The Economics of the 19th Hole: Barbados Resorts and Our Empty Courses

A scorecard has no box for a 19th hole. Yet Apes Hill in Barbados has one — an island green, water all around, and a pile of stories around it. That hole is part of no competition, it is counted in no round, it carries no world-ranking point. It is pure entertainment. On the courses where I have spent the last decade — Kurmitola, Savar, the grounds of Rangpur — the question is whether we can even fill 18 holes, so building a 19th is a kind of luxury.

I remember 2026, when no broadcaster was inside the ropes at the BPGA Open. I propped my phone against a water cooler and streamed six holes on Facebook Live. The feed drew 4,200 views; about 60 people stood on the course. The camera never arrived, so I had to become the camera. In Barbados the camera is never missing. Drones fly, panoramas sell, sunsets go on Instagram. The difference is not in the quality of the golf; the difference is in who owns it — who puts money behind the camera, and who only listens for the score.

Apes Hill Barbados is fundamentally a resort course. Four hundred and seventy-five acres, set 1,000 feet above sea level, designed by the renowned course architect Ron Kirby, who worked alongside Tom Fazio for years. The course is built on natural terrain — ravines, ridgelines, downhill fairways, and views open toward the Caribbean Sea. A central thread of Kirby's design philosophy is to leave the land as intact as possible and drop the game into it, and Apes Hill shows this clearly: the ravines and slopes were not removed, the holes were laid over them. The 12th is a par three, and the most talked-about hole is the bonus 19th, whose green sits like an island in the water.

The property also holds a monkey sanctuary, tying golf to eco-tourism. They use a historical link to George Washington in their marketing, though that is more branding than golf. The course has entered GOLF.com's Top 100 Resorts list. And as brand ambassador stands Ian Woosnam — the Welsh golfer, a former Masters champion, a wearer of the green jacket.

Competitively, Apes Hill is no tour stop. It hosts an annual event called the Barbados Legends, where amateurs play alongside professionals. There are no world-ranking points, no FedExCup link, no tour-card arithmetic. It is essentially a pro-am format whose real work is selling the resort's brand.

Let me note one risk. In the Caribbean the hurricane season is real, and the resort's 1,000-foot elevation does not reduce wind exposure. So the foundation of a resort economy is scenery, tourism and weather — all three dependent on outside forces. In 2026, sitting at the Qatar World Cup, I wrote that the 32-team format was 'a spreadsheet with a stadium attached.' Looking at Apes Hill, it seems this too is a kind of spreadsheet — only with a hill and a sea instead of a stadium. The difference is that their spreadsheet is kept well, while our domestic accounting is a mess.

On my open spreadsheet there is a column called 'the weekly cheque.' Splitting 2026 between Doha and Kurmitola, I reconciled the accounts and found that while Thailand's Danthai Boonma took a first prize of US$400,000 at the Bangabandhu Cup Golf Open, a win on the domestic BPGA circuit is worth roughly Tk 145,000. The gap is close to two hundred times. That gap is not a gap in any player's talent; it is a gap between two different economic systems. The economy the Barbados resort stands on is tourism, real estate and package sales. The economy Bangladeshi domestic golf stands on is almost nothing — fifty weeks near starvation, and one big tournament in the other two.

Since 2026 I have run an annual column called 'The Other Fifty-One Weeks.' In it I set every domestic cheque next to the elite purse. And I track one more thing — sponsor exemptions, the way a football desk tracks loan moves. Who got in, who sat on the entry list, and who paid for his own flight — the health of a system shows up in the answers to those three questions.

One thing keeps coming back to me. At Apes Hill, who carries the bag? The question is simple; the answer is not written. The course brochure has no mention of caddies — it mentions monkeys, sunsets, the island green. Yet the people whose sweat runs this game are absent from the brochure. In 2026 I walked all 18 holes behind Jamal Hossain Mollah and then spent two hours with three caddies, to understand why a Tk 145,000 winner's cheque never reaches the man who carried the bag. Ball-boy to Olympian — Siddikur Rahman's 58th place at Rio 2026 remains our only Olympic golf entry. We proved that circle once, and then for eleven years it was never repeated. Why it was never repeated is a far more thrilling question to me than Apes Hill's 19th hole. Why the pipeline stalled is not the failure of any individual; it is the fruit of institutional choices.

Look at Ian Woosnam's role. A former Masters champion, now a resort ambassador. His name is an asset — the memory of the green jacket creates credibility for a brand. That name works to draw European tourists to Barbados golf tourism. Here the player's role has shifted from competitor to representative. That is no fault; it is a model. The question is whether Bangladeshi golf has such a name that could make a course or an event credible. Siddikur exists, but our problem is that we could not turn a name into a system, could not turn a story into an institutional structure. The machine working behind Woosnam — the resort, the packages, the eco-tourism, the family-friendly facilities — is not the work of his name alone; it is the work of a plan. A name opens a door, but the room behind the door must be built with money, and building that room is the plan we do not have.

My own table holds a number. Bangladesh has nineteen golf courses, and only five of them are 18-hole courses. Nearly all sit behind cantonment walls. When the federation utters the phrase 'golf for all,' I do the arithmetic — how many ordinary people can actually walk in. The answer is small. Walking the hills of Apes Hill requires buying a ticket, true, but there is a golf economy there — rentals, coaching, caddies, packages, restaurants, hotels. Outside our courses there is hardly any such economy. A course inside the wall, zero outside it. Access does not mean merely an open gate; access means an economy outside the gate, where a path is built from caddie to coach. I know this accounting sounds pessimistic. It is not pessimism; it is accounting. And accounting has one virtue — it offers no comfort, it shows direction.

In 2026, back from Russia, I wrote a seven-page proposal — a video review officer, to settle disputes over ball movement and drops. The technical committee read it, praised it, and filed it away. That folder is still with me. Apes Hill's 19th hole is also, in a sense, a file — an idea no one rejected, no one implemented, just kept for pleasure. The difference is that Barbados has money for pleasure and we do not — if we did, which file it would go into is a separate question. A proposal can be praised and buried in the same committee meeting; we usually get the first, not the second.

Now to the counterintuitive side. The easy reading is — Barbados is rich, so it has beautiful courses; we are poor, so we have empty grounds. But that reading is wrong, because it sees a system as an individual's mistake. The real issue is the flow of capital. The Barbados resort is tied to a tourism economy — there golf is a product, and the product's buyer is foreign. Our golf is tied to a formality — there the course is a members' convenience, and membership is a social position. In one place golf earns; in the other it spends. That difference does not show up in the beauty of the course; it shows up in the weekly accounting. My table says that across the year roughly fifty-one weeks of our golf go unfunded. That is the real story, not the 19th hole.

The second counterintuitive point: the island green, the monkey sanctuary, the George Washington history — these elements are not reverence for golf, they are substitutes for it. They pull the visitor's attention away from the course toward other things. When I stream, the camera stays behind the player, because the viewer wants to see the game, not the scenery. The resort's strategy is the exact opposite — the scenery is the product, the game is the excuse. There is no loss to golf here, only gain. But it must be remembered: if we borrow only the scenery from this model and drop the game, we will make the mistake. We do not need a course; we need a working economy around a course.

The third counterintuitive point concerns the Woosnam model. Building golf on a single name is exactly the trap I try to avoid myself — mistaking one Siddikur story for the whole game's story. Woosnam's name works in Barbados because there is a system behind the name. In our country a name stands alone, because there is no system behind it. The ambassador model can be copied, but if you do not copy the machine behind the model, the name stays a photograph, never becomes an institution. So Woosnam's success is not a model for us to imitate; it is a warning — what lies behind the name is the real question.

I leave one question, one I have kept to myself many times. If the 19th hole were on one of our courses, what would it be — entertainment, or one more proposal filed away? I do not know the answer. But I know I keep a spreadsheet that once refused to keep a calendar for a year. That spreadsheet taught me that numbers can lie, and scenery certainly will. So when a Barbados sunset is printed somewhere, I ask — beneath that sunset, who is carrying the bag? The question that is not in the course brochure is the real course design. If more professionals join the Barbados Legends next year, I will watch for it. But I will watch our own fifty-one weeks more closely — there golf exists, the camera does not, and the story born there is captured by no drone.