It’s World’s Most Dangerous Golf Course

BEIRUT, Lebanon â€”  Lebanon’s golfers face the ultimate hazards--artillery shells, rockets, stray bullets and marauding gunmen. And that’s only on the fairways.

Golfers in this war-torn country not only play on what must be the world’s most dangerous course, they often risk death trying to get there.

“But it’s worth it,� says Salim Salam, president of the Golf Club of Lebanon and head of the country’s troubled Middle East Airlines.

“Golf’s about the only recreation that’s left here,� he said, kissing his favorite wood.

Some 350 club members share Salam’s devotion and flock to the carefully manicured 18-hole course near the bomb-shattered Sabra and Chatilla Palestinian refugee camps where hundreds were killed or wounded during recent fighting.

The golfers tee off behind huge, red, earthen mounds built to stop bullets and shrapnel that have spluttered about the course for years.

Veterans still remember a cautious U.S. diplomat who played 18 holes wearing a bullet-proof flak jacket and who was accompanied by three armed bodyguards.

Precautions are useful, but they don’t always stop bullets. Six months ago, a golfer was hitting onto the seventh green when a machine-gun round shattered his neck and left him paralyzed.

Two months ago, play was suspended briefly because of the war raging in the refugee camps between Shiite Moslem militiamen and Palestinian guerrillas.

Meanwhile, it took a fortune and a lot of imagination to get the club back on its feet, officials said.

“Four days after that war started we collected about one kilogram (2 pounds) of bullets from the swimming pool alone,� said Salam, who enjoys displaying the club’s war relics.

And they’re everywhere. In the clubhouse foyer, championship plaques bear the inscription “not played� next to years marking the most violent cycles of Lebanon’s 10-year-old civil war.

The air-conditioned club dining room overlooking Beirut’s sprawling shanty towns is adorned with photographs of the bomb-battered clubhouse and the scorched greens crisscrossed by tank tracks.

The course, situated by the sea, likely wouldn’t suit Jack Nicklaus or Seve Ballesteros, but it does have a certain rugged charm.

One of its main attractions is the fourth hole, a par 5. To shoot from the tee you aim for the mosque minaret on the skyline.

To counter a membership drop from 850 to 330, championship play has resumed. More players now are braving the dangers of Beirut’s violent streets to get back into the swing.

Later this month, a three-man team from the club will represent Lebanon in the Pan-Arab Games in Rabat, Morocco. Organizers included golf in this year’s events at the request of Lebanon’s indefatigable golfers.

The team includes two physicians and Lebanon’s golfing champion, Bilal Gandour.

To cope with money problems, club management replaced the barbed wire ringing the course with cactus instead of new fencing.

The club faces other problems, too. Some squatters, driven from their homes by the fighting, have built shanties on the club’s grounds.

Club officials came up with a compromise solution: They hired militiamen to throw out the squatters, then gave 55 of the homeless men jobs as caddies.