Sawangan golf course
By Hidayat Jati
JAKARTA (JP): Sawangan public golf course, located about two hours drive outside South Jakarta, is arguably the best place for golf-agnostics to start on their way to converting to this supposedly politically-incorrect leisure activity.
The Economist once wrote that many people hate golf for three reasons: because it destroys the environment, it is the sport of badly dressed businessmen and corrupt public officials, and that it is so addictive to converts that it creates phenomenons like golf widows.
If you are persistent enough to battle through the perpetually challenging traffic of Jakarta to play the course in Bogor, West Java, you will find that those three factors might not apply to either Sawangan's nine hole or 18 hole courses.
One immediately striking feature of Sawangan is its location. It sits on a little hill surrounded by a couple of villages with wonderful view of the mountains and the villagers strolling around just outside the club house.
Once I was inside the 94 hectare area, I could see some of the many trees around the fields, some of the golf-greens and even a river, which is called the Bojongsari River.
If you are lucky, like me, you might even hear some charming dangdut music drifting from the villagers' homes just across the Bojongsari River.
Nature-friendly
"I'm always proud to introduce the place as a nature-friendly golf course which helps the surrounding community," said Manuel Rawung, the soft-spoken, immaculately proper director of Sawangan.
Rawung is very proud of his course. He claimed that Sawangan employs 200 people from the nearby villages. "Golf courses are very labor intensive because they require such high maintenance," he pointed out.
The par-72 layout is the only golf course in the country designed by a local architect.
While showing me photographs of Sawangan's opening ceremony in 1972, which was attended by President Soeharto and then Jakarta governor Ali Sadikin, the slightly over middle age executive asserted, "We never have had any problems with the local community."
In contrast to a past controversy involving an exclusive golf course in North Jakarta which allegedly ruined a mangrove swamp or the widespread land dispute cases where villagers have lost their land to golf course developers, Sawangan does seem to be the exception.
Rawung went on to say that all of the caddies are young men from the villages. Apparently he does not like the idea of employing young girls to carry those heavy bags.
"We also give the caddies the choice of using trollies when working," he said while pointing at the waiting boys.
It was late Sunday afternoon and the courses were relatively vacant. Some of the caddies were just sitting around the fields while some others, using used sticks, tried a shot at the rich man's game.
"You know, some of the boys have even made it onto the junior national teams," Rawung said.
Infamous
Unlike one might find at those multi-million rupiahs members only courses, the chance of bumping into a famous, or infamous, industrialist is quite small at Sawangan.
Being one of the few public courses in the Greater Jakarta area, Sawangan is frequented more by the expatriate community, mostly members of the diplomatic corps, or bureaucrats from state financial institutions
Of course, judging from the press coverage of the rampant bad debt problem, the Economist's stereotype might be applicable even at Sawangan these days.
However, bad-debts aside, Sawangan's reasonable weekend greens fee (around Rp 100,000) is still far from conspicuous and is a major force in drawing such fidelity from Jakarta's golfers.
"We spend very little on promotion," Rawung acknowledged. "Our clients are very loyal."
Some of them are so devoted to Sawangan that they decide to hire the little cottages surrounding the courses. Some of these devotees, including former finance minister Ali Wardhana, usually spend their entire weekend in these tiny houses so that they can fully commit themselves to the ritual.
Such addiction, of course, might not solve the golf widow problem.