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LEISURE Golf
HIT THE FAIRWAYS
STARTING OUT AS A PASTIME FOR AMERICAN OIL WORKERS, GOLF HAS BECOME A POPULAR SPORT FOR BOTH LOCAL AND EXPATRIATE COMMUNITIES.
Golf first teed off in Saudi Arabia when American expatriates working at the oil giant Saudi Aramco dug out an 18-hole course in the sand near Dhahran in the late 1940s. Naturally this course was basic, but it led to the spread of golf resorts throughout the region. To compensate for the ultra-fine, indigent sand found in Saudi Arabia, the oil executives are believed to have pioneered the method of mixing in oil to stop the winds from blowing it away. All of the early courses that followed adopted this method, and to this day many golf- ers still refer to the greens as "browns".
That first course in Dhahran was moved to its present site a few years after its inauguration, and the course celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1998. Besides being the country's oldest golf course, it also became the largest when another nine holes were added in the late 1970s.
Today, the course has ditched its oil-soaked terrain in favour of grass and, following a second redevelopment, it was opened in 2004 as an 18-hole grass course, the first of its kind in the Eastern Province and only the third 18-hole grass course in the Kingdom. Grassed courses are a recent phenomenon in Saudi Arabia, prior to which hardy golfers used to carry a piece of artificial turf to place under the ball on the tees and on fairways. In contrast, today there are
a variety of first-class golf courses available throughout the King- dom. In fact, there are four grass nine-hole golf courses, three grass 18-hole courses, one 27-hole desert course and about ten 18-hole desert courses to be found throughout the country. The most spectacular golf courses can be found in Riyadh in the Dirab valley. Just a 30-minute drive away from Riyadh's diplomatic centre, the Dirab Golf Course is situated in the scenic valley near the mountain escarpment of Tuwaiq.
While this was the first green course in the Kingdom, it has since been voted as one of the best golf courses in the world. Two prominent Saudi golfers today, Mohammed Fahad Al Khaldi and Ali Hamad Bin Harith, began as caddies for the employees of Aramco but at the same time learned the sport for themselves. Today, they are both members of the National Golf Team of Saudi Arabia, participating in golf tournaments all over the world. The Saudi Golf Committee was founded in 1999 to promote the sport across the country and to produce young golfers with enough talent to participate and compete in golfing tournaments around the world. In 2007, the Riyadh Golf Course and the Dirab Golf Course hosted the Golf Federation Tournament of the Arab World. Following is a listing of some of the Kingdom's major golf courses:
saudiarabia 2011
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