A Touch Of Class - Lewine Mair

Golf in the region has remained true to it's culture and roots while also importing the best of everything that the world has to offer.

It is as if magic carpets of lush green fairway have been unfurled across the Middle East over the past 20 years. Not only that, but the carpets have the finest labels. Ernie Els, Gary Player, Colin Montgomerie, Ian Baker-Finch and Tiger Woods all boast their own designs, with each having been transported by a blank canvas of desert terrain. When, for instance, Baker-Finch was selected as the architect for Arabian Ranches, the former Open champion kept his mind open until he had developed a feel for the area. “I spent days on site,” he recalls. “Time and time again, I went walking through the dunes with the camels to decide how to make the best use of the land.”

Colin Montgomerie, when he assessed the glittering acres of sand which awaited him at Emirates Hills, opted for a layout in which desert and the Scottish links of home would come together. “It seemed like the perfect union,” said the Ryder Cup man. Els, who celebrated the opening of the first of his Els Clubs at the mindboggling Dubai Sports City, could see a touch of Pinehurst and Royal Melbourne written in the sand when he went to work. The Dubai Creek Golf and Yacht Club, designed by Karl Litten with some more recent input from Thomas Björn, is doubly blessed. Apart from the gently undulating fairways and a veritable army of palm trees, its position alongside the creek brings past and present together as nowhere else. One moment the eye is attracted to the latest multi-million pound yacht, the next, it will spy a working dhow which has a still longer history than golf itself. Litten, whose name also attaches to the Majlis Course at The Emirates, is not the only out-andout golf course architect as opposed to player/ architect on the loose in the Middle East. Peter Harradine is responsible for the outstanding Abu Dhabi GC, while he also shaped the idyllic ninehole Jebel Ali and is the man behind Al Hamra. Robert Trent Jones II, meantime, has brought his usual touch of class to the Four Seasons GC. Far more than in other lands, those playingtheir part in developing golf here have recognised the importance of celebrating the region’s identity. The visitor is never going to think that he could be playing one more American country club. What is more, if he wants still more of a Middle Eastern flavour, he can try one of the remaining sand courses where the early oil workers would play. The Al Ghazal course in Abu Dhabi used to stage the World Sand Golf Championship which had an appeal all its own for the European Tour professionals. In 2005, Padraig Harrington took the 18-hole event sufficiently seriously to have a full-scale practice round.

Browns, as they call the greens, call for much the same loving attention as the grass variety and they get it. In truth, the condition of all the desert courses takes everyone aback. The rough, with all the watering and the sunshine, is at once uniform and robust. However, it is where the rough ends that the real trouble begins in the shape of vast areas of desert waste. Peter and here you have it in abundance. The golfer who ends up in this but it is, quite literally, hit or miss as to whether he can do much with it. He could find himself in a tangle of flowering shrub or, alternatively, behind a lunar-like rock.  The clubhouses in the Middle East are as special as the courses, with that at Dubai Creek – depicting a ship in sail – having set standards which have been maintained the clubhouse has the look of a
Bedouin village, while Abu Dhabi’s of golf’s most famous holes. Yet these buildings merely reflect what is happening in the cities as one new and stylish construction holds its own with those that have gone before. Hotels continue to proliferate, with
the Burj Al Arab in Dubai and the Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi having, by popular accord, been granted more stars than the Milky Way. The Emirates Palace is a veritable city in itself. The European Tour has traditionally arrived mid-way through January for the run of the Abu Dhabi Championship, the Qatar Masters and the Dubai Desert Classic. Abu Dhabi, which has sired three grand winners in its first three years in Chris DiMarco, Paul Casey and Martin Kaymer, is so well-ordered an affair as to have had one rookie professional remarking, lightly, “Everything after this can only be downhill.” As from next year, the players will be back in the autumn for the first Dubai World Championship, which is to take place at the Jumeirah Golf Estates on November 19-22. Players will spend the year vying to become one of the 50 who will qualify, via the Race to Dubai, to play for a cheque of $1.66 million. Were the winner also to come out on top in the Race to Dubai itself, he could up his $1.66 to $3 million. Leisurecorp have put up the money for what is seen as the European Tour’s answer to the FedEx Cup in the States. And a very good answer it would seem to be in that, even now, a player of the calibre of Justin Rose has said that he wants to be a part of it and is reducing his American playing schedule accordingly. That the players love coming the Middle East is not simply down to the courses and the purses. The cosmopolitan collection of residents in the Middle East ensures that each player has his own countrymen among the spectators. On the last day, everyone will come together to watch the last few groups, with the occasional local in traditional dress adding to the rich mishmash of other nationalities. In this year’s Dubai Desert Classic the winner was Woods who, at the time, was in the middle of a seven-in-a-row winning streak. The excitement was immense as he birdied the last to come out on top but, for the most part, there is a calm about desert golf which suits the sport and can bring even its more fretful exponents to heel.

Take Colin Montgomerie. Photographers know to keep their distance when the great man veers from the straight and narrow but when, in the 2006 Desert Classic, Monty hit into a particularly photogenic wilderness, they could not resist going in for the close-up. They were expecting an ear-bashing when he failed to escape at his first attempt but, instead, they got a merry quip: “I’m practising for the sand championship.”