Check the leader board of any major—like this weekend’s PGA Championship—and you’ll see the obvious international influence. England, South Africa, Australia, Korea. But Cuba? Probably not in our lifetime.
But just because someone has lived under an oppressive regime, cut off from the joys of the free world their whole life, doesn’t mean they can’t at least dream of a career that involves a stick and a ball. Baseball players have done it from Luis Tiant to Yunel Escobar, why not golfers? Oh, that’s right—where would you practice? Are you ready for Cuba’s dirty little secret? The Diplo Club.
I had a chance to tee up a few shots there for a story I did during the Pan Am Games of 1991. People ask me how I was able to visit Cuba. You can actually get a visa to that diplomatically isolated island if you’re a journalist. (The Cuban government obviously never saw my work.)
I was part of a contingent of reporters and crews from TNT and ABC to cover the Pan Am Games, and it was my job to capture stories about Cuban life, much the way I did a year earlier when I rounded up feature stories in Italy for the World Cup coverage.
Turns out there are a lot of fascinating and unusual stories coming out of Cuba, even if their people aren’t. Coming out, that is. One of those stories was about the “elitist” sport of golf as played on Castro’s island.
A couple things to note about this piece: my golf swing is utterly atrocious, to the point of embarrassment. Bear in mind this was five years before my rebirth of interest in the game. I got better.
Second, this piece features my Turner Sports office mate at the time, Craig Sager, now known as the NBA insider on TNT who wears crazy jackets and knows everybody. In this particular feature, he was but a foil for my antics, and a pretty good one at that.
Oh, we’re on the first tee. Quiet, please.