"It really was the United Nations of golf."
/As the pitiful cash grab in Turkey marches to a merciful conclusion Friday, Doug Ferguson takes the opportunity to focus on a different kind of world golf expansion in Turkey: the recently concluded World Amateur Team Championship, where a waiting list now exists just to get in.
Credit the Olympic movement with fueling international interest in the event and expanding funding for player development. Some day.
It's too convenient to attribute the growth of the World Amateur Team to golf being approved as an Olympic sport for 2016. Golf was approved for the Olympics only three years ago, not nearly enough time for some countries to develop a reasonable infrastructure - golf courses, practice facilities, instruction, corporate involvement and, perhaps most important, a strong middle class.
The numbers have been trending in this direction for the last decade - 63 teams in 2002 at Malaysia, 70 teams in 2006 in South Africa. And it helps that Turkey is centrally located for some African and Asian nations.
But it illustrates how far golf has come - and how much more room there is to grow.
"I thought this was a good, inevitable outcome," said David Fay, the former USGA executive director who spent 30 years working the World Amateur Team. "It confirms the game is going global, in large part because golf is an Olympic sport. There are more countries playing now, and they look at Olympic sports differently than they look at other sports. There's so much evidence. When tennis became a medal sport (in 1988), that's when they invested more money in tennis, and you saw what the outcome was - all the champions produced by the former Soviet Union."
Ferguson goes on to include some fine stories from David Fay about the early days of the movement, including the days when Vijay had trouble breaking 80 and a doozy involving South Africa.