Stars from past and present have helped New Zealand maintain its stalwart presence on the international golf stage.

By Brian Doherty

Perhaps only in New Zealand could you find a place like Rakauroa Golf Club, where a call to the secretary would certainly be in order before planning a trip to the first tee. It might be closed for haymaking. Tucked away on the eastern side of the country's North Island in an area unkindly named Poverty Bay by Captain James Cook, Rakauroa is a farm first and a golf course second.

From mid-November to mid-March, spring and summer in New Zealand, Rakauroa is closed to allow the grass to grow. When the weather improves, the hay is cut and then the farm reverts to a nine-hole golf course for the 30 or so members who pay a $2 green fee and where, like a number of other rural layouts, sheep are the primary means of fairway maintenance.

Surprising as this may be in the U.S., it is not an unusual practice in New Zealand, a country better off for sheep than people. In a country still climbing toward 4 million inhabitants, there are 40 million sheep, an astronomical number but down from the 60 million of a few years ago. Still, the proportion of people to sheep is lopsided to the point where it is the subject of jokes from their Australian neighbors across the Tasman Sea.

If nothing else, the rustic charm of Rakauroa and the dozens of clubs like it dotted throughout the country reflects the fascination the game of golf has for New Zealand.

When New Zealand was colonized, the English, Scots, Irish and Welsh could each find a piece of home in a land of mountains, valleys, plains and dune country, and where there is ample rain to keep everything green. It was the Scots who brought golf to New Zealand, to the city of Dunedin, a coastal city on South Island the natives call the Edinburgh of the south. After a brief flurry in 1871, the game was truly born with the formation of the Otago Golf Club

in Dunedin in 1892. A year later, J.A. Somerville, a Presbyterian minister from Scotland, won the first New Zealand Amateur, the second such championship in the British Colonies after India. In 1907 the country's first Open was staged.

Today the New Zealand Golf Association has almost 400 clubs on its register and the boast has been made that the country has one of the highest ratios of courses to players in the world. But New Zealand is an isolated country at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Next stop is the Antarctic. Australia is 1,200 miles away, although many still blithely toss New Zealanders and Australians into the same barrel to the horror of both. The rest of the world is a lifetime away.

To be sure, this remoteness long restricted the development of the country's leading golfers. The first national team was not chosen until 1927 for a match against Australia, and Aussies were the only item on the menu until a British team toured in 1935.

Not until after the Second World War did a New Zealand team cross the equator, going to St. Andrews in 1954 for the first Commonwealth tournament and returning four years later to compete for the Eisenhower Trophy at the inaugural World Amateur Team Championships. The Commonwealth tournament was last played in 1967, but New Zealand has played in every world championship -- one of only nine countries able to make such a claim.

The design of early courses in New Zealand was primarily the work of the locals, and Alister Mackenzie was not impressed by what he saw when he stopped in

BRIAN DOHERTY is editor of New Zealand Golf. This is his first contribution to Golf Journal.

Auckland on his way to Australia in the 1920s. "Golf in New Zealand, unlike Australia, is dead," he wrote. "In fact, it has never been alive. Green Committees there do not seem to realize that the game is played for pleasure; they utilize long grass as a penal hazard and the consequence is that golfers will not put up with the annoyance of losing balls."

Mackenzie designed the Titirangi course in the west of Auckland, and for the most part committees have stayed with the design apart from softening a couple of greens with extreme slopes. But if Mackenzie could return to New Zealand today, he would find a game alive and kicking. As always, the boom has followed success.

In the mid-1980s, the New Zealand Golf Association made two smart moves. It employed Grant Clements as executive director, and second, it adopted his five-year plan to have a national team capable of competing on an international scale.

For the longest time, New Zealand was the skinny kid getting sand kicked in his face. No more, decided Clements, and a small group of teenagers were

placed in a squad and given every chance to develop their skills. The results have been remarkable.

Since 1972 New Zealand had fashioned one top-five finish in the WATC, but in 1990, playing on its home turf, the home team finished tied for second place with the United States, albeit a distant 13 strokes behind victorious Sweden.

In 1992, in the largest gathering of teams ever assembled for the WATC, New Zealand won its first title, defeating the U.S. by seven and Australia and France, tied for third, by a whopping 21 shots.

The way that victory was achieved thrilled all New Zealanders. Trailing the American team of Jay Sigel, Allen Doyle, Justin Leonard and David Duval after seven holes of the final round, the New Zealanders put on an incredible surge down the stretch to finish with a record score of 823, 17 under par. Philip Tataurangi, now on the Nike Tour, was the medalist at 9 under, one ahead of teammate Michael Campbell.

Suddenly, golf was the game. The average age of competitors at the New Zealand Amateur plummeted as teenagers turned from rugby to golf. Club memberships rose and media interest grew sharply. And more was to follow.

In one glorious weekend in 1993, Grant Waite won the PGA Tour's Kemper Open, Bob Charles took the Senior Tour's Bell Atlantic Classic -- and became the first to crack $4 million in senior earnings in the process -- Greg Turner captured the Italian Open and Grant Moorhead won the West Australian Open.

For a country with 30 touring professionals and a playing base of about 112,000, it was an amazing accomplishment. Two years later, the New Zealand Golf Association reported that a survey had shown that approximately half a million New Zealanders played at least one round of golf a year.

Then along came Campbell, who burst onto the international scene with a third-round 65 that thrust him into the 54-hole lead at the 1995 British Open. He eventually finished tied for third, but the spotlight had been cast on another New Zealander. Campbell, in fact, is a Maori -- an indigenous New Zealander.

Campbell and Frank Nobilo may be the current heartthrobs of New Zealand golf, but the player who planted the country's red-starred flag on an international stage was Charles, a shock winner of the New Zealand Open when he was an 18-year-old bank clerk.

Charles, the 1963 British Open champion, has played golf the world over, but he has not forgotten his New Zealand roots. His continued interest in the welfare of golf in the country is reflected in his giving one percent of his Senior Tour earnings to junior golf in New Zealand, a donation that in 10 years has contributed nearly $NZ100,000 (approximately $70,000 in U.S. funds).

Nobilo, who won the New Zealand Amateur as an 18-year-old, is a dashing bearded descendant of a Baltic pirate. Like Charles, he hasn't forgotten his roots, turning over his entire share from the 1994 President's Cup to New Zealand junior golf and promising the program his check from this year's match as well.

* * *

One of the attractions of golf in New Zealand is that it is relatively cheap. The most expensive big-city clubs have annual dues of little more than $NZ1,000 (about $700), with the average fee about half that.

The courses are not frighteningly long and the cult of long water carries passed New Zealand by. The courses tend to be pleasant places to play, although they can be toughened when required.

New Zealand professional golf owes much to two Australians, Peter Thomson and Kel Nagle. Between them they won 16 New Zealand Opens and countless other tournaments, and in much the same way as the Americans followed Arnold Palmer to the British Open, Thomson and Nagle brought the Aussies with them.

Thomson recalls a New Zealand Open in the 1950s in Christchurch, where he was ordered to change his red pants to something more dignified. But his sense of humor was tested when he and Nagle were threatened with suspensions by the Australians for playing in New Zealand. They played on and the suspensions imposed were quickly removed.

Thomson's favorite New Zealand course is Paraparaumu Beach, a links just north of Wellington. At not quite 6,500 yards from the championship tees, the difficulty comes from the unpredictable weather and the rolling dune country. The wind didn't blow when Corey Pavin won the first of his two New Zealand Opens in 1985 with a score of 19 under.

Pushing Paraparaumu for the most-favored tag is Wairakei International, opened in the early 1970s by the Tourist Hotel Corporation, a now-defunct government agency.

Built on pumice land in the heart of geothermal country, Wairakei has the country's most famous par 5, The Rogue, named after a geyser that used to erupt unpredictably behind the green. But it, like the THC, is now dead. Wairakei no longer has any obvious signs of geothermal activity, although the water in its two lakes is warm.

A sudden flurry in course construction has been prompted by a steady increase in tourists who want to play golf. Because green fees are spectacularly cheap -- New Zealanders blanch at anything more than $NZ30 ($21 in the U.S.) -- they can, with little trouble, combine other pursuits with golf. A common itinerary in Christchurch is to take a helicopter to one of the nearby ski fields for the morning, fly back for 18 holes, then catch a late flight toAustralia.

One last point about golf in New Zealand. It is a country of walkers, but the influx of tourists has meant an introduction of carts. It wasn't that long ago that a member required a medical certificate if he or she wanted to ride.

Regardless of whether players walk or ride, New Zealand golf has come a long way from the days when the only legs on the land were sheep's.