Kenya has top golf courses that can host PGA championships

I spent my Eid playing golf on one of Kenya’s most challenging golf courses, the Kenya Railway Golf Club, and I was engaged in a discussion as to whether Kenya has any truly championship golf course or whether we need them.

The first question is easy to answer; this country has a few courses that can be described as “championship courses”.

Top of that list is the Baobab Course at Vipingo Ridge – this course is fit to host any PGA event and can hold its own against any of the Top 100 golf courses in the world easily.

The Great Rift Valley Golf Resort, the Muthaiga Golf Club, Karen Country Club, Sigona, Windsor and the Royal Nairobi Golf Club all have, to greater and lesser extents, championship golf courses.

For many of us, whose only source of information is the television, my views here may seem absurd. However, to those who have travelled around the globe to watch PGA events, they will know that many of the courses that host The Open, for example, are not too different from our own courses.

Let me now describe a golf course that may surprise you, and you may decide if this course is indeed a championship golf course.

In 1891, the Honourable Company of Golfers built Muirfield and they were the first club to write down the 13 articles of golf that were later transformed into the first rules of golf.

Muirfield first hosted The Open in 1892 and since that time, they have hosted the event severally. Muirfield practices “natural greenkeeping” and it was not until 2011 that they installed an automatic sprinkler system for tees and greens (not fairways).

At one point, the course had 225 bunkers (Leisure Lodge in Kwale is the most bunkered course in Kenya with about 83 bunkers); the bunkers at Muirfield have since been reduced to 170.

According to the golfdigest.com, the golf course is essentially the same today as it was in the 1930s – the firm greens have been maintained. So is Muirfield a championship golf course?

According to the USGA, the average golf course construction costs range from $1.6 million to $4.5 million (Sh140 million to Sh395 million). With the clamour for more “beautiful” golf course, the annual maintenance budgets have increased; in 1998, it cost $383,000 (Sh33 million) to maintain a public golf course and just over $600,000 (Sh52 million) for private golf courses.

To maintain an average golf course (read a public golf course) would cost Sh33 million!

Does the maturity of the Kenyan golf market justify the financial pain that comes with maintaining a championship golf course? Do we as golfers demand championship golf courses? The average weekend golfer is probably a 18-handicap golfer, whose tee shots slice wildly to the left and hardly cover 200-yards.

Does this typical golfer want to make triple bogeys for the rest of his life on the golf course where his Sh40 million house sits? I would think not. This guy wants to buy a property on a well maintained golf course, that is challenging but not frustrating.

I have played on many championship golf courses, and they are frustrating — the carries to the fairways are long, they are heavily bunkered, the greens are as fast as glass and there is water everywhere!

Where is the fun in that? Sure I want to play on these maddening golf courses occasionally, but I don’t want to buy a home on a championship golf course.

Give me the Kenya Railway Golf Club any day, the tee shots are demanding and the rough is murder, but I don’t get frustrated. Give me the Karen Country Club any day. I am challenged but not hanged, drawn and quartered.

Enjoy your weekend.