Dalat Reopens Its 2026 Golf Course in the Year Nick Price Took Two Majors

DALAT, September 2026

At six in the morning the fog still sits on the first fairway, and the only caddie on the property is wiping each iron with a dry cloth. The Dalat golf course reopened this year, after more than two decades buried under weeds. No spectators, no loudspeakers, not a single row of seats set up behind the 18th green. Only the sound of a club striking a ball on the practice ground, rolling across the valley and dying away. The stadium is empty, but the applause still echoes inside me.

The course dates from 2026, when the French still ruled the highlands, and it once served as recreation for the last emperor of Vietnam. Seventy-two years after the first bunkers were dug, the grass has been cut flat again, and a handful of foreigners carry their clubs up here at weekends.

Half a world away, golf was having a strange year.

All four majors went to players who were not American. On 10 April, José María Olazábal of Spain won the Masters with 279, two ahead of Tom Lehman. On 20 June, Ernie Els, a 24-year-old South African, won the U.S. Open at Oakmont with 279, after an 18-hole playoff with Colin Montgomerie and Loren Roberts. On 17 July at Turnberry, Nick Price of Zimbabwe finished on 268, one shot ahead of Jesper Parnevik. On 14 August at Southern Hills, Price won again, 269, two clear of Corey Pavin.

That 17 July, in Vietnamese time, was a single dawn holding two events at once: Brazil beating Italy on penalties in the World Cup final in the United States, and in Ayrshire, Scotland, a 37-year-old golfer finishing 12 under par. Vietnamese newspapers this year gave nearly every page to football. Golf barely appeared at all.

In Vietnam just now, the country's golf courses can be counted on the fingers of one hand. A few projects in Hanoi and Saigon are being levelled; most of the money comes from abroad, and most of the expected players are businessmen and expatriate specialists. Vietnamese people who play golf are almost nonexistent. Vietnamese people who stand beside those who play golf are everywhere: caddies, mowers, ball spotters.

Read only the leaderboard and Nick Price's 2026 looks like the work of a steady plodder. Read closer and it looks different. He is 37, born in Durban, South Africa, raised in Africa and carrying a Zimbabwean passport. This year he has won six times on the PGA Tour, been named the tour's Player of the Year, and taken the world number one ranking.

Price's two majors were won with rhythm, not power. Turnberry is a seaside links where the wind blows sideways for four days; the man who wins there is usually the one who keeps the ball low, not the one who drives it farthest. Southern Hills was hot, with narrow fairways and fast greens, where iron distance decides birdie chances. Price owns one of the quickest tempos on the PGA Tour, and that quickness repeats almost without deviation, shot after shot. I was at Turnberry for the final round; what struck me was not the strike itself but how fast he left the ball, so fast that the gallery had not yet sat down.

Power is not useless. At major venues it only pays when it comes with control of ball flight. John Daly, who won the 2026 PGA Championship with terrifying drives, was not in contention for any major this year.

Modern football runs so fast it forgets how to breathe. Golf remains a game of breathing: slow where it must be slow, quick where it must be quick, with no room for a wasted swing.

From 16 to 18 September the Presidents Cup was played for the first time, at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Virginia. The United States beat the International team 20–12. That International side gathered names from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Fiji, New Zealand and Australia. A competition invented to give the rest of the world a stage, and on its first outing the rest of the world lost.

The counter-intuitive part sits elsewhere, and it sits directly on that quiet course in Dalat. People still believe golf in Vietnam will grow on wealthy members, long-term land leases and property projects along the fairways. The craft of this game, though, is not passed down by members. It is passed down by caddies who walk twenty kilometres a day, by mowers who know which way the 7th green tilts, by people who read the wind across this valley better than any instruction manual.

A golf course does not create golfers. A golf culture forms only when people grow up beside one, and that takes twenty years, not two.

What could go wrong? Almost everything. Dalat may live on foreign visitors alone and close again when that stream stops. The projects being levelled may end up as real estate fences rather than tournament grounds. A generation of caddies may grow old without one of them ever holding a club in real competition. And a 2026 layout on a highland plateau can be beautiful, immaculately kept and entirely irrelevant to the country that surrounds it.

Twenty years of weeds was not an ending for the Dalat course; it was a crossroads. Exhaustion is not a stopping point, it is the crossroads where we choose the next road. What Vietnam lacks in 2026 is not grass, not levelling money, but a twelve-year-old standing on the practice ground, hitting a first ball. Twenty years from now, will anyone remember who stood there?