Golf in Croatia
from: http://www.brijuni.hr/, written by Robert Trent Jones, Jr.
“I met a traveler from an antique land….” Shelley’s famous poem “Ozymandias” began.
Recently I attended a golf conference on Brijuni, a beautiful Adriatic island off the Istria Peninsula of Croatia. They played a ProAm on the recently restored golf course there which had been abandoned in 1939. This was not a modern design. It was an antique. There were un-irrigated fairways flowing as nature had provided, simple tee markers on uneven but raised tee boxes, and most interestingly, small sand greens or “browns”. Sand greens have been used in hot desert locations wherever the British Empire laid out a course to amuse its colonists or provide sport for its soldiers and in oil countries of the Middle and Far East and Texas.
At Brijuni the players included the young European professionals who were charmed by this unusual game of golf. It was a step back in time before OPEC was founded in a Brijuni conference hall by third-world oil producers, before communism, before World War II, when barons and princesses played with the social elite. There are Roman ruins on the island nearby and the deer and other animals graze the fairways -- they are the mowers of the grass. There are other simple charming venues in distant lands from the rubber plantations in Malaysia to the geyser-filled lava flows of Iceland. These natural layouts simply follow the land to holes with flagsticks and an invitation for a beautiful walk.
Today when modern courses are too long, too expensive and too hard and take too much time, try an antique course where nature simply charms and stirs the golfer’s imagination of why the game of golf, in all its forms, has given enjoyment for half a millennium.
The more modern golf course variation at Penha Longa Golf Club in Portugal includes a hole played under an antique Roman aqueduct. At Cancun, Mexico, a Mayan Chacmool statue oversees your putts on a green. These are golf courses in the ruins. Will they withstand the test of time? Only time will tell.
