How I taught a Maasai warrior to play golf

When you give a Maasai warrior a 7-iron, he instinctively compares it to the spear in his other hand. He carries that traditional, effective weapon every day from his adolescent rites of passage onward. He knows what it’s for, and he knows the damage it can do. 

Glancing over to his other hand and the yard-plus of steel shaft with a rubber grip and a dull, angled ax-like head, he struggles to deduce what sensible use such an implement might serve. You can’t blame him. His spear helps feed and protect his tribe. A golf club exists only to amuse self-abusive people playing a silly game.

Still, as my week at the Chem Chem Safari Lodge in Tanzania wound down to its final evening, I had this opportunity to teach this Maasai to play golf.

The veteran safari guides and conservationists at the Chem Chem Camp offer world travelers a chance to see the abundance and variety of wildlife on the Serengeti and in Tarangire National Park while teaching them how the locals work year-round to aid conservation. Camp visitors also have the opportunity to meet and explore the ancient, vibrant cultures of regional tribes such as the Datoga, the Hadzabe and the Maasai.

Young Raposh is a proud Maasai but he also contributes at Chem Chem by offering running lessons to safari guests. It wouldn’t be fair to say the Maasai run as easily as the rest of us walk because they run as easily as the rest of us stand still. They run to hunt. They run to round up their grazing herds. They run village to village with important messages, wearing sandals made from old motorcycle tires while carrying six-foot iron spears.

It’s natural enough for visitors who might be training for anything from a marathon to a 5K to seek the advice of Raposh and his fellow tribesmen. While the Maasai might look on the idea of running for fun as bizarre, they work with local translators to set up a program that tailors running pace and distance to their guests’ needs. 

As part of the Chem Chem team, Raposh was on hand for the farewell gathering the night before our group of safari pilgrims boarded long flights home. As the sun prepared to sit over Lake Manyara, Raposh busied himself with building a bonfire while the rest of us set up chairs at the water’s edge where giraffes and wildebeests gather to drink during the day.

Since searching for elephants by helicopter and watching lions devour a zebra kept me more than occupied, I hadn’t thought about golf in a few days (a personal record). But the folks arranging all of those experiences had a look at my website before I arrived in Africa and saw that I wrote frequently about the game.

Knowing they had an addict in their midst who hadn’t connected with his custom PXGs in a couple of weeks, some kind souls scoured the camp’s 4,000-hectare layout to find a few old clubs fashioned before the dawn of the persimmon age, along with a handful of golf balls that looked hewn from neolithic rock.

I never got a clear story on where the gear came from beyond some vague tale of a guide from the early days of Chem Chem who briefly toyed with taking up the game before more important duties took hold. But the dust and rust my gloveless interlock grip rubbed from each of them suggested that no one had pulled those sticks out of storage since Allan Quatermain left for King Solomon’s Mines.

Off I went to chip around the baobabs for a while — until I realized I had an audience. If there’s something the Maasai do as efficiently as running, it’s building a fire, and Raposh had a good one blazing faster than I could miss a four-foot putt. Now, he watched a 6-foot-3, 235-pound wannabe Hemingway knocking a dimpled pellet between patches of morning glories and whatever grass the dik-diks hadn’t mown down for breakfast. 

If the notion of jogging for fun is perplexing to the Maasai, the thought of knocking a ball into a hole for pleasure never penetrates their minds. Raposh comes from a village of hunter-gatherers. When not stalking the plains, his people raise livestock. They trade with other villages that, like the Maasai’s, manage without electricity and running water. We will forgive them if golf has yet to find a place in their collective consciousness.

Since I’m the guy at the driving range who has to punch himself in the throat to prevent the offering of unsolicited advice, I saw the unlikely opportunity to indulge my coaching impulse in the wilds of East Africa. I moved over to the smiling Raposh and (via interpreter) made an offer: If he would teach me to throw his Maasai spear, I would teach him how to hit a golf ball. 

A shared nod later, I handed him a battered 7-iron and took very temporary possession of a weapon Raposh, as a 14 year old, used to kill his first lion. The only thing I managed to kill by age 14 was any semblance of a teenage romantic life, but I was a late bloomer. Regardless, we established who scored higher on his tough-guy aptitude test before Raposh decided I would take my lesson first.

While the spear weighed only about five pounds, its length and weight distribution made it feel more substantial. The Maasai forge scrap iron into the business end and grip the weapon with well-sanded wooden handles. The resulting balance is perfect.

Without saying a word, Raposh demonstrated the throwing technique that kept him and his fellows provided with food and security: Forward and slightly up, stepping through the throw with the same leg as the throwing arm. Then, full follow through to the target.

Western arrogance in full effect, I made what I thought was the same motion, resulting in a toss that might’ve made a nick in a banana if this stretch of Africa grew bananas and if one of the local monkey species dropped the fruit in the dirt 10 feet in front of me. 

Jumping ahead to my half of the instruction, I got Raposh to take a natural hold on the worn-out grip with a balanced and neutral position over a golf ball set before him and between his feet. Immediately and naturally, he hit the “counterintuitive wall.” To lower himself over the ball, Raposh wanted to widen his stance instead of bending slightly at the knees because the tiny crouch felt ridiculous. He and our interpreter shared what would be one of many chuckles — laughing at the dainty nature of this new sport but, I hoped, not at my inability to teach it.

Most western rookies see golf on TV and want to wind up into a full slam of a swing just like the pros they watch. Having no such preconception, Raposh still wanted to wind up similarly and smash the ball the way he might whip the ground to get a bull moving. I put up both hands to stop him and introduced him to the concept of a half-swing sweep. Without a lot of weight shift that would probably result in falling back behind the ball, just take the club away waist high and rotate the shoulders and sweep the ground in a gentle arc. I expected him to force the movement down too steep and chunk down behind the wall.

I was wrong. Whether by instinct or accident, he caught the little ball before the big ball and popped a neat shot in a line straighter than one of his many runs. It rolled to a stop about four times as far as my best spear throw. On we practiced into twilight, our round ending with smiles and handshakes just before night brought the Southern Cross out to dance.

If you’re marking your scorecard at home, you might choose to modify my ambitious claim of “…I taught the Maasai to play golf…” to “…I taught a bemused Maasai warrior how to pitch with a 7-iron…” Fair enough, but the moment wasn’t about hunting lions or birdies. Despite my efforts that evening, the Maasai are no more likely to pick up golf seriously than I am bound to put spear through a charging African boar. Regardless, in a testament to how the wonderful absurdity of a game can bring very different people together, two men with histories as diverse as the northern and summer constellations became friends over a golf ball.

Looking back as a mid-handicap who has only broken 80 three times in my life, I got one up on the scratch players out there. For an hour, standing alongside an antelope’s watering hole in African Lake Country, I was a golfing legend — the only Tiger in Africa.