Blerim dug his lime green shoes into the matching colored mat, relaxed his shoulders and slowly exhaled. It gave him the relaxed and ready feeling he loves so much— the feeling that he can’t go without for a week, and that feeds his addiction.
He heard the rush of air through the grooves of the club and the flush sound of metal battling AstroTurf that is all too familiar to him. He looked up just in time to see the little white ball soaring to the clouds. For him, it was five seconds of pure bliss.
But the ball always comes down, and that day it came down in four feet of tall grass and weeds, not the usual sharp blades of rye grass in Germany or the pine trees of Turkey.
Blerim Sejdiu is a Kosovar businessman who works with German internet technology companies. When he travels he gets to play the sport he loves so much all around the world, but when he is home in Pristina with his family, all he gets is an overgrown driving range.
This driving range, paired with an 18-hole miniature golf course, make up Pristina Golf Facility, the only place to hit a golf ball in Kosovo.
“I love Pristina Golf and have been playing here for a long time, but I wish there was someplace where I could actually play near my home,” Sejdiu said.
In 2010, Dino Asanaj, an Albanian-American from New York, decided he missed golf so much that he would bring it to Kosovo. Asanaj worked with City Golf Europe, a Swedish company, to build an 18-hole course for Pristina that cost €350,000. With the adjacent land, Asanaj inserted a fenced driving range. Today the minigolf course still maintains its vibrant green glow and its clear flowing water, even though Asanaj passed away two years ago. Lavdim Zylfiu, who is from Pristina, runs the facility because of his zealous passion for golf that grew when he took control of Pristina Golf. He also is the president of the Kosovo Minigolf Federation and coaches children who play minigolf in Pristina and internationally.
Zylfiu is pushing to increase the golf presence in Kosovo, but the imposing limitations of the new nation are pushing back. With unemployment so high and available land to purchase so scarce, full-size golf is hard to imagine in Kosovo’s future, even though many Kosovars say there would love to play. To Zylfiu, focusing on minigolf makes more sense.
“Right now, Kosovo isn’t very interested in full-size golf because of the expense,” he said. “Minigolf is our priority.”
The minigolf course in Pristina consists of 1:10 scale replicas of famous, full-sized golf courses around the world, including St. Andrews in Scotland and Augusta National in the United States. For example, one hole at Pristina Golf is on an island surrounded by water, a perfect representation of hole number 17 at TPC Sawgrass in Florida.
Occasionally, an out-of-town visitor will stop by to send a few balls flying down the range, but the minigolf pays the bills. It costs €8 for a bucket of 100 balls to hit on the driving range. A round of minigolf costs just €5, and when Kosovars aren’t spending a couple laughs on the course, Zylfiu organizes minigolf tournaments.
In 2012, Zylfiu hosted Kosovo’s first international minigolf tournament at Pristina Golf called The Kosovo Open. Visiting teams had their doubts about the location, including the coach of the Finland Mini Golf Team, Pasi Aho. But the tournament succeeded in bringing money and recognition to the new Kosovo facility.
“The course proved to be very interesting and fair in the end, even if it was very different from all those we have played so far,” Aho said. “I hope that the Kosovar players could also win new experiences from this event with international players and will use them when visiting the next international events such as in Porto and Istanbul.”
Because of the doors opened by that tournament, Vullnet Mustafa, a 17-year-old Kosovar, was able to travel to Istanbul to compete in The Minigolfstream Cup, with his younger brother, Nderim. Vullnet made the drive back to Pristina with a trophy on his lap, after beating the competition by nearly 40 strokes.
“I would say that minigolf chose me,” he said with a smile. The two brothers were first offered the opportunity to play at Pristina Golf through a trip with their school. They continue to practice, with Zylfiu as their coach, and they play in tournaments across Europe, even though they began playing golf just four years ago.
“I am planning to send Vullnet and Nderim to the Youth World Championship in Lahti, Finland in the first week of August,” Zylfiu said.
The Mustafa brothers exercise their love for golf whenever they can, but they said living in a country where there is such a small golf presence can be hard. It’s rare to even see a golf tournament on TV. So for now, they will focus on minigolf.
According to Zylfiu, that focus is why Pristina Golf facility looks as it does— one 50-foot tall fence perfectly separates a beautiful green AstroTurf minigolf course from an overgrown rotting driving range.
“I would like to see more full-size golf in Kosovo, but first I would like minigolf to move forward and for Kosovo to make more minigolf courses,” Vullnet said. “There are almost no places to play minigolf in Kosovo. I wish there were more courses with different types of material like concrete and felt so we can practice before participating in a tournament.”
Zylfiu said he is pushing to establish full-size golf in Kosovo, one day. He has after all worked for years to create, as Sejdiu said, “a golf network— a community of people who love Kosovo takes a swing at a new sport the sport of golf in Kosovo.” This community ranges from 14-year-old players to professional Kosovar golfers. All they need is a place to play. Kosovar golfers who play full-size courses travel to south Albania, when they can, to practice. But Zylfiu and his colleagues agree that there should be golf courses nearby. Duncan Weir is executive director for R&A, an international organization that works to encourage the playing of golf. R&A receives surplus money— about €6.3 million per year — from The Open Championship in Great Britain so they can help countries educate people about golf, provide equipment and build facilities. One thing they will not do, though, is force golf upon a country.
“We work through over 100 international affiliates that apply to us so that we can help improve the status of golf in their countries,” Weir said in a phone interview. “From there, we send teachers, officials, equipment and machinery to help them.”
R&A is assisting more than 10 Eastern European countries, including Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Hungary. All have enough players and courses to qualify for R&A’s help. For example, R&A helps Macedonia run its National Open Tournament.
According to Weir, R&A hasn’t helped Kosovo because of its small number of golfers and absence of courses.
“Historically speaking, there has never been a lot of golf in that small area of the world,” Weir said. “Plus the war hurt the progression of sports like golf in Kosovo and reestablishing it is very hard… It’s up to the people on the ground to build up golf presence and then apply to us for help.”
Kosovo has professional golfers scattered throughout the country, but it needs more. Zylfiu said all he needs is local sponsors to invest and help them travel through Europe to recruit more players for Kosovo. Once the number of players grows, Kosovo golf lovers could apply to R&A for financial help.
Zylfiu is also working to build Kosovo’s recognition by the International Golf Federation (IGF) that has affiliates in 126 countries worldwide, including seven out of the eleven Balkan countries.
IGF affiliation, though, reaches much farther than just status. Golf will officially be a sport in the 2016 Summer Olympics, and all national golf federations affiliated to the IGF will automatically be included in the National Olympic Committees.
Weir predicted that as a new Olympic sport, golf will have vast promotion in summer months of 2016, therefore drawing attention to the countries participating. Those countries would receive funding and recognition that they may not have received otherwise.
For Kosovo, recognized as an independent republic by more than 100 countries, any form of recognition is important, according to Zylfiu.
“At this point, I think Kosovo playing golf in the Olympics is more important for Kosovo than taking a part in football in the World Championship,” he said with confidence. Zylfiu said Kosovo is unlikely to participate in golf in the 2016 Olympics, but he has hopes for the 2020 games. But there are many smaller steps to take before standing on the largest stage in the world. One of the difficulties is the lack of available land to build full-sized golf courses, according to Sejdiu.
“You can find a couple hectares there and another couple there, but you won’t find enough for a full course,” Sejdiu said while playing at Pristina Golf. “Even the land you see here is owned by three different people.”
An average golf course costs about €2.2 million to build and more than €200,000 per year to maintain, according to Turner Macpherson Golf Design. In a country where the unemployment rate is more than 30 percent and where nearly half the population lives in poverty, according to the Kosovo Agency of Statistics, the expense of a golf course seems astronomical.
But Sejdiu said Kosovars could afford to play golf if they had the courses.
“People here seem to think you need six zeros in your bank account to play golf, and that just isn’t true,” he said. “I think there is a way to make it work.”
Public golf courses in surrounding countries charge €15 to €40 to play. For example, Golf Club Center in Zabalj, Serbia is a highly-rated public course that costs €30 for a round of 18 holes.
Vullnet said such a course in Pristina could be affordable for Kosovars. He played golf on a full course for the first time recently, but he said that seeing a real golf course in Kosovo would be a dream come true.
“I just think we have to learn that golf can be played everywhere and not only in the rich places,” he said. “Then we would need some investors and sponsors and for everyone to start playing golf.”
Sejdiu and Zylfiu agree that finding those sponsors is the first step. In Bosnia, for example, golf sponsors lend money to build three full golf holes, every so often, until a full course is completed. That is exactly what Zylfiu is hoping to receive.
Weir said that if Kosovo applied to R&A and had legitimate plans of action for improving the quality of golf in the country, R&A would most likely support them.
Golf may potentially benefit Kosovo’s tourism according to Ardian Hasanaj, who co-founded Be In Kosovo, a tourism company.
“The news only shows the bad things,” Hasanaj said. “Kosovo has always been seen as a place of struggle even though it is more safe here than many other places. No one wants to come to the place they see on TV.”
He said tourism companies need to develop a stable infrastructure by highlighting Kosovo’s natural features. He thinks golf just doesn’t fall into such priorities.
“If we highlight Kosovo’s history, its beautiful landscapes, its food, and its motivation towards positive post-war development, Kosovo will sell itself,” Hasanaj said.
He doesn’t foresee Kosovo tourism companies working to develop golf courses, but Hasanaj is sure that it wouldn’t hurt to have golf included as one of the excursions. Though they said golf is barely present in this part of the world, Zylfiu, Sejdiu, Weir, Vullnet
and Hasanaj agree there is room for the relaxing sport in Kosovo. Just ask the young students in Pristina— they are always looking for something new to do.
Whether it’s paintball, horseback riding or go-cart racing, the novelty factor plays a role in this reforming country, according to Zylfiu.
“I know about Pristina Golf, but I have never played before because no one else really does,” said Shpresa Veseli, a University of Pristina student majoring in English. “My friends and I would love to try it sometime.”
Others said they feel the same way. Some Kosovars are interested in what Pristina Golf has offered the past few years. The holes may just be 10-meter representations of the real thing, but they also represent the community Zylfiu is working tirelessly to build and the potential of something bigger — literally.
Zylfiu said he hopes that one day Sejdiu can line up his shots toward 400 meters of thick green grass and plush trees, and do it just 15 minutes from his home.
(Connor Moriarty is a reporting intern at KosovaLive this summer in collaboration with Miami University in the United States)
