Vietnamese Golf in 2026: A Quiet Return on the Đà Lạt Hills

In March 2026, on the hills north of Đà Lạt, a small group rose before dawn to cut back elephant grass. They were not farm workers, and they were not land surveyors. They were men who still remembered how to hold a golf club. Since 2026, almost no one in Vietnam had spoken of the sport. The course the French had built on the highlands in 2026 lay buried under weeds: fairways had become ox-cart paths, greens had been dug up for vegetable plots. That morning, a white ball was placed on the ground again.

The man at the tee said nothing. He swung, and the ball rose through the thin mist and landed a few metres from a wooden post driven into the earth as a marker. No stands, no scoreboard, no applause. Only wind moving through the pines. The course empty, the wind still keeping time for the ball.

This was the fourth year of Đổi Mới. Inflation and the price of rice were still daily talk in the markets; ration coupons were slowly being withdrawn; the 2026 Law on Foreign Investment was beginning to bring foreign delegations in to survey the ground. On the other side of the world, that same year, Nick Faldo won The Masters and Mark Calcavecchia won The Open after a three-man play-off. World golf was in the middle of a golden age. In Vietnam, it had only just spoken again, very softly.

Within the country's sporting landscape, golf was a door almost nobody looked at. No school taught it, no association governed it, no national tournament existed. To talk about Vietnamese golf in 2026, one must first talk about a sport that had barely come back into existence.

It had existed once. The French brought golf to Indochina in the early twentieth century, building courses in cool regions such as Đà Lạt so that officials and merchants would have somewhere to pass the time. After 2026, those courses vanished one by one from daily life: some became parks, some became farmland, some survived only as a name on an old map. In the sporting system of the young state, golf had no place. The sports that received investment were football, table tennis, volleyball, athletics, shooting — tied to schools, to mass movements, to international competition results.

Golf was not on that list. A good club then cost as much as several months of a worker's wages. An imported golf ball was a nameless luxury on a customs form. A proper course needed dozens of hectares, a mowing crew, an irrigation system. In an economy still struggling for rice and cloth, golf was impossible to justify.

Yet it came back, in its own way: quietly, sporadically, tied to people who crossed borders.

What brought golf back to Vietnam in 2026 was the beginning of a movement of people and capital.

Three routes reopened that door.

The first was foreign-invested projects. From the late 1980s, teams of specialists, engineers and managers from Japan, South Korea and Europe began arriving in Vietnam. For them, golf was part of working life, a place to meet partners. With no course, they carried their bags and practised their swings in hotel courtyards, or simply remembered.

The second was overseas Vietnamese. Those who had left after 2026 and settled in the United States, France or Australia carried with them both the memory of old fairways and the golfing habits of their new countries. When they began returning to visit, they brought their clubs. The first clubs to touch Vietnamese soil after the war likely came not from a shop, but from the luggage of those who had gone far and come back.

The third was diplomacy. The slow normalisation of relations, the arrival of foreign delegations, and the need for a respectable place to host guests created a very soft but steady pressure for a golf course to reappear.

The three routes met at one point: golf in 2026 belonged to a very small group — people standing between two worlds.

That is also why it was hard to see. With no tournament, there was no news. With no news, there was no history. What remained were a few oral stories: a Đà Lạt man recalling the morning of cutting grass; an overseas Vietnamese describing carrying a bag of clubs through a border gate and being asked what it was; a foreign engineer practising his swing in a hotel courtyard under curious eyes.

Those stories never made the papers. But they were seeds. The wind recorded that year still blows in me whenever the course is empty.

People like to tell the return of golf as a symbol of growing wealth, of opening up, of new men. Look closer, and it is a story of a void being slowly filled. Golf came back mainly because outsiders stood at the edge, and a few insiders could not bear to let it disappear. Within a sporting culture still building itself from zero, golf was the one thing that needed no audience to survive — and for that very reason, it was also the easiest thing to forget.

From what I observed on those old courses, a sport never returns with a match. It returns with one person picking up a club and forgetting that anyone is watching.

So if a sport can only live through those who cross borders, then when the borders open fully, who will it belong to? The new generation watches the ball with their eyes; I still listen with my ears, and both are ways of loving. In Đà Lạt that year, no one yet loved golf in any way at all. But the ball had rolled, and the sound of it still echoes to this day.