DUBAI DESERT CLASSIC

The Dubai Desert Classic is four days of golf on the Majlis course at the end of January, and the reason Dubai is a golfing city at all.

It was the first European Tour event held in the Gulf, and the course it is played on was the first grass course built there.

The Grass

Before 1988 a grass course in the Gulf was regarded as impossible. Heat, sand, and no water to spare.

Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum chose the site himself: open dunes twenty-five kilometres from the city, with a single tree on them. An American architect named Karl Litten laid the course through and around the dunes rather than flattening them.

It opened in 1988 as the first grass course in the Middle East. It is watered with treated wastewater and planted with grasses bred to survive on very little of it.

Majlis is an Arabic word for a place of sitting, a room where people gather and matters are settled. The building that gives the course its name stands between the eighth and ninth holes.

The Tournament

The first Classic was played in March 1989, a year after the course opened, and was the first European Tour event ever staged on the Arabian Peninsula. Mark James won it in a playoff.

It has run every year since except 1991, when the Gulf War stopped it, and two editions at the turn of the century played across town at Dubai Creek.

Ballesteros won it in 1992. Ernie Els won it three times, Tiger Woods twice, and Rory McIlroy four, which is the record.

The professionals call it the major of the Middle East. That is flattery, but the field is the reason they say it.

What to Know

The fifth is rated the hardest hole on the course, and the eighth, sharply uphill, is not far behind. The eighteenth is where it is usually decided: a par five bending left, with the second shot over water to a green it shares with the ninth.

The wind off the Gulf is the only real defence the course has. In still conditions the professionals take it apart.

January in Dubai is why the tournament is in January. Twenty-five degrees and dry, which is why the tour spends its January in the Gulf. This is the oldest event of that swing.

The club’s second course is floodlit, so a round can be played after dark.

The mistake is following only the leaders. The course walks easily and the galleries are thin by the standards of a major, which means a spectator can follow one group all day from a few yards away.

The Court

The Dubai Desert Classic is not the Court’s own. Clubhouse access, hospitality on the closing holes and tee times on the Majlis in the days around the tournament are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay, and the table afterward.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.