It was the fourth event of the 2016 PGA Tour China season, and I was an hour from Shanghai’s Pudong Airport on Chongming Island. The island is a peaceful stretch of farmland and home to Lanhai Country Club, a long, windswept Nicklaus design modeled after Big Jack’s favorite holes in the U.K. I had spent the previous 24 hours with a vicious stomach bug. I couldn’t have named a single ingredient in the Sichuan hotpot from two nights before; perhaps I should have been more inquisitive.
48 hours earlier, I’d been in Chengdu, the capital of the Sichuan province, heading into the final round of the Cadillac Championship one shot outside the top 10. I was playing well and had a real chance at a top-five finish. Chengdu is a sprawling, rapidly expanding city—construction cranes on every corner, entire neighborhoods rising all at once. It was like that in most major Chinese cities then: ambitious development, shiny high-rises, and entire districts of completely empty apartment towers known as “ghost cities.”
Chengdu is famous for two things: pandas and Sichuan hotpot. One of these knocked me out, and it wasn’t the cute, docile bears. Hotpot is cooked and served at your table in a massive vat of broth, chilies, and ingredients of questionable identity. The spice levels range from a gentle tingle to full demonic possession capable of killing both host and exorcist. Mine was the latter—24 hours of misery I wouldn’t wish on Mao Zedong. I never left my hotel room for the final round. The withdrawal alone probably made that hotpot the most expensive meal ever eaten.
