| South African Golf |
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Page 3 of 8 
I found Sean Pappas in the clubhouse bar,
hobnobbing in Afrikaans with a group of rough-hewn South African men
seemingly sprung from the pages of a Hemingway novel. Whisky on the
rocks was the beverage of choice, and, Pappas aside, khakis and
goatees the preferred fashion. Pappas attended college on a golf
scholarship at the University of Arkansas, where he roomed with John
Daly, the once hard-partying PGA star with a knack for obliterating
both drives and kegs. “I went from living with wild animals to
living with a wild man,” Pappas said, smiling. “So it really
wasn’t too big a change.”As director of golf at Hans Merensky, Pappas, now 41, is familiar with the bad habits of hackers and hyenas alike. Every morning, he dispenses a crew to make sure nothing deadly stalks the fairways. But in extreme cases—a long-toothed lion, say, that has given up on gazelles but not on golfers—Pappas relies on his pal Greg Austin, who, at that very moment, burst into the clubhouse bar. “So we’re playing golf, is it?” Austin said. “All right, then. Why the hell not?” Burly, sunburned, and with the husky voice of a man who’d just kicked a lifelong smoking habit, Austin cuts the figure of a coarse-talking South African Steve Irwin—charming, buoyant, and decidedly ill-suited to black-tie events. He grew up in the bush and has spent more than 20 years as a tracker and tour guide. We bolted down our whisky and headed to the tee, our golf carts stocked with enough alcohol to sedate land mammals far larger than us. Pappas opened the proceedings by blasting a 300-yard drive down the fairway. Austin followed by shanking his ball into the bush. He headed after it, brandishing a three iron as a precaution. “The day you forget to respect the wild,” he said, “is the day it will remind you.” For a mental Post-it Note, I needed look no farther than the electric fence separating Hans Merensky from the game park. In 1998 an elephant crashed through the fence and trampled a German woman to death on the 15th while her husband, who opted to skip the back nine, was resting in their room. She was, to date, the only golfer killed at Hans Merensky; most fatalities have four legs. The 15th hole, for instance, is nicknamed Leopard Kill, in honor of the afternoon when a golfer was distracted by blood dripping on her shoulder and looked up to see a half-eaten impala dangling in a tree. As our round progressed, I racked up a lengthy string of bogeys, Pappas drained birdies, and our group emptied more beers than I bothered to count. The sun hung low. The temperature dropped from searing to a simmer, and a trio of giraffes appeared along the fairway. A gallery of vervet monkeys gathered around us. Pappas warned me to watch my wallet and cell phone. “Next thing you know,” he said, “they’re making long-distance calls and tossing your money from the trees.” |
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