Sawangan golf course

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.