The Empty Ledger, The Full Fairway: How Bangladesh Golf Loses Its Own Account

At six in the morning, the first thing you notice at the caddie shed of Kurmitola Golf Club is the wooden token board. Small metal tokens hang from it, each bearing a caddie's name. That morning the board was almost empty. Three men sat on the bench; all three were over sixty. And yet this is the club from which a ball boy rose to stand on a tee box in Rio de Janeiro. The token board hangs on the wall, but those who did not come in the morning— their names are written nowhere. This is exactly where Bangladesh golf's real ledger begins to empty out.

The country has nineteen golf courses. Five of them have eighteen holes— Kurmitola, Savar, Mainamati, Bhatiary and KEPZ. Almost all sit behind cantonment walls. The presidency of the Bangladesh Golf Federation has stayed in army hands decade after decade. That architecture has one plain consequence. Golf here was never an open sport. It was a culture inside the cantonment, and no one outside ever kept its books.

I began in journalism on Dhaka's general sports desks, then moved to the golf beat in the 2010s. Tour scorecards, federation releases, winner's cheques— those are my raw material. Standing beside the fairway for twenty years, I have noticed that the most important facts of Bangladesh golf live on no scorecard. What a caddie earns, what debt a player carries, how many leave the country each winter— these numbers sit in nobody's file.

In 2026, Kurmitola hosted the first Asian Tour event on Bangladeshi soil— the Bangladesh Open, won by Singapore's Mardan Mamat. The next year, golf returned to the Olympics in Rio for the first time since 2026. In a field of sixty, Siddikur Rahman finished fifty-eighth. I went to Rio for the medals and stayed for the ball boy. Siddikur did not go on a wildcard; he qualified on merit, the first Bangladeshi in any sport to do so. Qualifying on merit is the loneliest way to qualify. No one summons you; you buy your place with your own shots.

After Rio I opened a file and named it "The Second Siddikur." For ten years I ended every interview with the same question— who is next, and what stands in their way? The answer was not on the course. It was in the ledger.

What That Ledger Says

The domestic professional circuit runs under the BPGA banner— the BPGA Open, New Year Cup, Ramadan Cup, Chittagong Open, BGCC Open. Here the winner's cheque stood for years at around one hundred forty-five thousand taka. The circuit runs on Tk 145,000 and an unreasonable amount of hope. On the other side, in 2026 Kurmitola staged the Bangabandhu Cup Golf Open with a purse of four hundred thousand US dollars, won by Thailand's Danthai Boonma. Same soil, same community, yet more than three hundred times apart between the two numbers.

In 2026, at forty-seven, I left a staff desk for a digital newsletter. From that time I began setting prize money, travel and net earnings beside every result. A tiny circuit slowly became a readable business story. The interviews changed too— I ask about rent before I ask about swing changes.

The economics of the caddie pipeline are simple. Most of what a caddie earns per round goes to travel and food. No club keeps him on a monthly retainer, there is no insurance, and illness stops the income. Yet it is from this shed that the country's best players emerge. Siddikur's story is not the exception; it is the rule's brightest example— only, apart from him, no one wrote the rule down.

Entering the amateur ranks requires membership, and membership means connections, money and a recommendation. A family without all three sees its child stop at the doorway. So the start of the pipeline is nearly shut, and the end survives only on the trust of a handful who come out of the shed.

People here compare golf with cricket. To me that comparison is useless. Golf must be measured against its own calendar. How much competition happens across the year, how many can play for money, how many are forced abroad each winter— the real picture emerges from those answers. I measure golf's ceiling from inside itself. Nineteen courses, five of them full-length, one big event a year— those three numbers are the boundary of the national game.

In winter the country's best professionals leave for India's PGTI or the Asian Tour qualifiers. The winter exodus is never announced. It is only noticed— through a blank line on an entry list, a missing name from a tournament. One big week and the silence of the other fifty-one: Bangladesh golf lives in the gap between them.

In 2026 the world's stadiums and fairways emptied. The domestic calendar was erased entirely, yet the five eighteen-hole courses stayed open and unplayed. Caddies are paid by the round, with no monthly wage. In a single week their whole income went to zero. The caddies left first. The silence arrived a week later.

I filed one long piece then, and went quiet for six weeks. Familiar sports copy would not come. I came back with one question— who pays for the silence? Since then I keep an annual caddie-income audit. No wage, no retainer, only a token board and a morning's wait.

In 2026, while covering the migrant-labour story of the Qatar World Cup, I watched the Bangabandhu Cup at Kurmitola from the same hotel room. Construction workers in Doha, caddies in Dhaka— two faces of one story, where the question is the same: who carries the bag, and who keeps the cheque.

The Other Side

What everyone's eye skips past is this— Bangladesh golf's crisis is not a shortage of talent, and not entirely a shortage of money either. The crisis is of records. Much of what happens here is never written down. A game that is not written down does not exist in policy. There is no caddie in the ministry's file, no winter exodus, no domestic-circuit debt. Where there is no data, no investment arrives; and where there is no investment, the second Siddikur is never born.

Many say opening academies is the answer. My forty years of watching say otherwise. The ribbon is cut, the photograph runs in the paper, but the road from caddie to professional is never formalised. That road is the cheapest and the most honest. The men in the caddie shed spend eight to ten hours a day on the course, reading shots, reading wind— a longer training than any academy on earth. Only, no one keeps its account.

Cantonment walls and the federation presidency together create a safe distance. The slogan "golf for all" is spoken outside the wall, while the course gate stays inside it. What democratisation would cost is a question nobody wants to ask. Nobody wants to ask, because asking means admitting— that in seven decades, the account of whose game this really is has never been done.

Last Word

The token board is wood, the tokens are metal, and the names fade in a week of silence. I do not know who the second Siddikur is. But I know that if his name is written nowhere, finding him is on us. A calendar can be erased. The habit of showing up cannot. The question, then, is not of medals— it is who will write that ledger, which still lies empty?