants is a piece of the action, and a free meal or two.”

  Once the job was contracted, Martin would inform his project managers to stay adaptable. Every job, every owner, was different. There was no how-to for building a golf course in China – and even if there was, it’d have to be written in pencil. “You need to be able to meet that owner, that client, the first time, and you really have to figure out their personality, their way of business,” he said. “What they like and what they don’t like and all that. And then adapt your management skills to it.”

  *

  In 1984, when China welcomed its first modern-day golf course, the venerable travel book publisher Fodor’s came out with a guidebook to the People’s Republic. “You need have no fear about money dealings with the Chinese,” the book told its readers confidently. “They are always scrupulously honest, and will follow you out of the shop to return a couple of coins if you happen to leave them on a counter.”

  Martin’s experience during China’s golf course boom hadn’t been quite so quaint. In fact, he guessed some 95 percent of his industry colleagues would have little nice to say about their money dealings with the Chinese. “From a business standpoint, people say they’re liars and they’re crooked and all that stuff,” Martin said. “But, you know what, that’s fine. We’re successful here and the others aren’t. They don’t have the patience for it, and they don’t know how to deal with the Chinese way of doing business.”

  And patience was essential.

  Martin said many Western businessmen who arrived in China full of enthusiasm were “blown away” by how things operate. Some would take it personally, get pissed off, and leave. “I think that’s one of the keys to our success,” he said. “We know there are side deals. We know that the owner’s rep, who might be our direct contact, has all kinds of deals and we know that’s going on. I always tell my guys that we have to do the best we can to make it right.”

  For example, if Martin’s team discovered that a developer’s No. 2 or No. 3 man was getting a side deal from a certain gravel supplier, who happened to be providing the wrong kind of gravel, Martin instructed his project managers to tread very carefully. “If we become an obstacle for that guy,” he said, “he’s going to get us kicked out of there. He will do it and he will succeed at it. And we won’t stand a chance in hell.”

  Most important, he said, was to stay out of price negotiations over construction materials, because that’s where the lucrative side deals occur, and it was a quick way to make an enemy. “Fight for quality all the way,” he would tell his guys, don’t get tangled up over a yuan here and there. “I just want the quality to be good,” he said. But it wasn’t enough to fight; you also had to document that fight with memo after memo to the developer. The paper trail was important. “At the end of the day, we can’t force the developer’s guy to do something. If he does something we know is wrong then our ass will be covered ten times over. If one of the big, big investors comes down and says, ‘Why did you let them do that?’ – it’s going to be documented.”

  Then there were the “experts” that often came attached to jobs. These people may or may not have tangible experience building golf courses, but for one reason or another they had the ear of the owner (who usually had no experience building golf courses). Often they were the owner’s friends or confidants, and they were paid to monitor the construction process. The only way they had of proving their worth was to point out mistakes, real or imagined, or take credit for things they didn’t do. “Problem here is we get people who don’t know anything about golf, and they get so involved that they just screw up everything,” one of Martin’s project managers said. “So you’ve got to keep fighting them and telling them that’s not the way you do it. And it’s tiring.”

  Martin said such meddling was representative of a general lack of trust common in business relationships throughout the country, especially when one of the parties in the relationship is foreign. “It’s a China thing,” he said.
“They screw everybody, so they think everybody screws them.” This constant air of skepticism created reams of paperwork for Martin’s crews. Everything had to be logged and documented. It was a never-ending effort to defend their work and prove their own worth.

  Martin often wished he could ask for the same proof of worth from some of the subcontractors he was forced to work with. On one project Martin worked on in Yunnan, he said the cart path contractors were “horrible” and built “the worst cart paths you’ve seen in your life.” Everyone, from Martin’s project managers to representatives of the Chinese developer, was out there telling the contractor that his work was unacceptable, that they needed to rip everything out and start over. “Well, they were the local government mafia,” Martin said. “And they weren’t going to rip out anything. And there’s nothing we can do. They’re basically going to let them put in a shitty cart path for fifty-four holes, pay them all their money and get them off the job, and then go hire someone else to come rip it out and start all over.” But what about those times when a contractor did a good job? “I’ve been told that I’m not allowed to say that the contractor is doing a great job, even if he is,” one of Martin’s project managers reported. “Because if I say that, then the owner thinks I’m getting paid under the table!”

  Contractors’ profit margins were also unusually high in China. In the United States, contractors who won a job were likely to get, at best, a 7 to 10 percent profit. In China, that figure could rise as high as 40 to 50 percent. There were simple reasons for this. First of all, contractors were often obliged to pay commissions to the people who helped them secure the job in the first place. Then they had to issue more payments to the people who helped them perform their work with minimal interference from government regulatory bodies. It was said some people added a line item to all of their budgets: “NEGOTIATE WITH GOVERNMENT AUTHORITIES.” That covered all sorts of contingencies (and sounded slightly better than “bribes”).