Drive to Get Muscovites Playing Golf Falls Short

Arms straight, feet planted, head down and eye on the ball, Natalya Vorotilova finally let loose a long-contemplated swipe at a dimpled white object that seemed to be getting smaller.

Whiff.

She tried again, incorporating the prods and praise of her golf instructor, but each time with the same irritating whoosh of a missed connection.

“Why does it count if you don’t hit it?” complained the 15-year-old Muscovite, exuding the annoyance expressed by most of her fellow Russians who try--and usually quickly abandon--the sport enjoyed by millions around the world.

A combination of cultural and economic barriers conspires to block the spread of golf fever in Russia’s ever-expanding business community, where vodka-drinking in the sauna remains the preferred networking venue.

“I would like to say that the popularity of golf is spreading in Russia, but I’m Swiss, and I can only tell the truth,” said Christiaan Mann, director of sales and marketing for the Moscow Country Club, where only about 50 of the 550 members are Russian and few of them joined to play golf. “Most Russians have the idea that golf is a stupid little sport where you walk around trying to hit a tiny white ball, which of course you never do in the beginning.”

But in the run-up to this nation’s first international tournament--the Russian Open ’96 of the PGA Challenge Tour that began Wednesday--the sport’s quixotic promoters contended that their day will come.

“Our program to develop golf envisions at least 50 years,” said Alexei Nikolov, general secretary of the Russian Golf Assn., which was founded about four years ago. “But I am absolutely convinced that, by the end of this period, the game will be as popular among the masses as tennis and ice hockey, which were also imported.”

At both the Tumba Golf Club and the more exclusive country club--the only two functioning golf courses in all of vast Russia--the resident pros concede that the defection rate of first-time golfers is discouragingly high.

“The problem is that it looks so simple, and our people often want to be good at something right away,” said Igor Ivashin, assistant pro at the country club and one of Russia’s remote hopefuls for tournament glory. “To play well takes a big investment of time and patience, and not enough people have this.”

While the only two courses available to the 10 million residents of this capital city are almost exclusively the domain of foreigners, Russia’s few golf enthusiasts say the problem is more one of mentality than money.

“Golf is a game of frustration,” acknowledged Alexander B. Yarunin, executive secretary of the nine-hole Tumba club. “That is part of the challenge for those of us who like it, but it’s a psychological barrier for others.”

Yarunin said he believes the well-heeled movers and shakers of the New Russia will eventually be drawn to the more refined pursuit of golf for their business connections but that a few more years are needed to polish the nouveaux riches.

“There are plenty of people in Moscow with money, but at this stage, they want to more openly spend it,” said the 45-year-old former diplomat. “In the end, they will realize the social advantages of playing golf, but only after they have spent more in the nightclubs and casinos.”

In a country where winter can extend beyond May Day and then roar back before the end of September, golf promoters also find they are waging an uphill battle against Mother Nature.

“We’ve even created a seven-hole game that can be played on ice and snow,” Ivashin said. But he reported limited enthusiasm for the variation among foreign players and none whatsoever among Russians.

Most leisure pursuits of the capitalist world have caught on quickly in post-Soviet Russia.

Expecting a similar zeal for golf, a division of the Russian Foreign Ministry invested $3 million to make a reality of the country club course originally proposed by the late U.S. industrialist Armand Hammer and designed by Bobby Trent Jones, creator of the single hole on the White House lawn.

Although the Moscow Country Club’s 18 holes are rated among the most lavish in Europe, which is home to more than 5,000 courses, the building of a golf-playing community is taking more than opportunity and money.

Asked what percentage of the Russian population could be said to understand how the game is played, the golf association’s Nikolov needed to borrow a pen and paper to write down the minuscule fraction: 0.00000001%.

On the other hand, he noted, hand-held computer games and satellite television are bringing the game to growing numbers of Russians, and this country’s pent-up passion for foreign travel is also helping to establish the game.

Vorotilova, the 15-year-old first-timer at the Tumba driving range, said she bought shoes and signed up for lessons after happening onto a course during a trip last month to Italy.

“It looked so easy,” she recalled. “But I guess every skill takes time to develop.”

Ivashin estimated the number gripped by golf fever on the first try as in the 1% range but argued that the sport is being promoted through a program for juniors that trains local teens in exchange for caddying and greenskeeping at the country club course.

One 13-year-old junior, Svetlana Afanasyeva, placed second in this year’s St. Andrews Junior Open, giving an encouraging boost to Russian promoters. Nikolov said huge hopes were being pinned on the PGA event this week because Russian TV coverage of the tournament may pique more local interest.

“It’s a very slow process,” said Mann, the country club sales director. “We have to bend ourselves in two trying to get those who seem interested to hold the club right, to listen to the pro’s advice, to keep swinging even when they don’t hit it. If we’re lucky, sometimes they get hooked. But the run-up to that rare event is really hell.”