When your entire golf course is sand and rocks, should any foliage be considered a “grass trap?”

Elen Gubeb’s tattered sandals and torn jeans don’t match his pricey new Mizuno glove, but dress is not important at this homemade golf track on Namibia’s desert coast, an unlikely golf hotspot.

Very unlikely….

The nine-hole course dubbed the “West Side Club” has no greens or tees, water or grass. Stinging sand and gusts of wind whistle through a lone row of palm trees on the edge of the forbidding Namib desert.

Of course, no Reuters article could be complete without mentioning the evils left over from the colonial age:

The Namib, the world’s oldest living desert, and the barren Skeleton Coast limit employment options in the former German colony that for decades was under the control of neighboring South Africa.

Oooh, bonus points for the reference to both Germany and South Africa! How bad is the evil legacy of colonialsim? Why, this golfer is unemployed!

“I don’t work, I just play golf every day,” says Gubeb, one of thousands of youths unable to find permanent work in the poor southern African nation.

If you’d handed me that quote and asked who said it, I’d have guessed Tiger Woods, not Elen Gubeb. But since it was Elen, I’d like to know something that Reuters managed not to mention in this oh-so-brief news “story” from nowhere:

Where and how does an unemployed Namibian golfer obtain a “pricey new Mizuno glove?”

Makes one wonder….