Golf Course Architecture - Issue 64, April 2021

SAUD I ARAB I A two rows of stakes but possess nearly the same number of rocky outcrops, sand dunes and gravel banks as the rough. However, we meet that emergency promptly by creating local ground rules that permit the use of artificial tees for all shots except putts — and that means from even two feet off the green.” The end of this passage also reveals that this wasn’t even Aramco’s first layout: “And remember, this is our new course,” wrote McConnell, while also confirming the modest nature of these facilities: “We grew discouraged with the one farther south. Now we play on what undoubtedly is only the second worst golf course in the world.” Golf was clearly a welcome diversion for the oilmen and their families, because as Aramco continued to expand, more of these courses were shaped at other campuses: Abqaiq, Udhailiyah and Ras Tanura – the location of the Kingdom’s first refinery. At the main Dhahran campus, where the earliest of these courses emerged, the Rolling Hills Golf Club was created. In 1949 it hosted its first challenge tournament, where all four main camps came to the club for the beginnings of what would become known as the Aramcoama Golf Tournament. Dhahran won the 1949 event, edging out Ras Tanura by just 2.5 points. When Aramco completed its Trans- Arabian Pipeline to the Mediterranean Sea in 1950, more sand-and-oil courses could be found at ‘Tapline towns’ like Qaisumah, Badanah and Turaif – communities that were emerging into the northwest of Saudi Arabia, along the route of the pipeline and where its main pumping stations were located. A passage from a 1972 issue of Aramco World magazine describes what the game was like in those early days: “The balls are red because in the glare of the desert sun you can’t always see a white ball against the sand and rocks. The greens are brown, or sometimes black, because they are made of oil-treated sand. The fairways are hard because they are made of sand or marl sprayed with oil and compacted to preserve them from the desert wind. As for the rough, one golfer put it this way: ‘There just ain’t nothing else out there’.” A generation of Aramco golfers honed a different technique to those who played on turf, learning to pick the ball off the compacted sand, because driving through the ball into the ground could bring an early demise to their clubs. It would be a half century until Saudi golfers would need to learn a new technique. In the 1990s the Kingdom’s Rudimentary golf holes fashioned among dunes to attract expatriate workers and their families to Aramco’s Dhahran headquarters became the Rolling Hills Golf Club, right Photo: Alamy Photo: Bettmann/via Getty Images 72