Playing Like a Tiger in the Rough : Golfers in Thailand Are Used to Animals--but This One Bites

The sixth hole at Khao Yai golf course, a 455-yard par 5, is always tough but has been playing even harder the last few weeks. There’s a tiger in the rough.

Golfers anywhere will put up with a bit of wildlife on the links. Florida foursomes play on despite alligators in the water hazards. In the Southwest, a trusty niblick is good protection against a rattler.

And at Khao Yai, a 12-hole layout in a jungled national park near this central Thailand city, beasts are part of the bargain for players who drive up from Bangkok, three hours away.

“Mostly we see elephants on the course,” said Jumpa Butriwong, 37, a clubhouse man at Khao Yai. The national park shelters about 200 elephants, perhaps 100 tigers and various other creatures--all wild.

On the rare occasion that a tiger strolls the fairways--or bounds across them in pursuit of a deer--the players and caddies apply the commotion solution. They yell and clap their hands. The racket frightens the tiger, which heads back to the trees.

For elephants, not so skittish, a different rule applies: The elephant plays through. “Just let him pass,” Butriwong said.

Compared with elephants and tigers, the occasional cobra on the course is but a minor nuisance, the clubhouse man said.

The balance of nature between golfers and wildlife worked well until the recent tiger trouble.

Boonruang Saisorn, chief of the Khao Yai national park, reconstructed the developments.

About 10 months ago, he said, a tiger entered the tent of a sleeping ranger, put its mouth over the man’s knee and slowly began to tighten its jaws. The ranger awoke in pain and shook off the tiger, which ran away. The ranger suffered only some superficial bites around the knee.

On Sept. 21, a tiger entered a roofed but open sleeping platform where 10 Thai tourists from Bangkok were stretched out. Again the tiger bit down slowly on an exposed knee, and again the rudely awakened victim shook it off.

Then on Sept. 23, a construction company security man was walking outside his office, in a forested area near the sixth hole at Khao Yai. A tiger sprang from the underbrush and clawed the man across the back, shoulder and scalp before his shouts brought help from park workers, who drove the tiger away.

The next day, a Bangkok paper reported the attack under the headline: “Tourists Warned of Maneater at Khao Yai.”

But park chief Saisorn said: “This was no man-eater. I know these tigers. I’ve known them since they were little. There was a male and a female in this area and they both got used to humans when they were cubs. They played games with the rangers.

“But as they have gotten bigger--they are about three years old now--the play has gotten rougher. One of them has picked up this bad habit (padding up to a sleeping human and biting a knee),” he said.

Recently, the female was found dead near the park headquarters building. Saisorn said she had been hit by a car. He does not know whether it was the female or her mate involved in the attacks, but he and his men are now trying to catch the male.

“Maybe we’ll put it in a cage here at headquarters for the tourists, or maybe we’ll take it to some other part of the park and let it loose” he said shaking his head sadly at both prospects. “You know it’s us, the humans, who are encroaching here.”

Meanwhile, frightened caddies at Khao Yai--all women or teen-age girls--are suggesting that golfers play around the sixth hole, according to an American who tackled the course recently.

The golfers? A couple of foursomes sat steaming in a park restaurant the other day. They had driven up from Bangkok for a round, but rain had closed the course. A tiger in the rough seemed of little concern. But the rainout was serious.