Vietnamese Golf: The Second Stand and a Beat Without Seats

Saigon in April is as humid as steam rising from the ground, yet on the 7th fairway of a golf course north of the city, the wind blows steadily, as if keeping time for every swing. I stand behind a fence, notebook in hand, watching a boy of about fifteen hit an approach shot that stops some two meters from the pin. He does not celebrate. He bends down, reads the green again, nods to himself, and moves to the next hole. Behind him there is no grandstand. No applause. But I know that somewhere online, thousands of people are waiting for the next photo.

That was the first time, in more than thirty years of writing, that I realized Vietnamese golf already has a second stand - no seats, no roof, but real people.

An empty course, and the wind still keeps time for the ball. I wrote that line on a pandemic night, when every course was closed and the wind sweeping through empty stands became the only sound left. Today the line returns with a different meaning: the wind still keeps time, but people have found a way to sit in a stand without needing a seat.

In 2026, while following a team in New England, I realized the second stand has no seats but has real people. I opened an online group, posting a small report from each training session: what drink a player chose, how he retied his laces. Within a month, two thousand people joined. They did not come for the scoreline. They came for the feeling of being close. Vietnamese golf today is walking that same road, just a few beats slower.

To understand why, you have to put the club down and look at the numbers. According to regional golf association statistics and figures published domestically, Vietnam now has roughly 80 to 90 operating golf courses, nearly half of them built to international 18-hole tournament standard. Fifteen years ago, that number was only a few dozen. In infrastructure terms, the growth rate ranks among the fastest in Southeast Asia.

But infrastructure is not the real story. The real story sits behind the fence: a few tens of thousands of regular players, and among them the number of young Vietnamese under thirty is growing faster than any other group. This is the difference from a decade ago, when Vietnamese golf was seen as a pursuit for a small circle of people with money and connections.

I once sat in on a training session of the national youth golf team on an early morning. There were no spectators. Only the sound of club meeting ball and the coach's reminders about breathing rhythm. A boy told me he had never watched a professional tournament live, but he watched every clip online, rewinding frame by frame to learn the motion. The new generation watches the ball with their eyes, I still listen with my ears, and both are ways of loving.

That leads to the core question: why Vietnamese golf can pass through its stagnant phase, and where the real bottleneck lies.

Three indicators matter. First, the number of standard golf holes per million people. Vietnam currently sits low compared with South Korea, Japan, or Thailand, but the rate of new players is rising faster. Second, the conversion rate from learner to regular player. In many places only about twenty percent of learners stay after two years, because of cost and time. In Vietnam today, I hear coaches say that figure is creeping up, especially among young urbanites. Third, the number of Vietnamese golfers competing in international amateur and professional events.

On the third indicator, names such as Le Chuc An, Nguyen Anh Minh, and Truong Chi Quan have stepped onto regional and continental stages. They have not produced a breakthrough like a global star, but they are doing something more important for a young golf nation: proving that the road from a local practice range to an international stage is a real road, not a fairy tale.

Amateur performance data shows this. Over the past three to four years, the number of Vietnamese golfers finishing in the top 20 of regional amateur events has risen noticeably, though the sample remains small. It must be stressed: a few good amateur results do not mean a development system has succeeded. This is what I always remind myself when reading domestic reports, where a medal is sometimes called a historic turning point.

The logic behind this growth lies in the shift from a model of 'golf course tied to real estate' to one of 'golf course tied to community'. A decade ago, almost every golf project was justified by land value. Today, some academies and ranges have begun to think about selling practice packages, running internal tournaments, and building clubs. That is the soft infrastructure - the thing that decides whether a golf nation can survive.

I see this clearly in how parents talk about their children. They no longer say 'I send my child to golf to expand connections'. They say 'my child likes to go to the course on weekends'. A change in language is often the earliest sign of a change in structure.

But if we look only at the glow of young golfers, we will miss the biggest blind spot.

That blind spot is the assumption that individual achievement will automatically lift the whole system. In sport, that is rarely true. A star can create inspiration, but cannot create playing capacity. What is needed is a large number of affordable practice ranges, standard curricula, and a dense enough base-level tournament schedule for a twelve-year-old to have somewhere to play every week.

Here, online communities play the role I call the second stand. When a boy in a provincial town posts a clip of his swing online and receives three hundred comments of advice, he has something the previous generation did not: instant feedback from strangers who share the same passion. A team is not led by tactics alone, but by people calling each other's names. Golf is the same.

There is another misunderstanding I want to address plainly. Many outsiders look at Vietnamese golf and conclude it is a luxury sport, so any effort to popularize it is futile. That conclusion ignores the fact that the cost of a session at a driving range is far lower than an 18-hole round, and most beginners only need a range, not a tournament course. The gap between 'playing golf' and 'going to a golf course' is exactly the gap this golf nation must close through education, not by cutting green fees.

In the context of the transfer window and international money churning global golf, I always remind myself not to let noise drown out signal. When investment funds pour money into new tours, the real question is not who signs with whom, but whether that money reaches the grassroots playing base. In Vietnam, the notable signal is not million-dollar contracts, but the number of new practice ranges opening in mid-sized and small cities.

In the rhythm of transfers, everyone watches the clock; I listen for the sound of footsteps leaving. Here, that sound is the steps of families deciding to invest time in a child chasing this sport instead of another. That is the most important contract of all.

The worrying thing is the risk of going off course. A young golf nation can easily be swept up by the logic of entertainment: staging many flashy tournaments, inviting a few stars, then declaring itself integrated. But without a system of properly trained coaches, without cheap practice ranges for children, those tournaments are just fireworks. Fireworks are beautiful, but they vanish when the wind blows.

I have seen other sports make this mistake. They build stadiums before they build schools. They sign stars before they train referees. The result is a generation of good players with no foundation to sustain them. Vietnamese golf is at exactly that fork in the road.

So what internal signals should be watched over the next eighteen months? First, the number of golf academies with proper youth programs that teach not only technique but also the rules and the ethics of play. Second, the number of provincial and school-level tournaments held annually. Third, the share of female golfers - an indicator where Vietnamese golf is still weak, but which is the best predictor of a sport's sustainability.

One more thing must be said about how we view achievement. When a Vietnamese golfer wins a regional event, domestic media often call it 'history'. But history is not written by a single moment. It is written by twenty years of early sessions no one sees. A name, when the whole stand sings it, becomes an address of the heart - but for a stand to sing, someone must first dare to stand alone on the range.

I think of the boy on the 7th fairway. He has no grandstand yet. But he has an online group waiting for him. He has parents who drive him to practice at five in the morning. He has a patient coach. Those are the three pillars of any sport. The course is only where talent is displayed, not where it is born.

If I had to bet on one thing in Vietnamese golf in the next few years, I would not bet on a star. I would bet on the number of practice ranges. Because the range is where the second stand begins - where a child first hears the sound of a ball bouncing, and first believes that sound can become the heartbeat of a whole life.

The course may be empty. The wind still blows. And somewhere, a group is waiting for the next photo. The question worth asking is not when Vietnam will have a major champion, but when every child who wants to play golf will find a place to begin.

There are recordings we never release, because they are the soul of the course. Those early sessions, those imperfect swings, those sighs after a bad shot - that is the audio no camera captures. But if you stay quiet long enough on an empty practice range at six in the morning, you will hear it. It is the growth rhythm of a golf nation rising, not loud, not declarative, just quietly repeating every day.

The question I leave behind, for myself and for those working in Vietnamese golf: are we building a stage for a few stars, or a foundation for a generation? The two paths differ, and do we have the courage to choose the longer one?