The course where fore gets lost in all the noise

It's the only golf course in Afghanistan and probably the only one in the world where the sand trap is the least of your worries...


Most golf courses don’t include tanks among hazards
Don Martin
CanWest News Service
Sunday, August 05, 2007
CREDIT: CanWest News Service

Muhammad Afzal Abdul, head professional at Afganistan's only golf course, the Kabul Golf Club, fires one down the middleon the opening hole, a daunting 371-yard Par 4 with a 100 foot elevation drop to the green.

KABUL, Afghanistan - The blast of a far-off bomb hit in the middle of my backswing. That might be grounds to run for cover or at least claim a mulligan on Canadian golf courses, but this being Kabul and having my iron shot go further than its pathetically-short normal, I opted to play on.
Billed as "the best and only golf course in Afghanistan," the Kabul Golf Course has been declared free of landmines and boasts of freshly-oiled greens made from pressed sand.

But if you're like me, stranded here by exit visa problems and bureaucratic foot-dragging for a sixth day, even golf played on rock-hard dirt fairways with thistle-like weeds for ground cover is a slice of pretend-you're-home heaven.

It is a surreal experience, almost worth the outrageous $25 US greens fee, if only to say you've played one the world's truly horrible courses.

Yet this strange oft-bombed course is arguably a 5,614-yard analogy of Afghanistan, accurately reflecting the country's political stability or, more often than not, instability.

It opened in the early 1970s when Afghanistan was last in a semi-calm state, but closed six years later as the Communists came to power backed by the Soviet military. It reopened after the Soviets retreated, only to be forcibly closed down four years later when the Taliban formed a government.

The original pro shop was bombed by the Taliban and never repaired. Open ditches still bisect the course as a reminder of the Taliban's destruction of the underground irrigation system.
The local golf pro, Muhammad Abdul, was thrown in jail by the Taliban for a couple months in the late 1990s, his trophies seized and destroyed on the grounds that golf was the past-time of idle infidels and helping foreigners improve their game was sinfully anti-Islamic.

After the Taliban were vanquished from power in 2001 to become the insurgency being fought by Canadian soldiers today, the course reopened under Afghanistan government ownership.
The first item of business was to remove three bombed Soviet tanks and the remnants of a troop carrier cluttering the fairway, which would be considered a lateral hazard if struck by a wayward ball.

Then the fairways were subjected to a U.S.-financed mine-removal training project to clear away nasty surprises that could turn the search for a misplayed ball into a life-ending misstep.
Today, the rusty main gate hangs off its hinges and a police station strafed with bullet holes guards the entrance.

After driving a road that runs down the middle of the first fairway to the parking lot, you wake up a clubhouse manager napping under a tree, who groggily refuses to dicker on the high price to play a round of what the scorecard claims is "golf with attitude."

A contest among half a dozen teenagers to serve as caddy ensues, the winner being Ahmad, a high school graduate who plans to attend university to become a teacher. He shot an even-par on the course earlier this year and boasts a five handicap, which means he's a scratch golfer and PGA contender on any other golf course in the world.

He's a dream caddy too, dutifully teeing up every shot by pounding a bent plastic tee into the ground using his fist. He sings your praises after even the most badly hooked drive. He pretends not to understand that gimmies count on the scorecard. And just before the moment to pay him arrived, he declared that I was the best foreign golfer to ever grace the course. The suggested $5 caddy fee immediately became $10.

But there are unique complications to playing the game, Kabul style.

Like the ant colonies surfacing on the "green." Or having your approach to the sixth hole require a shot over the roof of the police station, which I managed to hit with a mud-loosening well-struck eight iron. Or, after bringing along your translator for his first-ever golfing experience, he thinks part of his job is to carve a shallow trench into the sand to guide your ball into the hole.

In the end, as I signed off a mostly-bogus 42 score after nine holes, one thought kept running through my mind: I'll never play this course again.

Nah. Just kidding. I was thinking that only in Afghanistan could just having a golf course to play, even if the only one in the country resembles a goat track under construction, be the scorecard to a nation's political health.

Perhaps it's a hopeful sign that stability will become par for the course.