The greens at the club unfit for golf. Picture by Pabitra Das

Yet another show of political strength with yet another round of Maidan mauling has claimed its latest victim — a golf tournament at a 116-year-old club.

Six days of salvage operations could not make the Calcutta Ladies’ Golf Club match-fit. The greens had been dug up and damaged, burnt and bruised last Sunday by a Brigade rally of the CPM’s farmers’ wing (as reported in Metro on March 12).

Truckloads of sand, countless tanks of water and endless hours of heavy dressing had gone into a desperate drive to make Sunday’s Crazy Golf Tournament happen. Some 100 golfers had turned up to tee-off, but it was soon clear that the post-rally scars on the course would take far longer to heal.

“The grass coat was not heavy enough to hold the golf ball and the ball simply refused to follow a pattern. With the grass layer becoming uneven and craters lurking under the green cover, it was not possible to play a proper round of golf here,” said Divya Lal, a club member denied.

With the Crazy Golf tourney being called off, the club is taking no chances with the Gold Cup, starting March 30. A move to shift the high-profile tourney to Fort William is underway.

The greens at the unique golf club, fear experts, could have been “damaged beyond repair” by the rally. After the mauling it suffered, it would take months of real pampering with new layers of soil, sand and grass seeds to ensure that the bounce is back. The greens at point 3, 4, 6 and 9 on the course have been so badly damaged that they would need a re-laying,” they added.

Brandon D’Souza, CEO of Tiger Sports Marketing, also feared the worst. “The beauty of this particular club’s green is that the course has not been laid to any specification. It’s natural and therefore the under-layer of the greens is not strong enough to bear the strength of a bus or a car. (Heavy vehicles had run on the greens on rally day.) So the damage is tremendous and I suppose the best way out is a complete re-lay.”

But what would prevent another rally to ride roughshod over the relaid turf? “We are a heritage club and the least we expect is some sense of restraint towards the greens that we toil hard to protect, cover and maintain. If the army can build a concrete boundary wall, I guess we can surely have a temporary fencing and we’ll press for it at the right forum,” says Anuka Dutta Kanungoe, honorary secretary of the Calcutta Ladies’ Golf Club.