Intrepid golfers try to revive a course destroyed in the Indonesian tsunami
They've hewn a makeshift pitch-and-putt out of the detritus near Banda Aceh to affirm a former way of life not yet buried.
from the December 26, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Locals, meanwhile, steal the remaining turf for their lawns while kids speed their motorbikes on the fairways. "If somebody doesn't pick up the course soon, it's going to fade," says the UNDP's Nigel Landon. The course workers ask me, Would Tiger Woods be interested in investing?
As the tsunami swept through Seulawah in three waves on Dec. 26, 2004, it killed the course general manager, three staff, the club's captain, and four other golfers playing on a quiet, Sunday morning. It cut down the clubhouse at the foundation, and flattened the cement wall around the property's border.
Engulfing the villages behind the course, it killed around 2,600 people in Mon Ikuen, about two-thirds of the population, including Jumarlin's wife and their infant child. Jumarlin was at the bank in Banda Aceh. Jamil, an instructor at Seulawah who was still at home in the village, outran the water, first on a motorbike, then by fleeing on foot.
Today, the decimation is marked by mass graves – simple grass plots all around coastal Aceh. There is one at Seulawah's old second tee. On a clear morning this fall, Jumarlin and Jamil sit there drinking coffee, talking to me through an interpreter. The guys lay out the immediate surroundings of the old course. The raised mound of the former first green, still visible; the par-4 second, 394 yards from here to the hole. Some of the club's original pines, stripped of their lower limbs, stand tall in the distance.
"The place had the most beautiful view in Indonesia – people came here and said that," says Jamil. He first started caddying at 13 and paid his way through high school with his earnings. Later, when he became one of the 10 instructors at Seulawah, he made enough to support his six children.
At the course, they whiled away hours chasing a better swing, a lower score, golf's fleeting successes. In the mid-1990s, Jamil won two Aceh championships at Seulawah and earned a ticket from the club to go to Bandung, on Java, for a major tournament – a moment he still savors.
Jumarlin's reedy voice runs in a similar vein. "The place reminds me of my first wife," he says. "She supported me with money to develop my golf. If I wasn't at the course on my days off, she'd ask, 'Why aren't you out there?' "
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