US-based Golf Digest magazine has released its annual list of what it considers to be the China's top ten golf courses. According to the magazine's editors, if you're looking for China's best courses, forget Shanghai, Beijing or Shenzhen – go west to the laid-back city of Kunming.
China's top 10 golf courses
SLICE magazine
We think we can safely say that SLICE is Shanghai's best English-language magazine about golf. This is, of course, not a difficult title to lay claim to -- kind of like saying Acropolis is the city's best Greek restaurant. (It's the only one, and we still have nightmares about our only visit there three years ago -- sometimes the nightmares are about the "moussaka," other times they are about the roach that crawled across our table.) But SLICE, which debuted in October, isn't playing the game like it's the only game in town. It's a slick little magazine that, style-wise at least, gives all the local English language rags a run for their money. This week, TIME Asia even gave SLICE a nice plug.
Tiger Woods? Never heard of the guy
Shanghaiist, filing this from the media center at the HSBC Champions golf tournament, is sleep-deprived and feeling kind of lazy right now, so instead of trying to be original we will copy and paste from something we wrote last night for ESPN.com:
How much would you pay to see Tiger play?
We will soon find out. The HSBC Champions golf tournament hits Shanghai's Sheshan Golf Club -- which touts itself on its website as "Shanghai's first truly private and exclusive 'members only' golf club" -- November 10-13. Private. Exclusive. That about sums it up. Tickets for the tournament are RMB 500 (around $60) for Thursday and Friday and RMB 1,000 for Saturday and Sunday. A tournament pass that includes all days is RMB 2,000, just RMB 319 more than the monthly income for the average Shanghai household. Not exactly the best way to grow Chinese interest in golf from the bottom up, as is necessary. But who cares about that? Tiger is coming to town!

