2011 Kazakhstan Open

One of my friends here sent me an email, looking for people to volunteer at the Kazakhstan Open, and I took the chance to see one of the golf courses here.

The event was one stop on the European PGA Challenge Tour. No big names at this event, but mostly younger players looking to qualify for the regular European Tour.

I could only volunteer on Saturday and Sunday, and I had no idea what I was going to do until I got there. Mostly, I was hoping to be the guy that holds up the "Quiet" sign when the players are taking a shot.

At first, I was asked to do some traffic control on the entry road into the golf course, which ran alongside hole 9. If cars or carts came by, I was supposed to let them know to stop and wait until the golfers had finished putting. Thankfully, there was only one idiot who didn't want to stop.

After about 30 minutes of that, one of the volunteer coordinators asked me to do radio scoring, basically following a group of players and calling their scores into the scoreboard control, because I "looked like I could count".  I thought it sounded pretty interesting, so with one other volunteer, I headed to the first tee to meet the guys I would follow. The group had three of the top 10 players in the tournament, so I got to see some quality golf that day. None of them did exceptional, but they played level par on a relatively tough course. Along the way, I talked to two of the three guys, and they wanted to know what an American who wasn't involved in the oil industry doing in Kazakhstan. When I explained that I worked in development, they told me that this Challenge Tour has stops in some places you wouldn't expect, like India and Colombia. At least, Almaty has a European feel to it.

I enjoyed walking the course and talking to the players, so I offered to do the radio scoring on Sunday as well. That day, I followed the group that was just one back from the leaders, so I hoped for some intense gameplay, and that's pretty much what happened. The first hole was an indicator of how things would go. The first two guys put their tee shots well off the fairway, and we spent at least 30 minutes looking for them. No one played particularly well the entire round, and a lot of short putts were missed that would have been birdies or saved par. At the end of the round, one of the guys gave me his ball. I think it was because he just wanted to get rid of it.