From Zhang to Kuang: golf’s remarkable journey in China
SHENZHEN: When Zhang Lianwei became the first Chinese player to win a European Tour event in 2003, 14-year-old Kuang Yang hadn’t even been born.
The pair, part of a record 45 home-grown players in this week’s 25th Volvo China Open, illustrate just how far golf has come in the world’s most populous nation.
Lianwei, who turned 54 on Thursday, only started playing when he was 20 because golf, then deemed a bourgeois pursuit, was banned under Mao Zedong.
Lianwei, the only man to have played in all 25 editions of the China Open, winning it in 2003, is now the daddy of Chinese pro golf, the precursor of a wave of young Chinese players hoping to make it big.
Precocious amateur Kuang Yang, 40 years his junior, is just one of a horde of teenagers tearing up Chinese fairways – and he made an impressive debut with a firstround one-under 71 on Thursday.
“It’s a different era and a different environment for these kids coming through now,” a smiling Lianwei said after receiving a huge birthday cake from organisers at the end of his opening round.
“I’m not jealous of the opportunities they have now,” added Lianwei, who was unable to turn professional until 1995, when he was 30 years old.
“They have a better chance to learn the game, but they have much tougher competition than I did. When I began there was no professional golf in China.”
While golf was banned during Lianwei’s formative years, Kuang Yang has been swinging a club since he was two years old.
“I started playing golf at the age of 20,” said Lianwei, who began in the mid-1980s at Zhuhai Golf Club, across the Pearl River delta from Shenzhen, when Mao’s ban on golf was lifted.
“But I had to wait a very long time to turn professional. It took 10 years because of procedures with the China Golf Association and the government.”
Pint-sized Kuan Yang, who looks every bit as young as his 14 years, isn’t even the youngest player at the China Open, which is co-sanctioned by the European and Asian Tours.
That distinction belongs to 13-year-old amateur Ma Bingwen from Beijing.
However, many Chinese teenagers have shone all too briefly, none more so than Guan Tianlang who at 14 became the youngest player to make the cut at the US Masters in 2013, but has since dropped out of the limelight.
Current world number 39 Li Haotong, who has won twice on the European Tour and played the first two rounds of last month’s Masters with Tiger Woods, is an exception and, now aged 23, he is tipped by many to become China’s first men’s Major winner. — AFP