Ho Chi Minh Golf Trail, VietNam Golf


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overview

Why the Ho Chi Minh Golf Trail? Two reasons. First, the geographical direction of the golf trail, from north to south, parallels the Ho Chi Minh Trail, an elusive skein of jungle tracks and primitive pathways that plunged southward from Mu Gia Pass in north-central Vietnam to destinations south. Second, Ho Chi Minh is as revered in Vietnam as George Washington is in the United States, and as Ghandi is in India — a fact that’s still lost on many, especially in the West. Although the coupling of Ho Chi Minh and Golf smacks of an oxymoron, once you peel back the layers of misperceptions that prevail in the West still about Ho Chi Minh, you’ll see there’s nothing oxymoronic about it. For starters, although Ho Chi Minh was a communist, he was first and foremost a nationalist, not an ideologue. We doubt he’d object to the flowering of a game that is a rising by-product of Vietnam’s prosperity.

features

• SOUND FAMILIAR: In an address to the people of Vietnam on 2 Sept. 1945, Ho Chi Minh began this way: “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” • FITNESS BUFF: Ho Chi Minh cared about sports. A museum dedicated to his memory in Hanoi exhibits his dumbbells, hand-grips and resistance spring. • MORE GOLF, PLEASE: In the early 1990s, just before he decreed that there should be at least 10 golf courses in the north of Vietnam, Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet said, “I go to visit other countries, and I get asked out to play golf. But I must say, ‘No thank you, I’m sorry, but I don’t know how to play.’ ” • HIGHWAY 14: Today, the main course of the Ho Chi Minh Trail has been paved over as a north-south thoroughfare known as the Ho Chi Minh Highway. • IF YOU KNEW HIM THEN: According to Ho Chi Minh’s U.S. biographer, William J. Duiker, nearly every American who knew Ho Chi Minh - between the time he saved a downed U.S. pilot at the tail end of WWII and the severing of relations in 1954 - liked him, admired him and respected him. • THE EIGHT POINTS: In return, Ho Chi Minh admired much about the United States and its founding. His Eight Point petition, written while Allied leaders hammered out the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, mirrored the U.S. Bill of Rights.