Golf has green future in China (2)

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While the prospect of Olympic gold may have sparked government interest, public interest has been stimulated by a humble teenager.

In April, 14-year-old Guan Tianlang became the youngest player in history to play in a Masters Tournament. Not only did the teenager rub shoulders with Tiger Woods, but he won legions of fans with his assured playing, winning the silver cup for top amateur in the tournament.

"When you look at what Guan did in Augusta, that has instantly spurred a lot of growth," says Raymond Roessel, founder of event management firm Infinite Ideas International, and the man behind many of China's top golf events. He also helps organize promising young Chinese golfers to train in the US.

"In the last four or five months since he played so well, and then went on to play a couple of tour events, there has been growing interest in golf."

While golf is considered prohibitively expensive for the majority of Chinese, the combination of more grassroots opportunities to play the game, combined with Guan's inspirational achievements, means golf in China is poised to enjoy a boom in popularity.

In 2004, there were only 174 golf courses in the country, today there are 600.

The jump in the number of courses has forced prices (slightly) down, at a time when Chinese are wealthier, making the game accessible to more people than ever before.

The SARS epidemic in 2003 gave golf an unexpected boost as businessmen opted to forego intimate restaurants for the airy expanse of the fairway to seal deals.

There might only be an estimated 400,000 Chinese golfers, but statistics from Mindshare Global Sports Index put the number of TV viewers of golf in China at 39.7 million.

This might be a drop in the ocean considering the country's population of 1.3 billion, but it is a bigger golf audience than the United Kingdom and the United States combined. Sports academies in North America and Australia are filling up with the children of China's wealthy.

Critics say government restrictions on the number of courses allowed to be built and the high cost of the game will mean golf will never have a major impact on China. That may be so, but China is certainly set to have a major influence on the game of golf.

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