First Dubai Desert Classic re-drew the map: ‘Overnight, it became everyone’s favourite destination’

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James Williams addressed his ball on the first tee at Emirates Golf Club, in full view of the gathered masses, the world’s media and his golfing idol, then looked down at his white golf glove and noticed the blood seeping through.

The club’s head teaching professional at the time, he had been chosen to play in the 1989 Karl Litten Desert Classic, a ground-breaking event that would initiate the European Tour’s sustained expansion outside Europe.

But busy dividing his time between delivering golf instruction and helping with the organisation of the inaugural Dubai Desert Classic, Williams had not picked up a club in three months. So every night for two weeks before the tournament, he would head to the driving range, switch on the lights and send buckets of balls into the darkness until 3am.

Yet hard work and soft hands are not obvious allies.

“I ended up with the biggest blister you’d ever seen, a whole flap on the palm of my hand,” Williams says. “And then I was told I had to play a practice round on the Tuesday with Tony Jacklin, since he hadn’t seen the course. That’s when the panic set in.”

Jacklin was the European Ryder Cup captain, with victories at the US Open and the British Open already on his resume. He was also the reason Williams took up golf.

“A big star, great golf swing and a good-looking guy to boot,” Williams says. “And here I am, the club pro. So I’m standing on the first tee, already nervous with everyone there, and I could see the blood coming through the glove. It was hardly ideal.”

Williams duck-hooked his drive so badly that it just about stayed in bounds.

“I thought, ‘oh my god, this is going to be so embarrassing, swallow me up and get me off this course’,” he says. “I got the ball back on the fairway, missed the green with my third, but somehow chipped in for par and went round in 69 and beat him. I’m not bragging – I couldn’t hold a candle to Jacklin – but at least I didn’t look a complete fool.”

As it turned out, the entire event made a good impression. It was only the previous summer that the European Tour decided that Dubai should drive its evolution beyond traditional borders. Rod Bogg, the general manager at Emirates Golf Club, was integral to the process, travelling to the circuit’s Wentworth headquarters to convince chief executive Ken Scofield that the recently developed project, located far from the emirate’s epicentre, could be the catalyst.

Until that point, the tour typically opened its season in Spain, and between 1982 and 1985 had experimented with the Tunisian Open. Passing the torch to a nascent Dubai therefore represented a sizeable risk. However, the substantial investment in the course and facilities – themselves only a year old – coupled with the guaranteed good weather, led to a pretty painless sell.

“They didn’t take much persuasion,” Bogg says. “Typical European Tour, they’d done their due diligence and were just delighted to see the expansion. Dubai was the real genesis of that. This was the first big one for them.”

The players soon realised that, too, although they had been well-prepped. Tony Lewis, a Dubai-based sports journalist, handled the public relations for the club’s official opening in March 1988, then took a sabbatical for the remainder of that year to caddie on the European Tour for Philip Parkin, a fellow Welshman and long-time friend.

Taking in 20 tournaments across Europe, and often travelling with several of the tour’s top stars, Lewis was kept on a retainer to publicise the Desert Classic. Again, it was an easy concept to plug. “Let’s just say that every pro I talked to said he’d be quite happy to professionally promote the golf club,” he says. “In those days, people could see it was an exciting project and that Sheikh Mohammed (bin Rashid) was behind it. Even that early on, everyone recognised there was something new and compelling happening out here.”

Not everyone was completely aware of what to expect, though. Andrew “Chubby” Chandler, the highly respected agent, was a pro on tour at the time, but other than a couple of events in America and winters spent competing in South Africa, the Englishman had played all of his competitive golf in Europe. The UAE constituted a complete departure.

“I couldn’t even spell ‘Dubai’ back then,” Chandler says. “Going there was a pretty radical step from Ken Scofield and the European Tour. Fair play to them, because it worked.”

The same cannot be said for everything in Dubai, though. Chandler and his peers spent tournament week flitting between the golf course and his base at the Intercontinental Hotel next to the World Trade Centre, one of the only high-rise buildings, since the emirate did not yet house the restaurants and the malls that now supply entertainment for millions of tourists per year.

Yet the players still managed to sate their retail impulses.

“We cottoned on very quickly to Karama,” Chandler says. “The players would go down there and load up their bags with about 50-odd music cassettes for £1 (Dh5.7) each. Then they’d get back home and find that 48 didn’t work.”

Chandler certainly helped set the mood for the Desert Classic. Not long after 7am on Thursday, March 2, 1989, the Englishman stepped into the baking sunshine and onto the first tee to hit the tournament’s inaugural shot. It was more historic than heroic.

“I have a feeling I necked it into the bunker on the left,” he says. “Now, somebody might be quite old, have a totally different view and say I absolutely busted it down the middle. But I suspect my story’s more likely.”

In fairness, quite the tale unfolded from there. An estimated 7,000 spectators turned out to cheer on the 120 golfers across the four-day championship, despite the fact the event was nothing like it is today.

The fairways may have been lush and the clubhouse luxurious, but the infrastructure was limited: no corporate chalets, one tent to house around 2,000 people, two small grandstands and a little marquee structure next to the putting green. There was a single scoreboard, on the walk from the driving range to the first tee.

The crowds still came, though, much to the players’ amazement.

“We were used to going outside Britain and no one being there,” says Parkin, now an on-course analyst for the BBC and Golf Channel. “All of a sudden we went to Dubai and there was this fantastic buzz. There were so many expats, it was like having a home game in the Middle East, only with perfect weather and the most magnificent course, probably one of the best we’d ever had on the European Tour.

“Almost overnight, it became everyone’s favourite destination, a must-event to scribble down first on your schedule. It was just a different league to anything we’d had before.”

The organisers had worked diligently to guarantee it, right up until the last minute. Two months out from the event, the course superintendent resigned, prompting Bogg to hurriedly headhunt Barry Carter, a replacement from San Antonio, Texas, whom he describes as “the real hero of the first Desert Classic”.

Although Carter somehow ensured the track was in prime condition by the time the European Tour rocked up in March, it was not quite tournament-ready.

On the first practice day, the players navigated the par-5 18th by driving down 17, thus eliminating the steep dogleg left and the water that guarded the green. So, overnight on Monday, Bogg sent out a team to plant half a dozen towering palm trees between the two fairways. It definitely elicited the desired reaction.

“These trees appeared out of nowhere,” he says. “If you could’ve seen some of the players faces when they turned up for the second practice day and went to drive down there – priceless.”

The players were jolted from their comfort zone, but only temporarily. Away from the Majlis, they encountered only five-star treatment. The Intercontinental was a welcome upgrade on their unusual lodgings, as were the on-course facilities. Their every need was met, right down to the bare necessities.

“Gordon Brand Jr and a couple of players were hanging around on Thursday morning in the players’ lounge,” Bogg says, “which was actually a converted snooker room, where we’d covered the table with plywood and set chairs around, so the players could watch TV.

“I saw them milling about, so I asked if I could help with anything. Brand Jr looked at the VHS player and jokingly asked if we’d a copy of The Jungle Book. To their surprise, I found it in the cabinet, so here we had three top professionals glued to that before their first round ... I’ve even got the picture to prove it.”

The week’s highlight reel was animated enough. Fog delayed the second round, but once play resumed, Mark James and Peter O’Malley threw a blanket over proceedings and eventually duked it out in a play-off. James was a prominent player on tour, but O’Malley was contesting his first tour event.

James’s experience captured the title. On the first extra hole – the 17th – he stiffed a wedge to six feet and rolled in the birdie putt to defeat O’Malley and seal his 10th European Tour victory.

Standing triumphant on the 18th green, James used his valedictory speech to lavish praise on the circuit’s newest event, then surveyed the grandees and the galleries, looked up at the cloudless blue sky and quipped: “I better go now – it looks like it’s about to rain.”

For James, the win banished the gloom that had began to hang over his career. An unexpected, mid-1980s slide prompted some serious introspection, but he shed the shackles in May 1988 by clinching the Spanish Open. The success in Dubai underscored the upturn. In fact, it teed up a classic 1989.

“To win early that year reinforced that I could move on from what was a very bad slump,” James says.

“My wife Jane was there and the emotions were running high, so it really was fantastic. I won twice again that season, then took three out of four points at the Ryder Cup in September. Dubai kick-started a really big year for me.”

The size of his achievement was immediately apparent. James was presented with the giant coffee pot trophy on the 18th green, an unwieldy piece of hardware that had been discovered at a local souq and bolted to a heavy wooden base. Posing for pictures, James struggled to even balance it on his knee.

“It was big,” he says. “I guess they didn’t want to risk anyone swiping it into their pocket and making a run for it. But it’s something really nice to have at home. I kept it in my trophy cabinet, pride of place.”

Pride was the endearing emotion from that inaugural Desert Classic. The European Tour had broken new ground and the local organisers rolled out an extraordinary event to justify their faith. Twenty-six years on, it remains one of the most recognisable of the tour’s 28 destinations worldwide.

“From there, it was so exciting,” says Mohamed Juma Buamaim, vice-chairman and chief executive of Golf in Dubai. “The world instantly fell in love with this place. At one stage, it was one of the most iconic clubhouses after St Andrews.

“Dubai has been very good to the European Tour and its players. That’s why they appreciate it, why they continue to come back. Sheikh Mohammed must be very proud. The change in the city, driven in a large part by the course and the Desert Classic, has been amazing.”

The future Dubai ruler’s satisfaction was evident from the beginning. On March 5, 1989, three years after Emirates Golf Club’s conception and one year following its opening, Sheikh Mohammed strode onto the 18th green, turned to the 3,000 people gathered to serenade the Desert Classic’s initial champion and raised a jubilant fist to the crowd.

“The cheer from the gallery was unbelievable,” Bogg says. “I remember the hairs on the back of my neck standing up. Sheikh Mohammed had obviously taken a massive risk with this – it was built to be part of the infrastructure and to put Dubai on the world’s sporting map. And he was quite obviously over the moon. That’s my endearing image: Sheikh Mohammed’s delight.”​

jmcauley@thenational.ae

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