Around the World in 18 Holes

Golf is not just a game, it’s, like music, a universal language. Go anywhere in the world in a crowded room and just murmur the name Hogan and see what happens. Shortly a guy in a turban will bound up to you and begin to shout “The Hawk! Carnoustie, 1953! Tell me, did you know the great Hogan?”

Haul a bag of golf clubs off an airport carousel anywhere from Karachi to Tierra del Fuego and a porter probably will ask if you like the overlapping grip or the interlocking. In Japan, a young woman who looks like something out of “Madame Butterfly” will tell you, “It’s 143 to the front of the green and 153 to the pin. There’s a one-club wind against you.”

If I didn’t already know this, I would have found it out from a new book written by two pals of mine, Tom Callahan and Dave Kindred.

These guys are the real Dream Team, because they just returned from a round of golf that took 69 days with a greens fee of $70,000 on a mythical course that’s 7,266 yards--or 37,319 miles--from tee to green, depending on how you look at it. If you thought Trent Jones’ courses were long from one green to the next tee, how about crossing the Pacific Ocean to go from the 15th hole, in Japan, to the 16th tee, in Pebble Beach?

This twosome, this ultimate odd couple, took flight from taking the garbage out and washing the car to go on a junket to play golf in all the exotic places around the globe. They constructed a conglomerate 18 holes that they dubbed the Royal & Diabolical Global Golf Club. It was the ultimate $2 Nassau and it began in Portrush, Northern Ireland, where their host landed in Crumlin Road Jail for supplying arms to terrorists and blowing up his own hotel.

The charm of their book, “Around the World In 18 Holes,” is that it’s not just a “And then I cut a little five-iron round the dogleg and two-putted to go one-up” type of recital. These guys actually looked out the bus window. Golf was just their entree.

First, they got the publisher, Doubleday, to pay their greens fee--considerable when you realize that getting from one green to the next tee sometimes involved the kind of flights even Amelia Earhart couldn’t survive.

They teed it up in Iceland, where out-of-bounds on the left was the Arctic Ocean; they putted alongside crocodile tears in Africa. They went up to the rim of the world, Katmandu, where your frame of reference for the tee shot was the tip of Mt. Everest, and they played the ultimate capitalist’s game in the shadow of the Kremlin in Moscow on a course where a 90 could win you the club championship. They played some Asian courses where the main hazards weren’t sand and water but the prospect of sniper fire.

It was, they remind you, an Indiana Jones adventure. But it was also Walter Mitty. They got to play the cradle of golf, St. Andrews, and they note that golf courses are 18 holes only because this one happened to be.

How about taking the Orient Express from one hole to another? The definitive golf cart. That famous train of traveling intrigue where Agatha Christie’s characters confounded the Surete with their nefarious carryings-on. Neither of our world travelers ran into Hercule Poirot, but they notice the train was impressively right on time--which is more than can be said for author Callahan.

Moscow, they noted, had made the transition from communism to capitalism easily and in a formulaic manner. Which is to say the city had gone from the KGB to the Capone gang. Either way, the machine guns ruled it. Only now they were in the hands of free-lance gangsters, not the government-sponsored ones.

Russia has one-fifth of the Earth’s land surface but had no golf courses. The Russian Open is light years away. The golf was not as memorable as the rest of the New Russia, which needs Eliot Ness more than Thomas Jefferson (or Jack Nicklaus) at the moment.

Currency, of course, became a problem. In one alms box in India, Kindred stuffed all of the twosome’s money. “It’s either $8,000 or 16 cents. I’m not sure,” he told his partner.

Travel was broadening. Kindred alludes to the crapshoot of buying a ticket on India’s internal airlines, where in the previous four months they had had four hijacks and two major crashes, killing 75. Callahan was intrigued.

“A crash might put a damper on the trip,” he acknowledged. “But a hijacking could be interesting.”

In Thailand, the golf carts were elephants. In Calcutta, they played on the world’s oldest course outside the British Isles, founded in 1829, thus beating Palm Springs’ first course by a century and a week.

The two are not so jaded that they couldn’t look out the window over their sterling silver tea sets and see the squalor outside. Calcutta, you conclude, must be Punjabi for despair.

“Hopelessness has a smell in Calcutta,” they write. “The smell of urine, excrement, exhaust fumes and food so rancid it burns your nostrils, food dumped onto babies’ garbage piles on Calcutta’s sidewalks, left there for weeks, buzzing with flies, picked over by vultures who dare little babies to put a hand toward their discoveries.”

But, Callahan adds, “Typically, we deplored the poverty of Calcutta from the comfort of the Taj Bengal hotel.”

The authors play a kind of literary Scotch foursome in which they play alternate shots--chapters--so that it’s sometimes difficult to know who’s talking.

But they have this revelatory glimpse of Singapore that was penned pre-caning:

“The ACLU back in the States would be wigged out,” the American (resident in Singapore) said. “But the hell with them and the white horse they rode in on. You can walk the streets of Singapore any hour of the day or night without thinking somebody is going to put a knife in your ribs. I like that more than protecting creeps.

“There’s no drug problem here and everybody works, either privately or in government programs, so there’s no homeless problem, no beggars on the street. The place has the highest per-capita income in Southeast Asia. It’s an experiment that’s working.”

They made 32 takeoffs, they note, but, more important, they made 32 landings. They took more than nine-irons and three-woods with them. They took their reporters’ eyes and ears.

I suspect if you ask the average globe-trotting pro what Calcutta was like, he’d screw up his forehead and say, “Well, the second hole doglegs left, but you better hit an iron off the tee and lay up the second too. The fourth green, the putt breaks three feet left. In Katmandu, your frame of reference is that big hill there, I forget what it’s called.”

In a sense, a pro golfer never leaves home. But 14-handicappers take time to smell the roses. Or, in some cases, Calcutta.