June 9, 2004

HOLE IN JONG

Word has it North Korea's Dear Leader is a golfing legend ' that's one myth worth taking a swing at. Eric Ellis.

The good folk at the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club have a blinder coming up: a weekend of golf in North Korea. Disappointingly, not included is a round and "on-the-spot guidance" with North Korea's Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, who, according to state propaganda, holds the world-record score for 18 holes, posted during the only round he has ever played.

For $US1500 ($2563), they get flights and accommodation, meals, green fees at the Pyongyang Golf Club and diverting 19th-hole entertainment, such as a visit to the Grand People's Study House, the captured US spy ship USS Pueblo (scuppered very close to the course) and the Children's Palace.

I once played the Pyongyang course during a surreptitious visit to North Korea to see how sad a country it was – and still is, by the sounds of it. Journalists are banned in the main by the regime. To get a visa, most correspondents have to go "undercover" and write something benign, such as pasta salesman or historian, on their application. In a fit of madness, I wrote "golf-course developer", thinking that would be the least suspicious job in North Korea.

It achieved the desired result, with the bonus of also playing on the country's only course, a par-72 affair carved from beautiful forest, an hour's drive west of Pyongyang, built for the Kim regime's Japan-dwelling sympathisers who never come.

It was quite an experience. Having fobbed myself off as a "golf expert", I then had to play well, lest my ruse be rumbled. Kitted up, I stepped out as the only one on the course, not counting my three Foreign Ministry spook minders in zoot suits and a caddy in traditional Korean dress who greeted my strokes with "good shottu". For six holes, I played the best golf of my life: four pars and two bogies. Coaches note: the prospect of life in a North Korean gulag is the antidote to a ropey swing.

A bonus was "the golf pro", Park Young Man. He told me that Kim Jong Il was a natural, shooting a 34 the only time he played there (the professional record is 59), including five aces. Perhaps the solution to North Korea's economic crisis – it is one of the world's poorest nations – is right there: launch Kim on the pro tour. Either that or let the country's starving millions, so beset by famine that they eat grass, at the fairways.