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Russians' sole golf course expected to begin nationwide obsession

http://www.jewishworldreview.com | (KRT) MOSCOW - Russia boasts some of the world's finest athletes, from gymnasts and track stars to figure skaters and tennis players.

But here in the largest country in the world - twice the size of the United States and spanning 11 time zones - there's only one 18-hole golf course.

The Moscow Country Club, which hosted the BMW Russian Open in mid-August, is cut into peat bogs and silver birches about 25 miles from Red Square. It was designed by Robert Trent Jones Jr., the California architect whose courses around the world are ranked among the best.

Yet in this sports-mad nation of 145 million people, only six Russian golfers played in the Russian Open, part of the European PGA Tour. None of them made the cut. An Australian won the tournament in a playoff.

"I sucked," said Dmitri Vinogradov, 17, the Russian amateur champion, who shanked a 7-iron on the final hole and missed the cut by one shot. He would've been the first Russian golfer ever to make the cut in a full-fledged pro event.

Climate, cost and politics always have conspired against golf in Russia. The country now has a couple of thousand regular players, but the game was virtually unknown in the old Soviet Union. Fat, middle-aged communist leaders considered the sport too decadent and too bourgeois, and "they thought it was played only by fat, middle-aged Americans," said Alexei Nikolov, the secretary general of the Russian Golf Association.

"In Soviet times if you asked 1,000 people on the street if they knew who Arnold Palmer was, you would have gotten 1,000 negative responses."

When Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev wanted to attract U.S. businessmen to the Soviet Union in the 1970s, he asked the U.S. oil tycoon Armand Hammer what to do. Hammer told him the Soviets would need to offer three basics: limousines, a business center and golf.

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Jones, the golf course architect, came to Moscow in 1974 to discuss building the country's first golf course but the project never got going. A Soviet customs officer thought the golf clubs Jones had brought with him were radical new American designs for hockey sticks.

Sven Johansson, a Swedish hockey star and onetime Boston Bruin, convinced the mayor of Moscow in 1988 to give him the land for a nine-hole municipal course, but they ended up with an eyesore. A tourist brochure advertises the course as "a 9th-pot golf field." (There's another nine-pot course near St. Petersburg, another ragged, frost-bitten layout.)

Construction on the Moscow Country Club began in 1988, and it would take six more years to finish it. In the meantime, history took a few divots in the old communist bloc: The Soviet Union broke apart, the Berlin Wall came down and the Russian economy fell into chaos. And there was this bad news for would-be Russian golfers: Boris Yeltsin, the new president, was a tennis player.

Weather, too, is a problem. The playing season in Moscow lasts only from May through September, and even that is pushing it. It's not unknown for golfers to toss hammers into their carts before setting out, all the better to drive their tees into the frozen ground.

Frozen fairways, however, can be a real help sometimes. "The ball gets a nice extra bounce," said Nikolov, a 30-handicapper. Vodka, the national drink, also helps take the sting out of those 30-degree days in mid-September.

The Moscow Country Club is technically in Nakhabino, a working-class village of laborers and chicken farmers. Vinogradov, the amateur champ, grew up in the village, and most of the club's caddies and promising junior golfers live there.

But golf in Russia isn't a sport readily available to the working class. Nor the middle class. Memberships at the Moscow club go for $25,000, and greens fees start at $100. That's pricey enough for the First World, not to mention a developing country where the average salary is $41 a week.

When the club first opened, its membership was 90 percent foreigners: Western diplomats, Japanese bankers, South Korean businessmen. The so-called New Russians eventually started showing up, although they knew nothing about golf. These young, ultra-wealthy tycoons would arrive in the clubhouse with bored, stiletto-heeled supermodels on their arms and no-necked, no-nonsense bodyguards at their backs.

Nikolov recalled one of the tycoons loudly bragging to the other members about his expensive new clubs.

"The man had no idea," Nikolov said, "that he had bought ladies' clubs."

Nikolov conceded that golf is "not the next big thing" in Russia, but there are signs of a new and growing interest.

For the first time ever, the Masters tournament was shown live this year, with Russian commentary, on the national sports TV channel. The country has two golf magazines, including Russian Golf Digest with 15,000 subscribers. The Russian Golf Association is embarking on a 15-year plan to build 500 driving ranges, municipal pitch-and-putts and full-length courses across the country's 89 provinces.

Nikolov and the other czars of Russian golf have been trying to get President Vladimir Putin to come out to the course and maybe hit a bucket of balls. Putin, whose sports of preference are judo and downhill skiing, sponsors a major golf tournament at the club, but he's never played or even visited.

"But I think he's secretly practicing," said Nikolov, perhaps anticipating a presidential match-up in Moscow between Putin and President Bush.

"At this point," he deadpans, "I'd settle for Bill Clinton."

Jack Nicklaus recently made a semi-secret visit to Moscow to discuss building an exclusive course here for a Russian billionaire, and golfer Nick Faldo's design firm reportedly is designing a new course near Moscow's main airport.

Faldo, quoted at last year's Players Championship, said golf was going to become a major sport in Russia.

"It will be, you wait, you just wait," he said. "You think how disciplined (the Russians) are in the way that they pursue a sport. You wait."

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