Xie Chengfeng had a fever. Otherwise, the Chinese golfer would have been driving his orange coupe to the practice range on this June morning rather than languishing in bed, cold towel on his forehead, in his four-story mansion. Five years ago, Xie (pronounced "shee-eh") and his family uprooted themselves and moved to Mission Hills, a sprawling golf resort in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen for just one purpose: so he could become the next Tiger Woods.
Tony Law/Redux, for The New York Times
Kuang Yang, 8, at the Mission Hills Golf Club in Shenzhen, China.
Tony Law/Redux, for The New York Times
Cheng Hanyu, 7, during a lesson with C. K. Tan, with his mother, Yao Yu, close by.
Nearly every day of the year, when he's not competing in a tournament, Xie works out in the morning, using the punching bag, medicine balls and bull whip (to strengthen his wrists) in the second-floor living room overlooking a quiet lagoon. Then he's off to the members-only driving range for two hours of training, hitting balls with every club in his bag. After lunch, Xie works on chipping and putting before playing a round on one of Mission Hills' 22 courses (it bills itself as the world's largest golf club). Nearly every other activity is designed to benefit Xie's golf game: piano lessons to strengthen his fingers; math tutorials to help him calculate distances, wind speeds and green breaks; and a daily English class to prepare him for his eventual arrival on the PGA Tour.
Xie is 8 years old.
When I visited his family home last month, the boy's father, Xie Xiaochun, handed me a plate of papayas grown on their back patio and an album of baby photos of his only child. One set of pictures showed the chubby toddler in a navy blue sweater vest, swinging a golf club. "He started hitting balls when he was 2½ years old — younger than Tiger was when he began!" Xie's father told me in Mandarin. Barely six months after his son began playing golf, Xie Xiaochun — a 43-year-old migrant from northeastern China who made a fortune in the trucking-logistics business — bought this house, and the golf membership that came with it, so his son would have ready access to world-class courses and instruction.
You can't call Xie a school dropout. He has never attended school. "He really didn't want to go, and I thought it was a waste of time he could use for golf training," his father said. As his peers went off to first grade, the outgoing boy enrolled in a succession of golf academies — first at Mission Hills at the Cindy Reid Golf Academy, named after an American teaching pro, then at one on Hainan Island run by Tiger Woods's former coach, Hank Haney, and finally at a summer golf camp in Japan. Father and son are now back home, working on their own regimen. Xie's parents still call him Xiao Bao, or Little Baby: at nearly 5-foot-3 (two inches shorter than his father) and 120 pounds, he dwarfs his 8-year-old competition. (Though his parents are small, their homeland in northeastern China is known for producing giants.) When asked to name his favorite club, Xie replied. "The driver, of course!" He can hit it nearly 220 yards, about as far as the average adult amateur — and about 50 yards past his peers.
Xie said his feverish symptoms began during a tournament the day before. I hadn't noticed, because his sunburned face always looked flushed, especially above his all-pink golf ensemble. He ended up with a third-place trophy, but his mother whispered to me: "He often feels sick when he doesn't play too well." Despite the fever, when I asked about the car in the driveway, Xie shuffled downstairs to show me the full-size, Chinese-made electric car — a gift from his father for his 6th birthday. Plastered on the car's back window was a "test driver" sticker; the logo on the side, because of an intentionally displaced "S," read "Peedway." "He's big enough to drive," his father said. "He's just not allowed to leave Mission Hills."
The People's Republic might seem an unlikely incubator for golf prodigies. Chairman Mao, after all, banned the game in 1949 as so much bourgeois frippery and had the handful of golf courses that predated the Communist revolution plowed under. The taboo lasted 35 years. China's first golf course built since then is not yet three decades old — younger than Tiger Woods. Even today, the state ostensibly outlaws the construction of new courses in mainland China, lest they gobble up too much scarce land and water — an edict that, though flouted in places, still limits the growth of the game. Then there's the paucity of role models: though the country churns out Olympic champions in sports from diving to table tennis, China has just four professional golfers — two men, two women — ranked in the world's top 300.
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