The Forbidden Game

by Dan Washburn

  After a solid first round that saw him birdie three of his first seven holes, Zhou found himself in a strong position to earn some respect. He shot a 2-under-par 70, good enough to be tied for thirty-third place in the 152-man field. There he was, his name up on the top quarter of the leaderboard, surrounded by foreign names and foreign flags. What surprised Zhou most was how comfortable he felt out on the course, even with the extra scrutiny that came with being a “local.” He was putting well and his mind was clear. It was as if his lack of preparation and his lack of expectations were turning into positives.

  But he still had to play the second round. A quadruple bogey on hole No. 4, a double bogey on No. 6, and Zhou was already 6 over and out of contention. He finished with an 82, twelve strokes worse than the previous day, and was eliminated. He went back to his job at Seasons International in sole possession of 146th place.

  “I think my golf club had high expectations for me in that tournament,” Zhou said. “And after the first day, when I shot a 70, they were very happy. After my performance in round two, I don’t think the club cared too much about it, but I felt very upset. It was my first tournament since I started working for them, and playing poorly made me feel like I had committed a crime.”

  Zhou didn’t have long to feel guilty. In less than a week, he was off to Shenzhen to take part in the first leg of the China PGA Champions Tour, one of two new tournament series geared at China’s domestic golfers. The Champions Tour, with $200,000 purses per event – double what had normally been on offer on the Omega China Tour – was organized by DYM International Sports Development, a Hong Kong company owned by the father of China-born and Canada-raised Su Dong.

  Su, who had turned pro in 2009 after three top-three finishes on the China Tour the previous year, was only twenty years old, but he represented the future of the game. There was a new generation of players nipping at the heels of homegrown and self-trained older golfers like Zhou. Mostly rich kids, these Chinese players were young enough to have grown up playing the game, and wealthy enough to afford quality coaching.

  When Su and the other well-to-do, foreign-educated amateurs found themselves lined up next to their older and more rough-and-tumble counterparts – the Chinese working pros – the contrasts were striking. From their hair, to their clothing, to their meticulously coached and elegant swings.

  In post-round interviews at a 2008 China Tour event, eighteen-year-old Hu Mu – who had been saddled with high expectations since someone labeled him “China’s Tiger Woods” when he was in his early teens – unwittingly made clear just how stacked the deck was against the self-trained golfers on the tour. Hu credited his fine performance to a call he had placed the night before to his coach, the world-famous swing doctor David Leadbetter. Later in that tournament he thanked Dr. Jim Loehr, a renowned performance psychologist, for the focus he maintained on the course. The reaction of players like Zhou? “What’s a performance psychologist?” Hu played one year at the University of Florida before turning pro.

  The playing field may have been slightly more level in Shenzhen than at the OneAsia event, but Zhou’s rustiness remained. He did not feel good about his chances. But, quite to his surprise, he didn’t much care, either. That was good, because he opened with a sloppy round that included five bogeys on the back nine, resulting in a 4-over 76. His strong putting had carried over from Chengdu, but his drives were all over the place. His performance was exactly the opposite of what he had come to expect in years past. Still, even with his poor play, Zhou finished day one tied for thirty-seventh place. He suddenly realized he might not be the only Chinese golfer who hadn’t been practicing.

  Zhou seemed to have found the Zen that Scottish coach Michael Dickie had said he was lacking back in 2008. His calmness garnered him solid, if not spectacular, rounds of 73, 70 and 72, and somehow this effort was good enough for an eighth place finish, seven strokes back from winner Zhang Lianwei, the legend himself.

  “I don’t know how I finished in the top ten,” Zhou said. “I didn’t perform very well. I guess the other players just played worse than me.” But any celebrations were necessarily brief. After the tournament, he immediately threw himself back into his job at Seasons International. Though he had about six weeks until his next event, he didn’t start practicing in earnest until the final seven days.

  This was partially due to time – he had very little, after the demands of his work – but he had not recovered the feeling of motivation that had consumed him in the past. There was no urgency. No drive. No giant chip on his shoulder. No hint, no inkling he was about to enter the most important tournament of his career.

  *

  A smaller circuit, called the China Challenge Tour and operated by the state-owned China Sports Travel organization, was also making its debut this year. The prize money for the Challenge Tour was more in line with events in previous years: 800,000 yuan per tournament. The first event had a rather awkward English name: the Handa Cup Philanthropy in China. (The Chinese name translated directly to the much more manageable “Handa Fraternity Cup.”) The cup was a joint venture between the China Golf Association and the International Sports Promotion Society, a Tokyo-based organization founded in 2006 by Dr. Haruhisa Handa, a “golf philanthropist” dedicated to supporting charitable causes through sporting events. Ten percent of the prize money from the tournament was to be donated to charities aiding the disabled in China.

  Zhou was fairly certain his mandatory donation to charity, if he was lucky to win anything at all, would be minimal. His confidence was already low, and the course, at the Jinghua Golf Club about twenty-five miles east of downtown Beijing on the banks of the Chaobai River, was known for its difficulty. The course’s Korean architect, Tiger Song, had put water into play on more than half of Jinghua’s holes. Zhou knew his typically aggressive style of play could prove disastrous on such a tricky course, so he decided to employ a more conservative approach, one that seemed to match his current mindset.

  Early on, however, it didn’t seem as though any approach was going to work for Zhou. The four-day tournament started on a Sunday, which was unusual, but no Beijing courses were willing to close their doors to business during the prime days of the week, especially for an event featuring mostly domestic players. It was brutally hot – reaching ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit (thirty-five degrees Celsius), with 82 percent humidity – and Zhou slogged his way through the front nine. He was 2 over at the turn, buried in the middle of the pack, and showing no signs, either to himself or anyone else, that he was about to break loose.

  Then something happened. It wasn’t dramatic. Probably nobody noticed. But Zhou collected himself, like a cat preparing to pounce. A birdie on hole No. 10, a birdie on No. 12, and he was back at even par. Zhou added two more birdies, offset by two more bogeys, and entered the clubhouse with a 72. He was in nineteenth place, four strokes behind the leaders. There was nothing spectacular about his round. He surely hadn’t raised any eyebrows. But Zhou, for whatever reason, was feeling good.

  Monday was cooler, and it was windy. The course was almost free of spectators, but if you closed your eyes when the wind swirled through the tall trees lining the fairways it sounded like a large gallery of whispering fans was following the action. And if that had actually been the case, they would have been chasing Zhou Xunshu, who was far and away the best player on the course that day.

  While the wind wreaked havoc on the field, Zhou occupied his own pocket of calm. The leaderboard was littered with bogeys and double bogeys and the occasional triple or quad. Most players were sliding decidedly downward. Sunday’s leaders – Chen Xiaoma and Yang Jinbiao, who both carded 4-under 68s in the first round, were a combined 10 over par for the day. Zhou, meanwhile, was climbing steadily upward. He was even par through the first nine holes, and tallied three birdies on a bogeyless back nine. His 69 put him in a tie for the best round of the day – no one else had shot better than a 73. When the final scores were counted, Zhou Xunshu’s name sat alone at
the top of the leaderboard.

  In years past, Zhou might have cracked under the pressure. This was the first time in his career he’d ever entered the last two rounds of a tournament in the final grouping, let alone with the outright lead. On Tuesday, he didn’t wait long to make it clear he was not shying away from his moment in the spotlight – he was seizing it. He birdied two of his first three holes and opened up a convincing lead. After eight straight pars, he added another birdie on the twelfth hole. Two more pars later, his lead over second place was a commanding five strokes. Zhou’s goal of finishing in the top three seemed a foregone conclusion. His dream of winning a tournament was well within his reach. Somehow, despite his lack of preparation, Zhou was playing the best golf of his life.

  “I’m more relaxed in my mind,” Zhou said. “It’s not like before, when I would stress over every stroke, because if I didn’t play well my family would starve. Before, I was too aggressive, too anxious to win a tournament. Without prize money, I couldn’t support my family. So I viewed every stroke as my last chance to succeed.”

  The break between domestic tournaments, coupled with his own period of extended unemployment, had been “torture,” he said. If he had learned anything from the ordeal, it was the value of patience. Exactly what Michael Dickie had tried to counsel little more than a year earlier in Shanghai.

  “Yes, Michael told me to be patient, to slow down my pace,” Zhou admitted. “He told me to raise my head, to lengthen my stride, and to speak more deliberately. He said all of these things could help calm me down during competition.”

  It took Zhou a while, but he finally decided to put Dickie’s advice into practice. “Before this year, every stroke I took was overly ambitious,” Zhou said. “I played with too much urgency. I took too many risks. Now, I want to think and make sure every stroke is steady and secure. If I want to win, I have to put safety first, right? Before, I never understood this cause and effect. Now I do. Now I am beginning to understand what Michael really meant about being patient.”

  Hole No. 15 at Jinghua was a pretty straightforward 458-yard par-4. It was surrounded by water – the fairway and green occupy a small peninsula that juts out into a lake – but the playable area was wide enough that, for a skilled golfer, the water rarely came into play. The bunkers, on the other hand, were a different story. Four of them framed the green like a pendant necklace, and they had claimed the hopes of more than a few players during the tournament. Statistically, the fifteenth hole was the fifth most difficult on the course, causing fifty-five bogeys, or worse.

  But Zhou had managed to birdie the hole in rounds one and two. He had seemingly figured it out. Given his large lead, he felt a conservative approach made the most sense again. So, he held back a bit on his tee shot, going more for accuracy than distance. The safe move, he told himself. The smart move.

  It very well might have been, too, if only he had hit the ball cleanly. Zhou was perhaps too concerned with being careful, and his driver only made contact with the top half of the ball. It skipped forward ungracefully, finally settling around 150 yards away from him in the left rough.

  The hole marked the end of conservative, Zen-like Zhou. He was beginning to tire, and he desperately wanted the round to be over. He went for the green with his second stroke, and instead found a bunker. On his first attempt in the sand, the ball didn’t budge. On his second, it sailed over the green and into the rough. He managed to get up and down from there, but the damage had been done. The double bogey turned his five-stroke lead into a three-stroke lead. One of the earlier leaders, Chen Xiaoma, birdied the following hole. This shrank Zhou’s once insurmountable advantage to two. That’s where he remained heading into the final round.

  In his post-round interview, Zhou told reporters his plan for the final round was to not think too much. But thinking was all he could do. Zhou had never been this close to winning a tournament before. He’d never been this close to achieving his dream. Every time he tried to empty his mind, a thousand new thoughts forced their way in. They played like a slideshow of images in his head, of what he wanted to do on each hole, each stroke. Images of him winning, raising his arms on the eighteenth green, raising the trophy in front of a wall of flashing cameras. And then negative images fought their way into view – hooking a drive, missing a putt, sailing the ball into the water. He shook his head, trying to reshuffle the pile. But he had lost his sense of control. He was having anxiety dreams before he even fell asleep.

  Zhou went out to dinner, like he normally would have, thinking the diversion would help clear his head. He had a couple beers, like he always did, thinking it would help him sleep. Neither seemed to work. He managed about five hours’ fitful sleep that night. He couldn’t stop thinking about winning, but did he actually think he could win?

  “I knew I wanted to win,” Zhou would say later. “But I guess I wasn’t sure if I could do it. I thought about it too much, about how to win. I was really distracted.”

  In the final round, Zhou’s main competition was Chen Xiaoma and Su Dong. Zhou had often played against Chen on the Omega China Tour, and they came from similar backgrounds – from the family’s fields to a job on a driving range in their twenties. They were the old generation, matched up against the new. But Su never really made a run in the final round, and it was clear early on that the Handa Fraternity Cup was going to be a slugfest between the two journeymen, when Zhou bogeyed the second hole and Chen birdied. Just like that, the two were dead even.

  Two holes later, Zhou bogeyed again, and Chen took the lead for the first time since early in the second round. Another birdie by Chen on the fifth hole, and it was Zhou who was now staring at a two-stroke deficit. The bad images that bullied their way into Zhou’s head the night before appeared to be winning.

  But Zhou battled back. He’d been fighting his whole life, and he wasn’t going to give up now. By the start of the back nine, Zhou had regained a share of the lead, and he and Chen remained knotted up until the fourteenth hole.

  “Even when he had a two-stroke lead, I didn’t let it bother me,” Zhou said. “I just worried about myself. I never took Chen as a scary competitor. I never thought he could beat me. We both weren’t putting well. I missed several birdie chances. We were neck and neck.”

  Meanwhile, poor Liu Yan was back home in Chongqing following the action in perhaps the most frustrating way possible. There was no TV coverage of the domestic golf tournaments. No radio, either. So fans trying to follow the action remotely – and, to be honest, these were mostly the wives and girlfriends of players – were left with two options: either try to distract yourself for five hours, maybe go shopping or do some housework, and wait for a phone call from the player, or spend the afternoon staring anxiously at a computer screen, pressing “refresh” repeatedly, waiting for the numbers to come, muttering, Why haven’t those idiots posted new numbers yet?

  Liu Yan had chosen the second option.

  Obsessing over the online tournament scoreboard was by far the most maddening of the two options, but it was also hard to resist, because it was the most immediate, even if the rate at which the numbers were updated was wildly inconsistent. Often, scores would be updated three holes at a time. There were sudden bursts of excitement or disappointment, followed by long periods of jittery inactivity.

  The interpretation of a golf leaderboard in China is quite simple: black numbers are good; red are even better; and blue are bad – very bad. But the computer screen offers no context. There were no explanations, no backstories, just batches of scores magically appearing on her screen. No nuance, just numbers. It’s the most one-dimensional way to follow such a complex and multi-layered game. Ahead then, behind now, ahead again. It was all she had. So, as her husband forged ahead toward the most important five holes of his golfing career, she sat in front of her computer, and hit “refresh” again and again.

  Hole No. 14 was a 416-yard, dogleg-right par-4. The fairway curved around a lake, with the most direct route to the green sai
ling the ball over the water. And Zhou decided to take the most direct route. His tee shot was perfect, leaving him eighty-four yards from the green. Then he saw his opportunity: Chen’s drive ended up in the rough. Zhou knew he had a chance to get a stroke back. He took out his lob wedge, hoping to place himself in line for a birdie putt. But Zhou hit it shorter than he wanted, and the ball found the edge of the green. Instead of skipping forward, it spun backwards, and settled into the fairway.

  Meanwhile, Chen escaped from the rough unscathed. His second shot found the fringe, and he putted to save par. Zhou putted poorly, and his third bogey of the round had him back down by one stroke.

  Zhou bogeyed again on the fifteenth hole, after his drive landed in the rough. Another par for Chen, and Chen’s lead was back to two strokes.

  “I began to be impatient,” Zhou said. “I was too aggressive. I wanted to finish the round as soon as possible.”

  Chen stopped being Zhou’s only concern. By now, Su Dong was just a couple shots behind Zhou, too close for comfort. And two players in the group ahead were also closing in on his score. Another mistake and, forget winning a tournament, Zhou could find himself outside of the top three.

  But Zhou didn’t panic. He knew there were opportunities for him to make up ground on the final three holes. Hole No. 16, a 544-yard par-5, was the easiest of all the holes during the tournament. In fact, it was the only hole on which the entire field was under par on average. Zhou himself had birdied it twice. So when Chen sent his tee shot into the rough, Zhou saw another opportunity. With a solid drive, a birdie was well within Zhou’s reach.

  The crowd was not large for this final round – it was a Wednesday, and China’s domestic tour, after all. Less than thirty people were following the lead group, and Zhou sensed each one of them was rooting against him. No matter, Zhou thought to himself, I’ve been the underdog my whole life.