First appeared in LA Times – https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-06-13-ls-3646-story.html

Golfers–ever the most staid of athletes–are known for fluid strokes, crisp follow-throughs, the occasional garish sweater, but not this :

Sal de Silva, a former race car driver, flooring his cart 20 feet up an imposing, rocky slope at Burbank’s DeBell Golf Course one day in February. It was a desperate act following a third hole he called “pure hell.” Not to mention a first for the club.

Said a course regular, familiar with what is now called the “cart incident”: “Those guys are nuts.”

“Those guys” are, of course, the Unorganized Golfers From Sri Lanka. In an infinite universe it was bound to happen: a zany rag-tag wrecking crew, from the nation tourist brochures call “a teardrop in the Indian Ocean,” meeting thousands of miles from their homeland to play golf.

The group’s invitational tournament, which started four years ago as a gathering of a few friends, has burgeoned into a monster that in September will attract more than 50 men and women from as far away as Chicago and Honolulu to Carmel Mountain Ranch in San Diego.

There’s “Black Knight” Bala, named for his choice of Scotch, and the one they call “Yakadaya”–“Iron Man”–for his phobia of wooden clubs. Another perpetual victim is a golfer who can’t tee off without practicing a comic ritual of posterior adjustment. Him they call “Fruit of the Loom.”

“It’s amazing,” said De Silva, 30, a real estate agent from Canoga Park who immigrated in 1990. “People who never played golf before will drive hundreds of miles just to be tortured by another Sri Lankan.”

The Unorganized Golfers had managed to survive until late last month without a formal meeting. That evening, several members gathered over spicy savories at the posh Tarzana home of Dr. Naj Nagendran to discuss logistics for the upcoming tournament, followed the next day by a round of 18 holes at the Knollwood Country Club in Granada Hills.

Denny Fitt, a pro at Knollwood, said unlike their mostly serious counterparts, the Sri Lankans love life and have a “picnic attitude” toward the game.

Translation: “They usually close the bar,” Fitt said.

Golf was never a likely choice for this group of expatriates. For the former inhabitants of the land of lush jungles and full-service elephants, the game was exotic. It was the sport of the elite who hobnobbed at the Royal Colombo, a course whose faded grandeur harked to an earlier time–when British soldiers patrolled the capital city in a country called Ceylon. A sea of rupees separated most of them from the game.

Now the tiny island, with a population of 17.2 million, is embroiled in a bloody sectarian conflict. Tamil radicals fighting the majority Sinhalese government are widely believed to be behind the 1993 assassination of their president by a bicycle-riding suicide bomber.

Troubles at home and their country’s immense poverty sent them in search of greener pastures. Census figures from 1990 show 10,970 Sri Lankan transplants living in the United States, with a large portion of them–3,385–in California.

Praba Chandran, 46, a CPA from Westwood who arrived in 1979, is the group’s unofficial, unelected and–he would hasten to add–“uncivilized” spokesman. An occasional newsletter, which Chandran writes and publishes, is a forum for the subtle Sri Lankan wit, a mixture of corny puns and a uniquely Eastern spin on American pop culture.

In one issue, Chandran advises golfers with swing problems to call a series of toll-free numbers. Do you hook? Call Heidi “Flice.” Slice? Lorena “Bob-it” will lend a hand. A selection of golf terms in the same issue contains the following entries:

Tee: “How Dan Quayle would spell a popular beverage from Sri Lanka.”

Scratch Golf: “A doctor’s instruction to his scheduling secretary upon learning that Cindy Crawford is coming in for a physical next Wednesday.”

Much of this is lost on the younger generation of immigrants, men in their 20s with the least time in the United States and the most bewilderment regarding its weird ways.

Consider the following exchange, which occurred recently when a younger golfer lost a ball in the hilly fairway at Knollwood:
“You will find the ball on the grassy knoll over there,” Chandran told him.

To which Mervyn Peris, a 42-year old insurance agent from Santa Clarita, added: “If you don’t find it there, walk toward the book depository.”

The utterly blank stares that greeted this play on JFK assassination lore meant that Chandran had to devote a whole page of his newsletter to explaining the significance of those Dallas landmarks. He called the segment “Kiddies’ Corner.”

Richard Nixon is a particular fascination of Chandran, who used the former President’s death in April as an occasion to pay tribute to Nixon the golfer.

“I was absolutely mesmerized by Watergate,” said Chandran, who added that he used to comb Colombo’s newspapers for quotes by Nixon and his staff. “I remember reading the newspaper and thinking to myself, ‘My God, this kind of thing happens here every day.’ ”

The group has chosen not to have a president or leaders of any kind, its only pretense at formality being Chandran’s erratically published newsletter–“of doubtful origin,” as its masthead states.

“We’ve all seen plenty of other ethnic organizations just self-destruct,” Chandran said, because of what he calls “power and pettiness.”

You know, egos get out of control and, before long, the separatists are breaking off and forming their own insurgent golf team.