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Asian Amateur Championship 2011

Tuesday, 27 September 2011
Jeremy Ellwood
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I'll confess to a little naivety on my part here. When I got final details through of my trip to Singapore to cover the third staging of the Asian Amateur Championship, my first question was, "which airport am I flying into?" My colleague Neil Tappin quickly put me right, pointing out that as it's a group of islands less than twice the size of the Isle of Wight, it only really has call for one international airport - Changi - where I landed at 2.30pm this afternoon local time (7.30am UK time).

To be honest I knew relatively little about the place then, but a little more now thanks to my own observations and experiences - it's a little under 7,000 miles and 13 hours from Heathrow, they drive on the left, it's extremely humid so weight gain shouldn't be an issue this week - and then from a very helpful taxi driver who informed me that...

- Singapore gained independence from Britain in 1963 and from Malaysia in 1965
- The main island measures roughly 47 x 24km
- It is connected to Malaysia by two bridges - one in the north and one in the west
- There are many different religions, but Christianity is probably the main one
- Table-tennis (silver at the Beijing Olympics) and soccer are the main sports with Man Utd and Liverpool both attracting fanatical followings

I'm not here to cover either of those sports - though I was a dab-hand at Ping-Pong in my youth - but rather the third Asian Amateur Championship being staged at the New course at Singapore Island Country Club (SICC) from Thursday to Sunday this week (72-hole strokeplay) following successful events in China and Japan in 2009 and 2010.

SICC boasts four courses in two separate locations - I know this for a fact as I went to the wrong one first, realised my error, called the cab company and got a slightly bemused driver returning to pick me up having not even made it back to the main gates. He looked at me like I was some kind of fool.

The New course, at the club's Island location, was renovated by five-time Open champion Peter Thomson back in 2002. Daylight only permitted the briefest of looks today, but I will undertake a full course recce tomorrow to check it out. Will an Asian player ever match Thomson's Open record? Who knows, but initiatives like the Asian Amateur Championship - a joint venture among the Asia Pacific Golf Confederation, The R&A and the Masters Tournament - can only serve to further strengthen the growth of the game in this region