The Week That Was, january 3, 2016

     It appears that Cape Wickham Links, the eagerly anticipated layout on King Island in Tasmania, was worth the wait. The recently opened 18-hole track, a co-design by Mike DeVries and Darius Oliver, checks in among the elite on Golf Australia magazine’s just-published ranking of Australia’s top golf courses, ahead of longtime favorites such as National Golf Club’s Moonah course, Ellerston Golf Course, and Royal Adelaide Golf Club. Cape Wickham, #5 on the list, trails only Royal Melbourne Golf Club’s West course (#1), Kingston Heath Golf Club (#3), and the companion courses at Barnbougle Dunes, the Golf Links (#2) and Lost Farm (#4). For DeVries and Oliver, this is a notable achievement: They promised to create a world-class venue, and they delivered.

     More bad news from the Land of the Rising Sun: In Japan these days, golf courses are reportedly going out of business at a rate of nearly one a week. The Financial Times blames the closings on the usual suspects -- high costs and busy lives -- as well as the demise of the nation’s “career-driven obligation to tee off with bosses or clients” and “skewed demographics,” which translates as a 17 percent increase in the number of golfers aged 70 and over. “Nobody has time for hours of golf and hours of travel,” a salesperson at a golf store in Tokyo told the newspaper, “and people who played it for work purposes now see it as a chore.” These factors have helped to erode the nation’s customer base, which the newspaper says now stands at 13.7 million golfers, half the number that the golf industry counted in the early 1990s.

     Turkey may be angling to host a Ryder Cup and planning to build a slew of resort-style golf courses, but if it really expects to be a player on the world’s golf scene, somebody needs to put a muzzle on its president. It’s hard to imagine Turkey continuing to be a vacation spot now that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the nation’s despot in training, has cited “Hitler’s Germany” as a model for the kind of government he’d like to oversee. Not surprisingly, Erdoğan quickly back-tracked, issuing an official statement in which his publicists claimed that his comments were being “distorted by some news sources.” Ultimately, though, Erdoğan’s actions speak louder than his words. He has a fast-growing enemies list, and it prominently features journalists, Turkey’s Kurdish minority, and anyone reckless enough to criticize his government. He supports extremist right-wing groups and, at least tacitly, ISIS. If Donald Trump’s anti-minority intimidation ultimately prevents Turnberry from hosting an Open Championship, Erdoğan’s budding police state shouldn’t win a Ryder Cup.

     More than a decade after Kim Jong-il played his first round of golf, carding a record-setting 38 across 18 holes, North Korea is reportedly “showing off its first golf course on state television.” United Press International didn’t identify the venue by name, but it’s presumably Pyongyang Golf Course, the layout outside Pyongyang where the late Dear Leader shot his purported historic round in 1994. The news service also didn’t say why Kim’s son and successor, Kim Jong-un, chose to highlight golf on a television broadcast, as it notes that “the vast majority of North Korea's population, who are impoverished,” can only dream of setting foot on “well-manicured putting greens.” No doubt, Kim Jong-un wouldn’t be the first government official who, on being told that his starving people have no bread, obliviously recommends that they eat cake instead. Then again, maybe he, like Donald Trump, figures that golf is at its core an aspirational sport and is looking to inspire a few wealthy elites. Either way, it’s always interesting to watch repressive regimes put golf to use for political ends.