{"id":2188,"date":"2016-09-24T00:21:28","date_gmt":"2016-09-24T04:21:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/?p=2188"},"modified":"2016-09-24T00:21:28","modified_gmt":"2016-09-24T04:21:28","slug":"my-story-in-the-new-york-times-adventures-on-the-china-golf-tour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/my-story-in-the-new-york-times-adventures-on-the-china-golf-tour\/","title":{"rendered":"My story in The New York Times: Adventures on the China Golf Tour"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My contribution to <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/09\/24\/opinion\/adventures-on-the-china-golf-tour.html\" target=\"_blank\">The New York Times<\/a><\/em>&#8216; new &#8220;Sporting&#8221; column about my time chasing the bizarre story of golf in China:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It was a foggy day in Chongqing, a metropolis in southwest China, and the driving range was almost empty. Out beyond the 250-yard marker, a cluster of new high-rise apartment buildings was barely visible, blurred by the haze into a mountainous shadow that made this decidedly urban setting feel unusually secluded.<\/p>\n<p>I was just fine with that. The fewer people to watch me swing a golf club, the better.<\/p>\n<p>It was early 2008, and I was hitting balls at Haoyun Golf Club, a driving range in one of the many new development areas sprouting up around Chongqing, often called sprawling but really just enormous: roughly the size of South Carolina, with a population of around 30 million.<\/p>\n<p>I sprayed balls to the left and to the right, where a large billboard advertised a Saab station wagon with a Chinese slogan that translated to something like \u201csoar straight ahead.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat am I doing wrong?\u201d I asked Zhou Xunshu, Haoyun\u2019s top coach and the man whose remarkable life story became my obsession for the better part of a decade.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My contribution to The New York Times&#8216; new &#8220;Sporting&#8221; column about my time chasing the bizarre story of golf in China: It was a foggy day in Chongqing, a metropolis in southwest China, and the driving range was almost empty. Out beyond the 250-yard marker, &hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2035,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,24],"tags":[33,85,21],"class_list":["post-2188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-featured","tag-media","tag-new-york-times","tag-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2188"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2189,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2188\/revisions\/2189"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}