DUBAI DESERT CLASSIC
Late January · Emirates Golf Club, Dubai · Four Days · Since 1989
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 professional tournament held in the Middle East, 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 gave the land on one condition: the desert vegetation around the holes was to be left as it was. 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.
Eleven of its winners have taken thirty-six major championships between them. 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 eighth is the hardest hole on the course. The ninth is the one people remember: a par four played over water with the clubhouse standing behind the green, and the tournament has turned on it more than once.
The wind off the Gulf is the only real defence the course has. In still conditions the professionals take it apart, and the record stands at twenty-four under par.
January in Dubai is why the tournament is in January. Twenty-five degrees and dry, which is why the European tour opens its year here.
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.
