On the occasion of 50th Kenya Open, some stories from the golf course

What you need to know:

  • For some 40 years now, Larry Ngala has been covering golf, a tribute to dedication, doggedness, boundless passion. When they inducted him to the Kenya Golf Hall of Fame the other day, I was very pleased for him.

Seth Shava won’t easily forget the reaction of a Prague golf course manager when he sought to have a round at his facility.

The now retired Kenya Air Force colonel was then still in active service and had travelled to the Czech capital on official business. He was shopping for aeroplanes.

At that time, the Air Force was in the process of upgrading its fighter squadron and the Czech Republic was one of the source markets identified as prospective suppliers. So Shava went there to see what was on offer.

After days of intense evaluations and report writing, he felt the need to unwind. And for him, there wasn’t a better way than a good round of golf. “I requested my host to organise something for me at the Prague Golf Club, and he did,” he told me.

The course manager seemed taken aback at the sight of this muscular African soldier with a rich black complexion.

And once he understood the request, he came up with a raft of requirements to be fulfilled before Shava could use the course. Shava downgraded his request and said walking around the course with a caddie could do just fine for him.

“You mean you have golf clubs in your country,” the manager asked. Shava calmly replied: “Nairobi alone has eight courses. (Note: Prague had only one). If you add its environs, there are more than 10. There is a golf club in almost all the main towns of Kenya.”

This was too much for the manager. He took a deep breath and said, okay, you can walk around. As Shava told me this story, it was my turn to get perplexed. I thought: does Nairobi have that many golf courses? I have lived here almost all my life and that can’t be.

So we counted them: Karen, Golf Park, Royal Nairobi, Railway, Muthaiga, Kenya Air Force, Windsor and Vet Lab. That makes eight. If you travel just a few kilometres to its fringes you find Ruiru, Kiambu, Limuru and Sigona – 12, already!

This conversation was taking place as Shava was trying to recruit me into playing golf – and he was the perfect salesman.

But despite his best efforts, he came short for I soon vaporised, even equipped with a full kit. It wasn’t the first time I had toyed around with the idea of taking up golf and I thought that if Shava couldn’t get me to do it, nobody could. I suspect the jinx started in early 1980 when I joined the Nation Sports Desk.

NERVOUS HANDLING GOLF COPY

It was a time of transition and we had our first African golf correspondent, a South African exile who went by the pen name John Phang.

He was tall and well built, was of a light complexion, and a Panama hat never left his head. Neither did a folder that was always thick with documents.

I never got to memorise his real name and he wasn’t keen to have it known around. He preferred to be called just John Phang, whatever that meant.

I was nervous handling golf copy because I didn’t understand the game and I fretted that I was going to pass mistakes out of my ignorance.

To forestall this, I literary begged John Phang to give me the exact length of the story I told him and not one line more.

Unfortunately, Phang had this disagreeable habit of complaining that the space we allocated him was always too little. He retaliated by defiantly writing to his head’s content. This was problematic because there is only so much space in a newspaper page. Quite often, I used the axe on his copy and the result was frayed tempers.

And then John Phang disappeared, as mysteriously as he had appeared.

I wondered who was going to be our new golf correspondent. Then Larry Ngala, who covered horseracing under the pen name Grundy, announced: “I can do it.”

“You can?” I was mystified. “When did you learn this game?”

Well, for some 40 years now, he has been doing it, a tribute to dedication, doggedness and boundless passion. When they inducted him to the Kenya Golf Hall of Fame the other day, I was very pleased for him. And when I met him last week, I thought that he still has plenty of gas in the tank, as Americans would say.

NEVER GOT TO COVER GOLF

Unlike Ngala, I never got to cover golf but I have haunted golf clubs and collected a goodly number of stories. At random let me share one because it is the nearest I came to believing that golf can actually become an obsession.

I once had a golfing friend who was a senior executive in a blue chip company and with whom we were doing some business together. Whenever I visited him, I learnt to gently steer him in the direction of our business because he would otherwise get immersed in details of the last game.

One day, a relative visited him in my presence and it was clear the young man was in dire straits.

He was evidently hungry and by his demeanour, he seemed to have reached the end of his tether. He was jobless and he had come for some succour from his well-to-do uncle who told me not to mind listening in on the conversation.

But poor fellow. My friend launched into the intricacies of his game and got so utterly consumed in them that I doubt he realised that he had left his seat and was now demonstrating how badly he had teed in the last two games.

He was standing in front of his desk and repeatedly swinging an imaginary club, all the while explaining where he thought he may have gone wrong. He seemed unable to forgive himself the mistakes.

He used golf jargon which the young man clearly did not understand but to which he nodded again and again with an accompanying smile when my friend smiled.

To all practical purposes we were in a golf course. My friend was completely oblivious to the ringing of his telephones and even got quite emotional when blasting some people who had infringed on golf etiquette.

When quoting the rules that sanctioned such behaviour, he became something of a school master and with a stern glare made sure we understood the rules.
You would have been forgiven for thinking that we were the culprits.

At first, I was amused by the whole show even as I pitied the hungry boy, but as it went on, I started feeling trapped.

How was I going to bring him back to the world without causing offence?

His nephew was helpless. I lost count of the number of times he corrected his swing. But mercifully, in the end, he seemed to have gotten all the demons that were tormenting him out of his chest and took back his seat. He reached for his wallet and sent the young man on his way, telling him to remain patient as he awaited feedback from his friends on that job matter.

But the golf story that stays with me even as I forget others is not Kenyan.

It is the story of Richard Nixon, the only American to be driven from office. I got taken up by the writings of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the legendary Washington Post investigative reporters who finally nailed him.

The more I read their books, the hungrier I got for more. Bob Woodward, in particular, is my journalistic hero. His writings instigated a curiosity in me to hear Nixon’s side of the story.

So I read two of his books that exhaustively dealt with the Watergate affair: RN, The Memoirs of Richard Nixon and In The Arena. Both are gripping. By his own account, the stress of Watergate nearly killed Nixon. He almost died from phlebitis.

He was hospitalised and put under intensive care and needed surgery to remove blood clots from his legs. After surgery, he suffered shock. “When I came out of shock,” he wrote in In The Arena. “I am told I was more dead than alive.”

He did pull through but resolved to regain his health because, as he memorably wrote, “a healthy cabbage is still a cabbage.”

That is when he immersed himself in golf. For a man who had never liked the game, golf suddenly became his therapy.

“Golf became my life saver,” he declared. “I’ve had prestige, power and even, at times, some money. Those things come and go – as they have with me.”

He progressively lowered his handicap and associates who used to laugh at him stopped. He had weathered many storms in his life and career and always picked himself up after devastating defeats but in his opinion, there wasn’t a worse defeat than resigning the office of President of the United States.

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

There was no precedent to it and he was totally disgraced. When psychologically he reached, as a depressed man once put it, lower than a snake’s belly, he turned to golf to help himself survive. And it worked.

Though heavily in debt, especially to the lawyers who fought his myriad courtroom battles, he recovered to write compelling books and gave lucrative speeches.

I followed his misfortunes with an almost malicious delight and I was surprised at myself, sometimes wondering what my reaction would have been if it was me he had offended rather than his voters in faraway America. Yet I Iearnt from him that golf can literary raise a man from the dead. Maybe I should dust that bag I have packed somewhere and revisit my unfinished business with Shava.

And happy 50th anniversary, Kenya Open!