By Mark Horyna
Ever since the game first arrived in Switzerland, St. Moritz and the Engadin have been a driving force in the country’s golfing culture. The game was already being played in the valley in 1889. In 1893, the Engadine Golf Club was founded and the course at Samedan opened. The track today is recognised as the oldest golf course in Switzerland. The first Engadine Amateur Championship was played that same year, a tournament that still exists today.
More than 130 years later, golf up here has its very own character. It’s remarkably international, relaxed and uncomplicated. (Readers of issue 5 will remember Emil Weber’s and Christopher Meister’s piece.)
And there is quite a lot of it here. Golf that is.
At Samedan, around 1,720 metres above sea level, you can play what feels very much like a genuine Alpine links: old, relatively flat, exposed to the elements and surrounded by mountains quite stunning. The course might have changed considerably over the decades, but there is still something wonderfully old-fashioned about playing across this wide-open piece of Engadin landscape. It lifts your spirits. The thin, dry mountain air helps, of course. Balls do fly further up here.
A few kilometres up the road, Samedan’s younger sister course at Zuoz offers a modern and perhaps more demanding interpretation of Alpine golf. In the town of St. Moritz itself, meanwhile, the world famous Kulm Hotel has its own small but beautiful nine-hole, par-27 course. The place is basically hidden away in their backyard. Just a couple of minutes' walk from the hotel.
And then there is the Kulm driving range. St. Moritz hosted the Winter Olympics in 1928 and again in 1948. Parts of that Olympic heritage remain integrated into the Kulm grounds today. Using the range, you are actually hitting balls onto the historic ice rink. The longish, maybe a little eccentric building to the right is in fact the former Olympic Stadium. It’s not every day you get to whack balls beside an architectural monument to winter sporting history.
But Golf has always been a little different here. In winter, when the lake freezes, the game moves onto the ice. And for a couple of days in February, you can play snow-golf. In summer, since this year, people meet once a month at the Kulm driving range for Negronis on the Driving Range, an event series initiated by our friends at St Moritz based Enzo Golf in cooperation with the Kulm Hotel.
This again, is all very St. Moritz.
The local crowd mixes with golfing visitors from all over the world, there’s a DJ, music plays, Negronis are poured and balls are sent into the thin Alpine air. People bring their dogs and children. No tournament, no scorecard, no competition and not much interest in whether your left wrist is doing what it is supposed to do at the top of your backswing.
Beginners and pros, young and old, cool snowboarder types, fashionistas, artists, gallery staff and serious weekend warriors share wedges, irons, hybrids and drinks.
Everybody swings the way they can. This is golf in perfection. And very St Moritz indeed.
