THE SANDY 70S

THOMAS WRAGG By

A membership fee that only costs 500AED, ‘browns’ instead of greens and “bloody great lizards running all over the place” – it seems a world away from the well-kept greens and manicured fairways we are spoilt with across the UAE in this day and age.

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Sand, sand and more sand! Oh and one tiny peice of astroturf.

But it isn’t a world away, in fact it was just 50 years ago right here in Dubai at the famed Dubai Country Club, which opened in 1971 after

Duabi’s leaders granted six expatriates and prominent local businessman

Khalifa bin Juma Al Naboodah land in Ras Al Khor to build the club.

To find out more about the history of the club and the UAE itself, we caught up with

David Burns, who was first introduced to the UAE in 1967 when he was on his way to join a military unit in Singapore. The aircraft he was flying on lost an engine en route and they ended up landing in Sharjah, where he spent a week with the Solomon

Scouts. After leaving the army in the 70s, he moved to Abu Dhabi to join Spinneys before working across the GCC for next 35 years.

“I think the first thing that struck you was the heat as soon as you got off the aircraft,” Burns said. “It was like walking into an oven, something that we’d never experienced before. It was phenomenal –it was all encompassing in terms of, it was everywhere. Everything you touched was hot. In those days, the only public places you could go to that were air conditioned were the banks and all the banks had a very large security guards with rifles!

So, you had to try and get into the bank to cool off. I can remember getting in by dodging the security guards!”

After its opening in 1971, Dubai

Country Club proved a major attraction to the growing expatriate population in the UAE after the discovery of oil in the country. Throughout the summer months it would normally be a male-only affair with wives and partners who didn’t work returning home to Europe for four months to escape the intense heat.

The club offered them a sanctuary for social contact plus spending time at the bar without any pressing need to return home! By the end of the first year, the club’s membership trebled and continued growing with weekly tournaments on a Friday well attended.

“Everybody, and I mean in those days everybody, there were no grass coursse, so everybody played on sand,” says Burns.

“The Country Club in particular, you had quite clear fairways that had been sort of raked and brushed, and then dunes and just sand and scrub for the rough areas. And what we would call greens were actually browns, and the putting surface was just sand mixed with crude oil.

“On a Friday, the club would employ the green-keeping staff and after everybody had been round or when somebody had finished putting, they would go on the green or on the brown with a big brush, and cut out the previous markings from the balls.

“Before you reached the brown, if you landed on the fairway, you would place a nine-inch square of astroturf down to play your ball. You would always carry this around with you and placed it behind the ball, then you were allowed to pick up the ball and put it anywhere on the astroturf. All of the tee boxes had astroturf as the surface from which you could drive from. Usually, when you hit your ball, you’d hit the mat first! The good players could play quite well off the mats, but us hackers, sometimes the mat went further than the ball!

“And if you played in the rough, in a lot of cases you hit stone. So, you never used good clubs to play there, because your clubs got battered very quickly. The same rules applied. There were people that would go back to the club after a game and analyse every stroke and every shot, something I could never do. You played a normal game of golf, but you played it on sand.”

With membership continuing to grow, funds were generated to build nine extra holes, but the small clubhouse became a problem with the growing numbers. The club’s golfers soon solved this issue by installing a separate golf clubhouse using a redundant prefabricated staff accommodation unit donated by a construction company – the ‘temporary’ building continued in use for 35 years from the early 80s.

But there was one problem that couldn’t be solved – giant lizards on the course!

“It was hot during the summer; it would get up to 50 degrees,” said Burns. “I played golf on many occasions in temperatures of more than 50 and that gets difficult out in the middle of a desert, which it was back then.

“Because you were out there with sand all around, there used to be iguanas living on the course. You could walk down the fairway and there’d be bloody great lizards running all over the place – it was a sight to behold!”

By the 1980s things had changed in Dubai with more and more expatriates coming to live in the Emirate. With new housing complexes in self-contained communities that featured swimming pools, tennis courts and squash courts along with hotels offering sports complexes, the Dubai Country Club was no longer the place to be. Add in the opening of the desert oasis that was Emirates Golf Club – the Middle East’s first grass course – and membership began to decline.

“Do you know why they built Emirates Golf Club where they did?” David asks me. “The Emirates Global Aluminum factory that is further up the road were pumping about a million gallons a day of fresh water into the sea, because they had nothing else to do with it. And one of Sheikh Mohammed’s advisors had done some geology work, and beneath the land where Emirates Golf Club is, is a natural aquifer. And an aquifer is like cracks in the rock that store water.

“So, the idea was they would pump this fresh water from Dubai, and pump it directly into the ground underneath the area where the golf course now is. And then all they would have to do is drill some boreholes and pump it up and irrigate the land, which worked. It was fabulous, and it was the first major green golf course in the Middle East. The club remains the premier golf club in the region without a doubt.”

With the rise of Emirates Golf Club and Dubai’s growing ambition, Dubai Country Club closed down for good in 2007 to make way for the spectacular Meydan Racecourse.

“When they announced that Meydan Racecourse would be built on the site it was a sad moment,” says Burns. “There was talk about finding the club another place, and they were offered land quite far away from town but the committee didn’t want to move that far out.”

“Some members weren’t happy that the club was going to be shut down but it was just part of the evolution of Dubai. It is what it is. We had some great times there. It was one of those places, if you wanted to play rugby, you played rugby, if you wanted to play golf, you played golf on the sand.

“Back in the early days we could never have envisaged what Dubai has become today. Nobody had the vision that the rulers of the UAE had – not once did we look around and say ‘in 20 years’ time, there are going to be multistory buildings everywhere’, because we didn’t have that vision, it wasn’t ours, we didn’t own it, we weren’t invested in it.

“There was no value for us in dreaming those sorts of things. I take my hat off to the UAE, what they’ve done there is nothing short of incredible.”

Dubai Country Club closed for good in 2007

“It came about when the Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani was devolping Qatar. He had big plans for the west bay, north of west bank, and wanted to build a load of hotels and a golf course. There was a sand course at one side, there still is, but they pushed for a grass course.

“The President of the Qatar Golf Federation had contacted Peter Harradine to design the course, so he came and surveyed the land and then the order was given to Qatar National Hotels Company to build the course.

“I flew out and joined the company on the day they celebrated the three-month anniversary of breaking ground on the new course. The Chairman at the time asked me if I know much about golf, I told him that I played and he basically gave me the keys to the kingdom and told me to make sure the course was built to budget.

“So, I had to make sure that Harradine didn’t go over budget, I spent two years with him and his side-kick and we had some stand-up fights, but it all went well in the end!

“I think I was the first non-star member to play every single hole as they became available, and when the course was finally finished, we had a board meeting, and one of the board members said ‘well, what do you want to do now, Mr. Harradine?’ And he said ‘I’d like to keep the course closed for a year, to allow all of the plants and trees and the grass to grow.

‘And if we do that, the course will be

“Sharjah Wanderers Golf Club was a joy to behold. If you could imagine, you had a tee box and the golf course was in the dunes, so it changed daily with the wind. The boys in the morning would go out, and they would find a flag, a whole flag and they would put a tyre around it. So the tyre was on the surface and you would chip into the tyre, and that was like putting out! The course had no browns, it was literally a tyre.

“It was funny, a really wonderful and weird experience. But there were no fairways, there were a couple that a few people had sort of taken a bulldozer to, but there was nothing that you would call a fairway and they got covered with sand anyway. So, you played in the dunes off the sand, you could play them with a piece of green grass or your astroturf.

“And then just when you got somewhere

David on one of his trips around Doha Golf Club

good for 25 years. If you let people play on it at the moment, it’ll cost you a fortune maintaining it.’ They agreed and gave the golf course to me to take care of.

“It was brilliant, because I was known as ‘Mr. Golf’ and I could play golf on my own 18hole golf course any day I wanted. Seriously, it was like that, and nobody bothered me.

“Every VIP who came to Qatar, who played golf, I would get a call from the foreign office asking if I could organise a golf event? I’d obviously say yes and we would take them round.

“I can remember playing golf with Boris Becker and his wife before he got divorced. The president of Lebanon, the chairman of Nippon Industries, I mean it was just incredible.”

Sharjah Wanderers Golf Club did get browns eventually!

near to the to the flag you chipped in. Sometimes the flags would be buried completely, the dunes would just blow over. So, you would put another tyre down, and sometimes the sand dunes would expose tyres that had been there for years. So, the course was different every time you played it. That was cute and very cool.”