De-FORE!-estation

by Reilly Capps

IQUITOS, PERU — I admit it wasn’t my best round: 60 strokes over nine holes won’t get me on the PGA tour. But I have excuses.

On the second hole, my nerves were rattled when a python lunged toward my scorekeeping pencil. By the ninth I was about to die from heat stroke (and I couldn’t afford another stroke!). And somewhere around the fourth hole, I was nervous because a shirtless man appeared near a jungle-thatched hut and stared at me, and I worried he would laugh at my swing. My faithful caddy, Lorenzo, was nice enough not to point out how badly I played. Not sure he could. I think mine was the first round of golf he’d ever seen.

At least I got off the Amazon Golf Course, which opened in May, in one piece. Last month, a golfer was pulling his ball from a water hazard when a piranha bit off the tip of his finger.

The Amazon is about the last place you’d expect to see a golf course, outside this jungle town, which is connected to the outside world only by plane and river boats, and is connected to common sense just as tentatively.

How’d it get here? About five years ago, “Mad” Mick Collis, a British expat, walked into the jungle, looked around, and saw a golf course. He grabbed some land (and grab is exactly the right term for it — property laws are flimsy in Peru) and paid some cholos $5 a day to hack away the scrub, cut some trees, and build up some greens.

Rainforest deforestation is speeding up, and while Mick’s contribution to this trend is, in the grand scheme of things, barely worth mentioning (the world’s appetite for meat is what’s really devouring the Amazon), I went to see him to find out what in the blazes he was thinking.

Mad Mick owns a tour company and, on this afternoon, he was cocooned in a hammock in a sweaty concrete room, looking like a ridiculous Kurtz. His female Peruvian helper and I had to pry him out of the hammock and hoist him to his feet, a signal that maybe jogging, not golf, ought to be Mick’s sport.

Mick explained his desire to build a golf course in terms of tourism for his beloved Iquitos. He started the Great Amazon River Raft Race for the same reason. That got Iquitos on NPR, and Mick figured: golf resorts are huge tourist draws, particularly for people who like to travel the world and play the same sport they do at home.

Golf started off as such a nice, gentle Scottish game and it ended up a monster, at least from an environmental point of view. After spreading to places like Arizona and Dubai, where the wasted water could sate several cities, this new Amazon course may be the beginning of the end of golf courses in outlandish places. Especially now that fewer people are playing golf, and, for the first time in a long time, more courses are closing than are being built.

Good. Golf deserves to get weed whacked, particularly in places where it doesn’t make any sense (see: most of the western U.S., where states fight over water like fat kids fight over cake). Golf makes more sense in Aberdeen, Troon, even on the moon. At least the moon has some wide-open fairways, lots of holes, low humidity, and not a single piranha.