A former player in the region—in fact if the author remembers rightly it was the Mount Isa angel Gabby—posed the question some years ago on the number of golf courses in Singapore.
How many do ya reckon?...
Innocent, uneducated guess back then… Aaahmm. Three? Four?...
Turned out five times that number on this tiny little red dot hot spot.
Oh. Oh, OK then. Yeah.
The million/billionaire contingent was quite high; disproportionately so. (Highest per capita on the planet in fact.)
Cheap foreign labour.
The colonial inheritance. (Not forgetting social psychology entwined.)
And last but not by any means least, the traditional association with corporate/politico wheeling & dealing. (Soeharto and many of his cronies were keen golfers; founding father LKY here unbeatable on the course.)
The Singapore Open in its final stages presently, sponsored by the SMBC Japanese bank.
Rain and thunder disrupted yesterday's play, as it has done on three of the last four years of the tournament. (This year a resumption after a hiatus of three years.)
Steep fees at clubs of course; big dollars. Mid-level entrepreneurs were shooting across to Batam and over to the Peninsular for their recreation.
…One was forced to wonder about fans discretely mounted at tees and around greens. (Ensconced within the branches of trees?)
What had been the ingenious solution on the palm-fringed beaches of Dubai? Air-con units buried in the sand between lounge-chairs?
The thunder and rain god in the tropics was still a force to be reckoned with during the monsoon season. Horse racing can be run at night under lights; golf was more problematic.
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