FOR the best part of a century, golf throughout the Asia-Pacific region has been a shamelessly elitist sport.
A combination of the paucity of facilities and the high costs involved in playing have meant that only the rich and well-to-do have been able to enjoy the delights of the Royal and Ancient game.
Over the past decade, however, golf has become more accessible to an increasing number of people.
Indeed, the growth of golf in Asia since the mid-1980s has been spectacular . . . both in terms of the number of new courses that have been built and the number of people who have taken up the game.
So rapidly has the golfing boom swept through Asia that some golfing associations around the region are unable to accurately quote exact figures on the amount of courses and active golfers in their respective countries.
In Thailand, for example, the estimates of how many people actually play the game range from as few as 200,000 to as many as a million.
