European Tour cashing in on golf boom in China
And the players heading to Beijing for the lucrative Johnnie Walker Classic and the BMW Asian Open the following week in Shanghai better get used to the journey if the predicted Chinese golf boom becomes reality.
Type the words ‘golf’, ‘growth’ and ‘China’ into an internet search engine and 676,000 matches are found within 0.07 seconds.
The country has already hosted two tournaments on the European Tour this season, three if you include the Hong Kong Open, and the next two weeks will make it an astonishing five in total.
That is two more than the so-called Home of Golf, Scotland, three more than England and makes China comfortably the most visited destination on the schedule.
And there are few signs of this popularity boom becoming just a passing phase.
Golf has become immensely popular in China after a hiatus of more than 50 years.
China’s last emperor Pu Yi learned the game from his English tutor in the 1920s but it was not until the 1980s that economic planners began to see the game as a chance to attract foreign investment to China.
The first golf course built in post-revolutionary China was designed by Arnold Palmer and opened in southern Guandong Province in 1984.
More than €4.5billion have been spent on China’s courses since then, making the country the fifth largest golfing nation in the world in terms of green space.
There are 195 officially registered golf courses in 22 cities with a further 500-1,000 new courses under construction or near completion.
The potential is obvious, not just to the European Tour, but to club manufacturers, clothing suppliers and course designers.
Designer Barry Humpthy, who moved to China from Australia to establish an office for former USPGA champion Wayne Grady’s Golf Design company says: “It’s the right time to be getting here, because golf is very new in China. It’s growing fast and it’s going to be a big market for us.”
The price of club membership means the game is still the preserve of the elite, with most players restricted to hammering balls on driving ranges in the middle of the big cities.
However, that will not be the prime concern of the European Tour, whose main objective has always been to provide its players with as many tournaments to play in as possible, for as much money.
Co-sanctioned events have become an integral part of the calendar with tournaments run in co-operation with the South African, Asian and Australasian tours.
Australian officials are known to be looking on enviously as the European Tour makes inroads into China despite the Australian Tour being much better placed geographically to take advantage of the potential market.
And USPGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem has spoken of following in Europe’s footsteps with regards to co-sanctioned events.
“We’ll probably do more joint-sanctioned events in the future,” he said earlier this year. “We’d like to play some more golf in Asia. We’d like to get down south a little bit. I don’t know how it plays out.”
The battle lines are being drawn, but the European Tour is in the driving seat and it would be no surprise to see yet more tournaments in China on the schedule for 2006.
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