Now It’s Par for Soviets’ Course : Former Swedish Hockey Player Brings Golf to Moscow

Five of the holes feature water hazards and one par 3 is played to an island green. The 2,200 square-yard clubhouse has a pro shop, a restaurant, 11 tennis courts, a swimming pool and a business club with a conference room and secretarial services.

It may sound like an American suburb, but it’s a golf club just a 10-minute drive from Red Square in the Soviet capital.

Sven Tumba, the former Swedish hockey star who helped pioneer golf in his homeland, is about to see his 20-year dream of bringing golf to the Soviet Union become a reality.

The course is a joint venture between Tumba, the Moscow Sports Committee and a Finnish company. The agreement was signed in the wake of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost , or openness, policy, but Tumba’s long ties with Soviet sports officials also proved helpful.

“I’ve been planning this course for a long, long time,” says Tumba, 57, who became a household name in the Soviet Union in 1957 when he led Sweden to the world hockey championship title by tying the Soviets, 4-4, before 50,000 fans on an outdoor rink in Moscow.

“I started thinking seriously about it after taking the Soviet national hockey team players to my indoor driving range in Stockholm in the late 1960s,” Tumba said.

Among those who have accepted honorary membership in the Tumba Golf Club are Gorbachev, Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov, former soccer star Pele, golfers Arnold Palmer and Seve Ballesteros, track star Carl Lewis, former tennis great Bjorn Borg, chess champion Anatoly Karpov, actor Sean Connery, former world heavyweight boxing champion Ingemar Johansson and tennis star Mats Wilander.

But what sold the Soviets on the idea of the course was Tumba’s plan to teach golf to the nation’s youth.

“At least 10% of the club members must be Soviet citizens, according to our agreement with the Moscow Sports Committee,” says Tumba. “And one of our most important tasks is to stimulate kids to take up golf.”

Some 50 Soviet juniors, most of them 15 or 16, have been selected from a local school by the Moscow Sports Committee to join Tumba’s Golf School. A Swedish pro, who speaks fluent Russian, is teaching the basics.

“What we like most about Tumba’s idea is his approach to sports, to children, and his concern for strengthening the friendly relations between Sweden and the Soviet Union,” said Alexander Kovalyov, chairman of the Moscow Sports Committee. Kovalyov said the Soviets have received offers from several other nations to build courses in the Moscow area.

Tumba’s course, limited by space to nine holes, will open late next summer. The driving range that goes with it opened in September with boxing champion Mike Tyson, Pele and a Politburo member attending a crowded ceremony. Now closed for the winter season, the range’s grass turf was imported from Sweden.

Tumba, who spends the winter months in West Palm Beach, Fla., between his frequent visits to Moscow, believes that the Soviet Union will produce world-class players in the late 1990s.

“Within 10 years, there will be a Soviet top player, at least on the amateur level,” says Tumba, whose ambitious junior program seems to be on the right track.

“They laughed at me 25 years ago when I predicted that golf would become one of the most popular sports in Sweden. But I was right. Anyone can play golf in Sweden now, not only the wealthy.”

Tumba’s idea is to make golf a sport for the average Soviet citizen, and especially kids. The club’s motto is: “Sport Strengthens Friendship.”

Soviet citizens living in the area also support the golf-course project.

“We are all in favor of this course,” says Sergei Yavorenko, a 42-year-old painter who lives in one of the apartment buildings surrounding the golf club. “Sports for everybody is a good idea. Tumba once showed me how to swing. I tried and I found out how difficult it is.”

There are other plans for golf courses in the Soviet Union. American industrialist Armand Hammer, chairman of Occidental Petroleum with long and close ties to the leaders of the Soviet Union, is financing a championship course designed by Robert Trent Jones in Nakhabino near Moscow that is expected to open in 1991.

And Mark McCormack’s International Management Group, whose roster features some of the biggest names in golf, says he is talking with the Soviets about developing condo real-estate courses, one on the Black Sea, another one in the Moscow area.

“But I’m not sure if their concept is right,” says Tumba, who has turned down an offer to sell his interest in the club to a Japanese company. “It’s good that more courses are being built, but they should be open to the Soviet citizens, not only for diplomats and Westerners.”