The Golf Hotel in Ain Sokhna hosted the last of the season’s tournaments on Saturday, which was won by Mrs Wang Xiao Ming with a score of 69. The course, which is in tip-top condition and has matured since opening 20 months ago, saw 49 competitors tee off from a shot-gun start, except for the Egyptian Champion who had a golf lesson.
Calle Carlsson, the director of Golf at the Ain Sokhna hotel, won the 2007 Egyptian Open at Dreamland Golf Course last week over 36 holes, defeating Gerard Bent, from the Katameya Heights Golf Club by five shots.
But on Saturday afternoon Carlsson’s priority, at this boutique hotel with 48 rooms and three suites, was to coach two budding Egyptian cub tigers, who one day may challenge him for Egypt’s top prize.
After winning more than two dozen professional events in his native Sweden, Carlsson, 32, decided to stay on in Egypt after first arriving as a tour leader with a golf tourism operator two years ago.
“My dream was always to get a start on the European Tour and if that didn’t happen then I always wanted to run a golf club, Carlsson said.
Having also won the Egyptian Championship in 2005, Carlsson would love to see the tournament on the Red Sea at the Golf Hotel.
Co-editor of Sports and Fitness magazine, Alexander Fuchs, who was covering the tournament for his magazine’s annual golf issue, said: “Calle runs a hell of an organization here.
“We are trying to grow golf in Egypt. I think Egyptians excel at individual sports like squash, and golf is the ultimate individual sport, Fuchs said.
Egypt’s golfing community is small, a figure of 3,000 regular players is often quoted, of who a few, including Carlsson, are endeavoring to set up a Professional Golf Association in Egypt, with the help of the PGA in the UK and to hold professional events on Cairo’s top championship courses – Dreamland, Katameya, Mirage, Golf City and also at Ain Sokhna.
It is easy to see why the Golf Hotel may become the traditional home for golf in Egypt. Traditions have to start somewhere, and the hotel’s dark terracotta exterior, wooden beams, coffee colored décor, impressive library and discreet bar makes it the perfect new home for this ancient game.
“I’ve stayed at 58 hotels in Egypt and been on five Nile cruises, and this hotel has the best trained staff and that includes the Four Seasons chain, Fuchs said.
New Yorkers like Fuchs are known to be boastful, but he could well be right. The hotel’s General Manager, hospitality veteran of 20 seasons in St. Moritz, Isabelle Cutrona, is proud of the fact that she gets so many return customers from Cairo.
“It has taken a while for the word to get out, but once people find us, they keep coming back, Cutrona said, who was wearing a light sleeveless sweater, the signature of any golfers’ wardrobe.
Cutrona, who has Italian and French roots, doesn’t actually play golf because she is too busy looking after the small details at the Golf Hotel, as she is determined to make it, if not the four seasons, then the best hotel for three seasons in Egypt.
The tourists and expatriate customers dry up during the heat of the summer, a time when Carlsson will rearrange bunkers, develop new water features to make the course more challenging and search for an effective local weed killer, as it is illegal to import such pesticides.
But it was Wang Xiao Ming, native of Beijing who only started playing golf in 2003, that found the course to her liking.
Wang Xiao Ming, who is a member of the Mirage Golf Club, Cairo, and whose husband works for a Chinese military import-export business, dominated Saturday’s field and found every green, including the tricky 16th and the long 11th and 15th holes. Unlike her good friend, Soony Schieske, a Korean, who told me that she was, “the worst player in the competition.
Though, Soony Schieske didn’t admit her final score, her German husband, Gunter Schieske, who works for the German development agency, GTZ, placed second, just one shot behind his wife’s close friend.
Carlsson and Cutrona presented prizes to the winners on the hotel’s terrace or 19th hole that looks across a lake framed by the Mediterranean villas of Stella di Mare and where one can spend mindless hours whacking balls into the watery abyss, which is the therapeutic nature of golf. Wrapping a club around a palm tree epitomizes the other side of the game.
Maybe this is why the best sports imitate life.
