From playing golf at Hong Kong's Happy Valley racecourse to fighting the Japanese: 92-year-old Willie Woo goes down memory lane
92-year-old icon relives the old days of golf in Hong Kong
Willie Woo smiles softly at the memories and he begins to talk about his love of golf, and about the love of his life.
“My family had come to Hong Kong in 1936 and my father started playing at Happy Valley,” says the 92-year-old. “There was a nine-hole course then inside the racecourse. I think I might be the only surviving person to have played on that course.”
By the mid-1950s Woo had become a member of the Hong Kong Golf Club, and he had also met Simmy, the woman who was to become his wife.
There was a nine-hole course then inside the racecourse. I think I might be the only surviving person to have played on that course
“She still keeps me company to this day,” says Woo. “We have been playing together since 1959. Before that she played with her friends but since we met we have always played together. It is something that has brought us close.”
The couple are together here today, too, as we meet at the Hong Kong Golf Club at Deep Water Bay, but Simmy Woo wants the attention to be focused on her husband and his reflections on a life spent on and around the HKGC’s courses.
“He has all the stories to tell,” she says.
And so Willie Woo picks up on how as a boy he had first been lured to the golf through his father’s obsession and through his connections at the Qingdao Universal Golf Club.