Editor’s note: This story, which originally published on March 24, is another installment in our annual Best Of The Year series. Throughout December, we will be bringing you the top GGP+ stories of 2022.
A few nights ago, on the BBC’s “Outside Source” program, the presenter asked Lyse Doucet, the station’s chief international correspondent, about the gold-domed Monastery of St Michael’s, the backdrop to so many of her harrowing bulletins from Kyiv. For just about the first time since the conflict started, Doucet’s face softened into a smile.
That the bells of St Michael’s ring on the hour comes as music to her ears. “Every time I hear them,” she said, “it reminds me of another time, and it sends a message right across this country, because across this country the monasteries are still standing. The bells, the bells, they toll for Ukraine…”
You would have to imagine that the members of the PGA of Ukraine will give a smile of the wistful variety when they look at the happy photograph of 23 of their 37 members at the head of their association’s website. Directly below, there is a heart-rendering plea for help from Jeffrey and Anna Vinall, two of their members who escaped Kyiv for Poland on 24 February and have since been supporting the families of those of their colleagues who are still in harm’s way.
“To think,” said Jeffrey, “that it’s only a few weeks since we were teaching golfers how to grip a 7 iron.”
Today, they’re gripping guns.
“Most of our golf coaches,” he continued, “have joined the Territorial Defense forces and are at their posts defending their land and looking after its people. They need money, food, medicine, transportation and so much else.”
https://t.co/CrzSoNSbDu PGA of Ukraine Update #supportUkraine #golfersforukraine #RussiaInvadedUkraine
— PGA of Ukraine (@PgaUkraine) March 16, 2022
Jeffrey is trying to raise awareness for their campaign with the help of Tim Taylor, a London businessman from Ormorfos Incubator Ltd who knows a thing or two about setting up fund-raisers. His wife, meantime, has been splitting her time between giving out food at the Polish border, preparing beds in refugee shelters, and helping with arrangements for humanitarian aid to be sent to their fellow professionals via the Ukraine PGA’s head office in Kyiv.
Among them, they have a longer-term plan to help the association’s women members – always assuming it is what they want – to relocate to those golf resorts in Europe which are in a position to give them work and somewhere to stay. At the same time, the wives of the PGA of Ukraine’s male members will be offered relocation packages which will be fully funded until their husbands can join them.
It goes without saying that the destruction of a Ukraine golf course is never going to make headlines around the word when hospitals, schools and homes have been flattened and thousands have died. Yet to those PGA professionals it adds a very real dimension to their sufferings. GolfStream, the Kyiv club to which the Vinalls are attached, was churned up by Russian tanks a couple of days after they left the country.
“What happened to our staff of green-keepers and clubhouse workers is still unknown,” said Jeffrey. (Since that post was penned, they seem to have caught up with most of these people, though they know, for sure, of the death of one of their security guards.)
My next call was to the Edem Resort at Lviv in the West of Ukraine where they had been talking excitedly of how they expected to be hosting their first international events this season after hosting a successful 2021 Ukrainian Open.
Back in 2011, Robert J Vasilak, writing in Golf Inc., introduced the news about a proposed new course at Stugma, near Kyiv, as follows: “All the Russian money flowing into Ukraine is about to spark the development of the nation’s 5th golf course…”
Global Golf Post rang the course’s designer, Peter Harrodine, from the famous Harrodine family of golf architects, to see if he had any news of what was happening over there. He was not at all sure if the resort in question had ever been completed but he is worried sick about the friends he made at the time.
“I’m going to look for some of their telephone numbers, but I doubt that they’re going to be where they were then,” he said. “It’s hideous what’s going on. As for the golf course, I dread to think what’s happened to it.”
Maybe Russian tanks have churned that one up, too.
My next call was to the Edem Resort at Lviv in the West of Ukraine where they had been talking excitedly of how they expected to be hosting their first international events this season after hosting a successful 2021 Ukrainian Open.
In a conversation with the manageress at that resort, I learned how Ukrainians looking to escape rather more troubled districts than theirs had still been coming to their hotel. “It’s safe here at the moment,” she said, “but we don’t know for how long, any more than we know if the golf course will start up again in April. The bombs have been close, and we hear them all right.”
It is only a couple of weeks since the Russians launched 22 or 23 cruise missiles at the nearby Yavoriv Military Range before denying that they did anything of the sort.
When I put the phone down, my eye could not but be caught by the line above a picture of the resort’s grand dining hall with its tables set for a dinner which may be years away. The line in question?
“To live as for the last time, to celebrate as at the first time”.