Vietnamese Golf: The Heartbeat from Busan to Saigon

Early November morning, I sat on the eastern stands of Asiad Golf Course in Busan. The Sea of Japan lay just ahead, but thick fog hid the horizon. On the practice range, a young Korean golfer was hitting his twelfth drive. His phone, propped on his golf bag, played an instructional video with English subtitles. I could not hear everything but caught the keyword repeated again and again: Tempo. Tempo. Tempo. More than a thousand kilometers to the southwest, at a 9-hole golf course in Long An province, it was pouring rain. I knew this not because I had someone there, but because I had once stood under the roof of that very course, in 2026, as a freshman studying international communications. My uncle - a small trader at Ben Thanh market - took me along to meet a business partner. Rain fell on the fairway, heavy droplets smearing the grass. My uncle, wearing his conical hat, stood under the roof and called to cancel the meeting. We never played golf that day. But before we left, he stopped for a few seconds and pointed toward the empty fairway. That gesture meant nothing special. A middle-aged man pointing at a patch of wet grass. Yet it was the first time I stood before a real golf course and realized that this place had its own rhythm, its own set of sounds - the click of club on ball, the rustle of spiked shoes on grass, the murmuring of caddies. Cheers are never noise; they are the heartbeat of a city. I fully understood that sentence only years later, when I was living in Busan and witnessing how Koreans love this quiet sport. And I realized that my uncle's gesture was the moment I entered the world of golf - and became its rhythm-keeper for the past twelve years. [SECTION 1 - HOOK] If you look only at the numbers, you would think Vietnamese golf is booming. In 2026, the country had about 20 active golf courses, mostly concentrated around the two major cities of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. By 2026, that number passed 90, stretching from Quang Ninh to Kien Giang, with roughly 6-8 new courses opening each year. South Korea, one of Asia's largest golf markets with about 5.5 million golfers, has fewer than 550 full-size courses, including public and membership facilities. By golf courses per capita, Vietnam is advancing faster than many nations with long golf traditions. The number of golfers has also risen dramatically. Local golf associations report membership tripling between 2026 and 2026. A survey by a Vietnamese sports-tourism company showed domestic golf tourists rising 40 percent in 2026 alone. But these figures, however impressive, do not tell the full truth. Infrastructure is only the visible part. The hidden part of the iceberg is the training system, competition pipeline, and youth development. And in that hidden part, the story of Vietnamese golf still has many gaps. South Korea began building its school golf system in the early 1990s. They have more than twenty sports high schools with dedicated golf programs, private academies closely linked with KPGA and KLPGA, and a youth tournament system operating almost year-round. From this system, they produced generations of golfers one after another: from Choi Kyung-ju (K.J. Choi), the pioneer on the PGA Tour in the late 1990s, to Park In-bee dominating women's golf in the early 2010s, and now Kim Si-woo, Im Sung-jae, and Kim Joo-hyung, a golden generation competing on the world's biggest stages. Vietnam established its first youth golf academy around 2026-2026. The national golf team was founded in 2026. A national youth tournament system emerged later, around 2026. A twenty-five year gap is a reality that no policy or slogan can erase overnight. But I am not writing to complain about the gap. I write to tell what I have observed from the other side - from Busan, where golf is practically a religion, and from my childhood memories in Saigon, where golf was seen as a rich man's game. [SECTION 2 - CONTEXT] I once wrote 2,000 words about tactics, then realized a single pointed finger tells more. I wrote this in my diary after the 2026 World Cup, when I understood the limits of pure tactical analysis. The same applies to golf - even more so. The generation of young Vietnamese golfers emerging today is not rising because of a superior training system, but because they possess something the previous generation lacked: mental permission. They are allowed to dream about golf. Nguyen Thuy An is a prime example. She comes from Hanoi, first holding a club at age twelve - not because her family was wealthy, but because an uncle who worked as a caddie at Long Bien golf course saw that she had a good shoulder turn. Eleven years later, at the 2026 SEA Games in Cambodia, Thuy An became the first Vietnamese golfer to win a gold medal in the women's individual event. I watched the round through a screen at a coffee shop in Busan, because the event was not officially broadcast in South Korea. I remember Thuy An's parents sitting in the stands, not clapping, not cheering. They only held each other's hands. When the decisive putt dropped, they still sat still - two people crying in absolute silence. Koreans cry for golf noisily. Vietnamese cry for golf quietly. I once wrote about King Jae-hyun, a Korean golfer of Vietnamese descent, in my KLPGA Tour column for a local newspaper. He is twenty-four, playing in the B-flight, never having won a title. Yet he has a loyal fan base - Vietnamese people living in Busan who come to the course every weekend. They do not need him to win. They only need to see him walk onto the course in white, wearing the two-color flag on his chest. People remember a tournament not by the trophy, but by the moments they held each other. This explains why the 2026 SEA Games was a bigger turning point than people say. Thuy An did not merely win a gold medal. She gave an entire generation of Vietnamese kids an answer to the question: is becoming a golfer okay? [SECTION 3 - CORE 1: YOUNG GOLFERS] In 2026, Vinpearl Golf Hai Phong hosted an Asian Development Tour event, the first international professional golf tournament held in northern Vietnam. The scale was not huge: a total prize fund of 100,000 USD, about 120 golfers, including roughly 30 home players. But for me, this event was an interesting experiment for another reason: it created an occasion the Vietnamese golf community could rally around. That month I flew back to Vietnam for a week to cover the event. Standing on the fairway of hole 16, I witnessed one of the moments I will never forget. Truong Chi Quan, a 22-year-old golfer from Vinh Phuc, entered the final round in 12th place, four shots behind the leaders. The sun was directly overhead at hole 13, and Chi Quan had just dropped a shot on 12 when his tee shot found a bunker. In the stands, fans began to leave, partly due to the heat, partly because the tournament seemed decided. But Truong Chi Quan's mother - a small woman in a violet ao dai - remained seated. I saw her from fifteen meters away, because she was the only person holding a conical leaf hat in the stands under the 35-degree sun. No sunshade, no fan. She just quietly watched her son. Over the next four holes, Truong Chi Quan made four consecutive birdies. When he celebrated with a clenched fist on the 17th, his mother slowly lowered the leaf hat and held it to her chest. After the tournament, in the press room, a reporter asked Truong Chi Quan what he had been thinking mid-round when he lost his composure. He looked down at the table and smiled: I looked up at the stands, saw my mother still there wearing the conical hat, and told myself - if my mother can be patient, so can I. No tactical or technical answers were given in that press conference. But that answer about the mother in the conical hat circulated in the Vietnamese golf community for weeks. People remember a tournament not by the trophy, but by the moments they held each other. The event at Vinpearl Golf Hai Phong gave Vietnamese golfers more than their first OWGR points. It gave them a story - a truly Vietnamese story, starring a mother and a conical leaf hat. [SECTION 4 - CORE 2: INTERNATIONAL EVENTS] But if all we have is emotion, Vietnamese golf will not go far. In recent reports from the Vietnam Golf Association, the most cited figure is the number of young golfers in the national tournament system: about 350-400 young competitors each year across age groups from U12 to U21. That number is still modest compared to Thailand's 800 or South Korea's 2,000. One positive trend: the share of young golfers with a personal coach has risen from 15 percent in 2026 to about 45 percent in 2026. This shows Vietnamese families are beginning to spend money on golf education - but the bigger issue is the quality of the instructors. There are 8 youth golf training centers licensed by the VGA as of late 2026, a respectable number for a country still young on the golf map. Yet only about 30 percent of coaches at these centers hold international certifications from organizations such as PGA, USGTF, or CPGA. The rest are self-taught, former amateurs, or transfers from other sports. On a home visit in 2026, I stopped at a district-level golf academy in the Mekong Delta, which I will not name. The instructor, thirty-four, had previously played semi-professional table tennis and had never undergone formal golf training. He was teaching a 13-year-old student to hit inside-out by rotating the hips very fast and keeping the shoulders late. When I asked why he taught it that way, he answered: I teach the way I watch on YouTube. I do not mention this to criticize any individual. That instructor was doing the best job he could without a proper training system. But this very point reflects a paradox: we are expanding academies faster than our ability to train coaches. South Korea already learned this lesson. Between 2026 and 2026, many Korean academies rushed into early physicalization: 14- to 15-year-olds were sent to the gym, lifting heavy weights to push driving distance toward 300 yards. The result was a generation of young Korean golfers forced to retire at 24 or 25 due to spine and hip injuries. Only after this system was broken and replaced by a comprehensive technical, biomechanical, and rehabilitation curriculum after 2026 did Korea produce a second golden generation: Im Sung-jae, Kim Joo-hyung, An Byeong-hun. In Vietnam, I see the first signs of a similar loop. At a youth event in the North in 2026, I met an under-15 female golfer whose swing was so powerful that she had the longest driving distance in the women's division. But that fourteen-year-old could not fully stand upright at the finish of her swing. Her shoulders tilted to one side - a familiar sign of forcing power without proper mechanics. I asked her coach about the training schedule. He answered: Five hours a day, except Sunday. Five hours a day for a fourteen-year-old, without proper warm-up and recovery protocols. This does not just steal the physical capacity of the next golden generation; it steals their mental endurance - something no scoreboard can reveal. Data only shows you where to stand; emotions give you a reason to stay. The current WAGR rankings place four Vietnamese golfers in the top 1,000 amateurs worldwide. That number is small, but it is the first signal that a generation is finding its way. Maintaining these rankings, raising coach quality, avoiding Korea's early physicalization trap - these are the three problems Vietnamese golf must solve before talking about placing a player on the PGA Tour or LPGA Tour. [SECTION 5 - CORE 3: TRAINING SYSTEM] King Jae-hyun's story makes me think about a resource Vietnam has barely tapped: the overseas Vietnamese community, especially the second generation - children born and raised in Korea, Japan, America, Australia, carrying both cultures within them. According to South Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2026, about 220,000 people of Vietnamese origin live in South Korea - making them the second-largest foreign community in the country. Among them, tens of thousands of children and teenagers are growing up in a country where golf is the most thoroughly invested sport in Asia. How many of them have had the chance to hold a club? I do not have exact numbers, but I know the KLPGA Tour - Korea's largest professional women's golf tour - increasingly features talented young players of diverse backgrounds. Hoang Yen, or Kim Ye-won in Korean, is one such golfer. Her mother, a Vietnamese immigrant who settled in Busan in 2026, spent more than ten years bringing her daughter to local golf practice grounds. She does not speak Korean fluently, is not wealthy, and works at a convenience store in Haeundae. But she has memorized the rules of golf in three languages and knows dozens of technical terms just to read her daughter's results. People say I was crazy to put my daughter into golf, she told me during an interview in late 2026. But when I watch my daughter on the practice range, I see she is happy. We do not have much money, but we can give our child a joy. That is what I want. Hoang Yen's story is not the story of a rising star. She is twenty-five, plays in the lower tier, and has no titles. But her story - and that of Vietnamese mothers like hers - proves that love for sport has no borders. For the Vietnamese golf community, if there is a proper policy toward the diaspora, the second generation growing up in countries with developed golf systems could become a valuable bridge. We do not necessarily need to pressure them into wearing the national team jersey. We only need to create exchange programs and shared playing grounds so they understand they always have a home in Vietnam - and so Vietnamese golf gains momentum from its sons and daughters abroad. [SECTION 6 - CORE 4: DIASPORA] From the most skeptical viewpoint, I could say that Vietnamese golf is celebrating imaginary numbers. People will tell you Vietnam has more than 90 golf courses, thousands of new players each year, and a rising young generation. But I want to look at the opposite. Korea's success is not because they have more courses or more golfers. They succeed because they have a story. Every Korean child who picks up a golf club knows the story of Park In-bee overcoming injury and pressure to win the 2026 U.S. Women's Open; the story of Choi Kyung-ju, a farmer's son, opening the PGA Tour dream for a generation; the story of Im Sung-jae winning his first PGA Tour title at twenty-one. These stories create something policymakers cannot create: belief. Vietnamese people - passionate sports lovers - do not lack belief. We have proven that through football, esports, and athletics. But golf follows a completely different logic of development. You cannot cram athleticism, cannot shout slogans to produce a professional golfer. Golf requires time, requires tolerance for boredom, requires a sustainable system from the grassroots. That is why I am not overly excited about the boom in golf course numbers. Golf courses are infrastructure, and infrastructure can be built quickly. What cannot be built quickly is an ecosystem: a proper coaching system, inspiring stories, and fans who understand golf and are willing to wait eighteen holes under the blazing sun. In other words, Vietnamese golf is growing horizontally - more courses, more players, more academies - but the vertical pathway from training to competition to professional conversion is still thin. The 2026 SEA Games with two golf gold medals, however historic, is not yet a measure of the ecosystem's health. Nobody wants to hear this in a country that is having its first days of the golf dream. But the people who love golf the most - those who have sat long enough in the stands - are the ones who need to speak the truth. A course without spectators is a body without a heart; it still beats, but no one hears it. [SECTION 7 - CONTRARIAN] Last weekend, I called my mother in District 7. She told me that a neighbor's son - nine years old - just won second prize in a children's golf tournament in Can Gio. My mother said: People now send their kids to learn golf; they no longer dream of football like when you were little. I laughed. Not because the story was funny, but because I realized the gap between two generations. When I was nine, if anyone asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have said football player or pilot. Golf did not exist in the vocabulary of an ordinary child in Saigon in the early 2000s. Now, a child in Can Gio can win second prize at a children's golf tournament, and his parents - who sell seafood - are proud of that. That is a change no scoreboard can measure. I still remember my uncle - the one who pointed at the fairway of Long An golf course in that rainy 2026 afternoon. He passed away a year later from cancer, never getting to see Nguyen Thuy An win the SEA Games gold, never getting to see Vinpearl Hai Phong host an international event. But his pointing gesture, a motion meaningless to others, became the origin of an article more than 3,000 words long about love for the quietest sport in the world. I do not write this to answer where Vietnamese golf stands. I write to document what I have observed in twelve years of work - so that when a Vietnamese child picks up a club fifteen years from now, that child can look back at how far we have come and know that people once started from a rainy day in Long An, from a mother in a conical hat in the Hai Phong stands, from devoted rhythm-keepers like me. Every match is a drumbeat; I am merely the one keeping rhythm between two stands. Vietnamese golf will move forward. Not because more courses are built, but because there are people who love it in a way that makes it part of the story. And the final thing I want to send home: Please never let the golf courses of Vietnam become bodies without hearts.