Playing on the Most Extreme Golf Course
When we talk about golf, it will appear green golf courses and bright sunshine in our minds. Yes, it’s a golf course looks like we saw in our lives. It makes us curious about what does the war zone such as Afghanistan look like? It will be the most extreme golf in the world, not mention the half-a-dozen heavily armed bodyguards fan out around him and scan the Kabul Golf Club course, what we are talking about is just the course. It is one big hazard, with unfair fairways of rock and thistles, sand-and-oil “greens” and the chance of falling into a ditch making even the wicked of traditional sand traps and water hazards seem benign.
But in a country where guns far outnumber golf clubs and diplomats live in compounds set deep behind blast walls and razor wire, it’s not easy to get out and get some fresh air. The fresh air at Afghanistan’s you can get only at the golf course, which is a half-hour drive out of Kabul. It’s certainly easier to breathe than the dust and pollution of the chaotic capital, but golfers accustomed to the eye-soothing sight of immaculate lawns would be in for a shock. The course was built some 60 years ago during the rule of the then-king, Zahir Shah, but has been destroyed by 30 years of war: a line of rusting Soviet tanks from the 1980s can still be seen on a nearby hill. The Russians were followed by civil war and rule by the hard-line Islamist Taliban, who were ousted by a US-led invasion in 2001 for sheltering Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden after the 911 attacks on New York and Washington. Deminers cleared the course, but as an extra precaution Afzal set several thousand sheep roaming over it for five days, they set off no mines and all survived.
They can leave the fancy two-tone spiked shoes behind, being well-advised to don army style boots to cope with the terrain. As for clubs, forget about the state-of-the-art Titanium driver that cost a few hundred dollars and choose, like anybody else, from a dusty collection of bags containing ancient woods and irons in the Spartan, single-room “clubhouse”. Then, equipped with two caddies, one to carry the bag, the other to stake out the likely landing area of your shot so that he can maybe see the ball ricochet off a rock into a pile of rubble, you are ready to play. The fore-caddy will also warn picnickers and cricketers and the riders of passing donkeys that balls may soon be coming their way. They tend to be most accommodating, shifting temporarily from the direct line of fire and applauding any good shot in this bizarre game, in which Usackas and his party of one reporter and Afghanistan’s only golf pro were the sole players one recent Friday.
The most important tip playing in such course is playing aggressively. There are no gimmes. Don’t even ask for the stroke index because this is Afghanistan and they’re all tough. The tee boxes seem invisible in the scruffy terrain, except the one who has a scratch handicap and plays the course like the pro that he is. The fairways can barely be distinguished from the rough and are scarred by ditches every 20 yards or so in preparation for a sprinkler system and dreams of covering the course in grass, but it has been like that for a year.
The golf courses are grey there, which made form sand and waste oil in an effort to provide a smooth surface. And the holes are like everything here — relative. Some have cups, others are just scratched depressions in the sand. Playing on the most extreme golf course is very different experience from the other courses. You can get an extreme experience.
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