THE ORIGINS OF GOLF
The origins of golf are equivocal and much debated. Some historians trace the sport to paganica, played by the Romans using a bent stick to hit a stuffed leather ball. This game spread throughout the Roman Empire during the 1st century BC. The Chinese too played chuiwan between the 8th and 14th centuries, swinging a golf club at a small ball with the aim of sinking it in a hole. And then there is England’s cambuca, France’s chambot, Persia’s chaugan and Netherland’s kolven.
However, it is generally accepted that modern golf developed in Scotland from the Middle Ages onwards. It was not popular until the late 19th century when it spread to the rest of the United Kingdom and then to the United States.
The oldest golf tournament in existence and golf’s first major is the British Open, known as The Open Championship, which was inaugurated on 17th October 1860 at Prestwick Golf Club in Scotland with Scottish players dominating the earlier editions. Two of them introduced the game to the U.S. and later set up in 1888 America’s first golf club – the Saint Andrew’s Golf Club in Yonkers, New York.
Wandering a little from the story of golf, that was the period in time when widowed but brassy Dolly Levi (remember the iconic Broadway hit Hello, Dolly!?) travelled to Yonkers to visit the gruffy “half-a-millionaire” Horace Vandergelder and managed after much effort in hilarious fashion to convince the penny-pinching Vandergelder that “Money is like manure. It’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread about, encouraging young things to grow.”
No mention of golf in Yonkers throughout that musical though. The fairways at the newly-formed Saint Andrew’s could well have done with a spread of “manure” no doubt!
Women started to play the game in the mid-1550s when Mary Queen of Scots commissioned St. Andrew’s links, but they were not taken seriously as most men considered women weak and lacking in skill and ability. There was nothing humorous or light-hearted, as one would imagine it to be, when the men claimed that GOLF stands for “Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden”.
To them, it was an unwritten rule, until the 20th century at least, when women came to the fore and proved themselves equal to the task. Even so, as recent as the late 1940s the Royal Liverpool Club refused Sir Henry Cotton’s wife entry into the clubhouse with the club secretary’s statement declaring “No woman ever has entered the clubhouse and praise God, no woman ever will.”
The RSGC too had, until a decade or so ago, some restrictions imposed on the ladies but none that arose from such chauvinistic mentality. The few limitations were innocuous in nature and have never affected or impeded the tremendous interest and progress in the game of golf here since its inception 125 years ago.
PLAYING HOST TO MAJOR TOURNAMENTS
No major international tournaments were held at the RSGC in the era prior to Malayanisation. Throughout that period, other than the wellcontested Club Championships and other Club cup competitions, the Malayan Championship was perhaps the only noteworthy tournament. In the late 1950’s however, fanned by the Tunku’s passion for golf and subsequently that of the King, interest in the game spread. The Tunku had, perhaps unwittingly, set an irreversible trend that led to the proliferation of world class golf courses in the country today.
Anyway, for 30 years or so after Merdeka, the RSGC was still the only club (other than KGNS which opened in 1968) in Kuala Lumpur and Selangor with an 18-hole golf course and the facilities to host a golf tournament. Coupled with our Club’s close ties with the Malaysian Golf Association ever since its formation in 1929 and the fact that the men at its helm were mostly from our ranks, it followed quite naturally that our Club became the birthplace of most of the major golfing events during the 1960s and 1970s.
PUTRA CUP
One of the major tournaments held then was for the Inaugural Putra Cup, a glittering gold trophy costing a king’s ransom, donated by the Tunku for a South East Asia Amateur Team Championship. In the 25th Anniversary souvenir brochure, Edmund Yong wrote: “… The Tunku, as he is popularly known, wished the competition to be played among teams along the lines of the World Amateur Golf Team Championship for the Eisenhower Cup. The object of the competition would be to foster friendship among the sportsmen of South East Asia…”
Teams from Burma, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, and South Vietnam participated together with host Malaya in the event that began with a simple flag raising opening ceremony on Thursday, 19th July 1961. The favourites, Hong Kong, won by a thumping 33 strokes, with Singapore, Thailand and Malaya taking the minor placings in that order.
A number of our Club’s Members represented the country in the series : Patrick Lim, who was also a national shooter, in 1961; George Lee (elder brother to Tommy) and T.C. Chan in 1963; Rashid Mallal in 1967, 1969 and 1972; Choo Kwan Choong (grandson of Choo Kia Peng) in 1967, 1968 and 1969, and Bobby Lim in 3 consecutive years from 1969. Before they turned professional, both the Yusof brothers acquitted themselves well in the Cup, the elder brother Zainal Abidin in the early seventies and Sahabudin from 1975 to 1979. Sahabudin bagged the 1979 individual title, for good measure.
Malaysia won the Cup in 1976 under the tutelage of Norman Von Nida who was engaged by then Captain Tommy Lee primarily for that assignment.
The Putra Cup Championship continued to be hosted at the RSGC for the next 3 years before it was decided to have the venue rotated among the participating countries in alphabetical order. However on its 25th Anniversary, the RSGC played host once again to enable the Tunku to witness the proceedings, as it would have been too taxing on him to travel long distances at his age (he was 83). The Cup was later renamed the Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra Cup.
Credit to YK Liew – Excerpt from the book ‘The RSGC: Veritably A Royal Heritage”
