Career in sports? Not so fast

My son, Haobo, always draws a small admiring crowd when he hits ball after ball onto the driving range.

On the practice green, spectators burst into laughter when Haobo, after tapping the ball into the cup, drops the putter to chase a butterfly or grasshopper. After all, he's just 3 years 4 months old.

Haobo's interest in golf started at 2 when he slammed the ball with a set of plastic golf clubs on the community playground. When he was taken to the driving range for the first time at 3, I was surprised to see the ease with which he lifted the ball off the mat and onto the turf.

"You should try to train your son to be a pro," a fellow golfer said. That has become a refrain with others.

Well, I may have many a dream for Haobo. But a golf pro, or a career in any other sports, isn't one of them. My instinctive concern is about the sacrifices that the family would have to make.

Andy Zhang, 14, the youngest US Open competitor from the Chinese mainland, started playing golf at six and a half in Beijing and his mother had to give up her job two years later to take care of his training and participation in competitions in the United States.

Things looked easier at first for Feng Shanshan, 22, the first Chinese LPGA major winner who joined a junior golf team in Guangzhou at 10, because her father was a local sports official. But her parents had to spend their entire savings when she left for training in the US, and at one point, they even considered borrowing money by offering their only home as collateral.

About 100 young Chinese, supported by their families and agents, are reportedly training in the West. The tabs on board, training and competitions are anywhere between 500,000 yuan ($78,000) and 1 million yuan a year, more expensive than going to a top medical or law school.

Then why don't they join the formidable Chinese national sports program that trains hundreds of thousands of children and teenagers every year for free? The system has produced legions of Olympic gold medalists.

Golfers in China are not like gymnasts or divers, who are respected for their long years of hard work and traditional dominance in their events. Golf has long been perceived as an elitist pastime of the moneyed class, a ruse for real estate developers and a potential threat to the natural environment.

Despite hastily assembled state teams that aim for the 2016 Rio Olympics where golf makes its debut, training young golfers remains largely the responsibility of parents.

Even if there are golf schools for children that are run like typical State-supported courses, middle-class parents, including better-off farmers, would be reluctant to let their children give up a formal education and devote themselves to the kind of hardships that all past Chinese sports champions have endured. The heyday of the cradles of champions that ride on the support of poor families is over, with more people becoming affluent and more children taking sports as a hobby rather than a career.

Parents have to worry about what their children will do if they don't succeed. In golf, most players will end up selling balls or giving lessons at a club after failing to make the pro tour. Athletes in other sports can be far worse.

China retires thousands of career athletes each year, many of whom have difficulty finding a job because of lack of schooling and skills.

I hope my son will always be a recreational golfer, unless he turns out to be really, really good at it.

The writer is editor-at-large of China Daily. E-mail: dr.baiping@gmail.com

(China Daily 07/26/2012 page8)