Ready To Shine

A short drive from Longgang is the driving range at the Honey Lake Sports Center GC. It's a three-deck affair with 135 bays. Another 135 are being built at the other end of the range, which would make it the biggest in China. It costs 75 RMB an hour to hits balls (about $10) and for 5,000 RMB ($700) you can buy 10,000 balls—good for one year.

May 1 is a national holiday in China, International Workers Day, and the parks of Haikou are jammed with people picnicking, flying kites, running and just hanging out. Twenty years ago Hainan Island, the province where Haikou is located, was designated a Special Economic Zone, giving it the freedom to invite foreign investment.

Haikou, the site of the first LPGA tournament in China, is also the current home of one of China's pioneers of women's golf, Hong-Mei Yang, who started playing in 1995 as a caddie in Shenzhen. Two years later she turned pro.

"There were seven women professionals in China when I turned pro," she says. "There are a little over 50 now if you include coaches." Yang, 32, is married to Dong Hua Li, CEO and vice secretary general of Dingshan GC. Their son, Yang Li, will be 2 in September.

Hong-Mei, who teaches golf and plays part time in Japan and China, is full of questions for a visitor: How far does Ai Miyazato hit it? Will Michelle Wie get it back? What is the most important thing to teach a child learning the game? Did you know Tiger Woods' father? What is your handicap?

Yang went to the United States in 2004, helped into the country by Huey Yu and Dr. Ernie Huang at Oak Valley GC in Southern California, the same club that currently sponsors McDonald's LPGA Championship winner Yani Tseng and Teresa Lu, both of Taiwan, on the LPGA. One week after Yang got her California driver's license she was on the road to El Paso, Texas, for her first tournament on the Duramed Futures Tour, which she won.

In two months Yang played nine tournaments, including the 2004 U.S. Women's Open at The Orchards, where she missed the cut after rounds of 76-75. Because of the language barrier, however, it was a lonely life of isolation. One night, hopelessly lost in Michigan where not even her GPS could help, crying in frustration, she decided to return to China.

"If I could do it again, I would have gone to Japan instead of the United States," she says. Yang, her husband and child live in a cozy apartment on the second floor of a building off the main drag in Haikou. One wall of the living room is decorated with her trophies. In front of the shelves stands a child's golf bag. In an office off to the side is a framed sign that says in Chinese, "Tranquility Go Far."

The unanswered question is how far golf can go in China. "Ten years ago I said there would be a Chinese tennis champion, and in 2004 we won the women's doubles in the Athens Olympics," says Zhang of the CGA. "I also think we will produce a world-class Chinese golfer."

There is so much money in Asia right now that golf can continue to grow significantly strictly as a private-club sport for years to come. But for the game to take a great leap forward both in numbers of players and in terms of tapping into the country's enormous talent pool, it will need more affordable public courses. The vast underclass of China—factory workers and farmers—likely will be shut out of the game for financial reasons for many years, however. Caddies at Longgang Public GC make $400 to $500 a month—about twice what a factory worker gets.

And still to be worked out is the tricky political situation in which the government publicly opposes golf, but at the same time sees its value as a tourist revenue stream and privately yearns to produce players who can compete with the Japanese, Koreans and even Americans.

China's success in other sports has been impressive, but it could very well be surpassed by golf. There is something about the nature of the game that connects with the Chinese mindset—a solitary pursuit of perfection in which gambling plays an important part. Those who play are extremely passionate. "I really love golf so I am a happy person," says Haibing He of Longgang Public GC. Then he adds wistfully: "In China, golf needs friends in high places."

There was a time it had one. Ziyang Zhao was general secretary of the Communist Party and a leading economic reformer before being ousted because he supported the student protests in Tiananmen Square that led to hundreds of deaths on June 4, 1989. Zhao lived under house arrest until his death in 2005 and rarely was seen in public—except on a golf course in Beijing.

It was the economic reforms supported by Zhao that made golf possible in China. And now the game is very close to breaking through its final barrier—changing the public perception. "We need to show that golf is for everyone," says Zhang. And in China, that is a lot of people.