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On the first tee of the Norman course, one of my fellow players, a young teaching pro at Mission Hills, gave me the ominous news that Greg had agreed to the job only on the condition that his would be the most difficult course of the 10. From the back tees it is 7,200 yards, with the front nine climbing and dipping precipitously along a series of ridges and hills, and the back winding through a tropical forest that could have been the backdrop for King Kong.
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Straight driving was imperative, as I realized while tramping through a patch of dense rough in pursuit of my sprayed tee shot at the par-5 8th. "Watch walk, watch walk!" shouted my sweet young caddie, Dora Lee, leaving me befuddled until she pointed to a small sign: "Beware Cobras." That concluded my search.
Deadly poisonous snakes aside, this is a wonderful layout, skillfully routed over some extremely challenging terrain. Like its designer, the Norman is in-your-face assertive, flamboyantly attractive, immaculately groomed and tough. It ranks among the country's top 10 courses according to Golf Magazine China.
Mission Hills also offers three driving ranges, a learning academy, 51 tennis courts, two swimming pools, a spa, a conference center, 500 hotel rooms and three million square feet of real estate. Some of the homes are over 10,000 square feet, with everything from mah-jongg rooms and walk-in humidors to swimming pools with thundering waterfalls. It's enough to bring tears to the eyes of Donald Trump.
But Mission Hills isn't the only game in town, just the biggest one. Most private clubs in China welcome-even depend on-foreign visitors (mostly Japanese and Koreans), and two of the best courses in the Shenzhen area are the Sand River Golf Club and Shenzhen Golf Club.
Sand River was designed by Gary Player in a tidal basin beside Shenzhen Bay, its fairways lined by palms and mangroves with water in play virtually from start to finish, in the manner of Florida layouts. This is a club dedicated to very high standards in everything from course conditioning to pace of play. A notice in the pro shop exhorts members to complete their rounds in four hours and 15 minutes or risk having their weekend tee times restricted. I liked that.
If a country with a golf lineage that goes back only two decades can be said to have a grande dame course, Shenzhen Golf Club would be a strong candidate. Designed in 1985 by Isao Aoki and revamped in 2000 by the Canadian team of Robin Nelson and Neil Haworth, this is the closest course to Hong Kong (just a 10-minute cab ride) and sits in the heart of dynamic Shenzhen with the city skyline in constant, somewhat surreal, view from its rolling fairways.
Among its members is a self-taught 41-year-old who made history two years ago by becoming the first Chinese player to compete in the Masters. Lian-Wei Zhang earned his Augusta invitation by birdieing the final hole of the Caltex Masters in Singapore to edge Ernie Els by a stroke.
Zhang was in town during my visit and joined two members of the local press and me for a round. A lanky fellow, well over six feet tall, he showed only average power for a pro and got around Shenzhen in two over from the member tees. On the other hand, he wasn't being pushed-our best ball couldn't have beaten him.
Chinese golf officials are desperate to produce at least one megastar as a way of helping golf spread to their burgeoning middle class. One theory is that this will happen only with the advent of sterner courses that will train and challenge them.
Tropics to Mountains
Currently, most of the top courses in China are tied to resorts, and many of those are located on Hainan Island. Fifteen miles off the southern tip of the mainland, Hainan is China's Hawaii, abundant in luscious mountain scenery, coffee plantations, ancient culture and pristine sand beaches. With nearly a thousand miles of coastline and 300 days a year of sunshine, it's no surprise that dozens of courses are currently under way in Hainan.
The standard is Yalong Bay, a Robert Trent Jones Jr. design near the city of Sanya on the island's southern coast. Like Sand River, it's a course akin to the best of Palm Beach or Palm Springs, with broad fairways, grasping bunkers and a variety of native vegetation adding to the challenge and charm. Small lakes border over half the holes; many call for heroic risk/reward decisions off the tee and into the green.
On the day I played a gale blew in, with gusts as strong as any I had seen in Scotland, but the generous driving areas and open approaches to most greens allowed the course to be played as a links, albeit without the same firmness and roll.
Two first-class hotels serve Yalong Bay, one a low-rise tropical design hard by the course, and the other a new beachfront Sheraton, just across the street. After dinner you can head out for some more golf because, like Mission Hills, Yalong Bay lights up like Yankee Stadium.
China has an even greater diversity of natural beauty than the U.S., as I discovered the next morning. A flight of barely three hours transported me from the equivalents of Maui to Switzerland, and I went from perspiring in 85-degree heat to having my noon tee time delayed because the course had a dusting of snow.
The ancient city of Lijiang is in the Yunnan Province of southwestern China, on the border of Tibet. Sitting at 10,000 feet in the foothills of the Himalayas, the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain course (pictured left) is breathtaking, both scenically and literally. In its rarefied air, a golf ball flies almost 20 percent longer than at sea level. Nonetheless, it was a kick to knock my 3-wood second shot onto the green of the opening hole, a par 5 of 606 yards. (The back tees measure 8,548 yards.)
Jade Dragon was designed in 2001 by Haworth, who has installed himself in Singapore and with his partner, Nelson, is producing some of China's best courses. Both nines return to the clubhouse at the top of the property, but Haworth routed his holes skillfully so that only one hole plays straight uphill.
Carts are absolutely mandatory here unless you're an Ironman competitor or have Sherpa blood. But if the notion of hitting 300-yard drives from elevated tees toward a backdrop of massive snow-capped peaks appeals to you, Jade Dragon is your ticket.
All that fresh mountain air had left me ravenous, and my gracious host had arranged for a special dinner at a local family restaurant in Lijiang. The locale turned out to be a small apartment, which Westerners would characterize charitably as a tenement, where our party of eight entered a room as bleak as a prison cell and sat on wooden stools surrounding a steaming cauldron of broth into which our chef deposited numerous unidentifiable specimens of macerated flora and fauna. After it had all simmered a bit, we were invited to pluck out the various bits.
One item-a brownish-maroon colored meat that had been sliced thinly and seasoned exquisitely-appealed to me. I scarfed down several pieces before asking what it was.
