Far away . . . fairway . . . KJ . . . pay day . . . runway . . . g'day

CADDIE'S ROLE:THOSE of you who travel long distances on business will be familiar with the feeling of not having any idea where you are when you wake up in strange surroundings and wondering how you got there. A day or two of meetings and you find yourself back at home feeling as if you had been in a virtual dream in some faraway place.

Despite starting my accidental career of global caddying with the strongest motivator being to travel, some decades on the sense of travel has taken on a very practical meaning. We frequently move like ghosts through a location without knowing a word of the local tongue, whether we are in the north or south of the city and if, indeed, the country we are in is coastal or land-locked. This is the downside of moving around the globe too easily and way too quickly: often there is no sense of location.

Well last week in South Korea I had an extreme version of this sensation; a 13½-hour direct flight from New York and a 13-hour time change later I shuffled around my hotel room in Seoul last week as if I had just landed from another world entirely.

My lodgings were effectively a transit hotel in Incheon airport outside Seoul. The staff were in shock that I kept on reappearing each day for breakfast. The golf course was on the other side of the airport and apart from its location it was inextricably linked to the North East Asian hub south of Seoul.

Some 10 years previously there had been a mountain beside some mud-flats. The government decided to blow up the mountain, remove its entrails, fill in the mud-flats , build a brand new airport on reclaimed land while creating the appropriately named Sky 72 public golf complex on what was left of the flattened mountain.

When curious people ask me about my peculiar job I have in the past tried to play down the exotic nature of global looping by saying that most weeks on tour entail airport, golf club and hotel. Well, last week I had all three rolled into one by staying at the airport which was built out of the golf club land which now overlooks it. I couldn't get away from any of my weekly compulsory haunts.

We made the long haul from the exclusivity of the 72nd Masters to Korea for the SK Telecom tournament which in its infancy, is one of the showpieces of the Korean Tour.

There were two star guests at the event; my player, Retief Goosen, and the local hero KJ Choi.

Sky 72 is a four course public golf facility and upon our arrival on Tuesday last, it looked like we had interrupted a ladies' golf outing where the dress code was strictly prim but loud and gaudy. I thought perhaps roles were reversed in this corner of Asia where the women played golf and the men stayed at home and looked after the household.

It must have been an exception as the next day it was back to an all-male affair in the pro-am and the only women I saw on the golf course were caddying.

There is one caddie assigned to three amateurs in the pro-am. Their bags are loaded on to an electric cart, the caddie has a remote control with which she manoeuvres the cart along a magnetic strip on the cart path in order to speed up the procedure of looping for three. I hope the idea does not catch on in the professional game or two out of three of us will be looking for alternative employment.

So much for being at a low-key event. We played a practice round with Choi on Tuesday afternoon, which was the most chaotic nine holes I have ever witnessed at a tournament. There were three movie crews each vying for the best angle of KJ's every shot. On top of countless TV cameras, there was a gaggle of stills photographers, all of them willing to test the limits of just how straight a jet-lagged superstar will hit the ball on a Tuesday afternoon, in their quest for a winning shot.

Both star players were assigned their personal bodyguards. The necessity for security seemed a little excessive. This was certainly the case for Retief who, if it wasn't for the bodyguards and the management representative, would have had nobody following him for our 7am tee time on Friday. They were presidential bodyguards who were experts in martial arts and surreptitious conversation. The martial arts were not required, given that ours was an understated grouping.

During the entire week the two minders never spoke an audible word. Instead they muttered into their miniature mouthpieces and obviously communicated only in such a fashion.

They carried stun-guns as you are not permitted to bear arms in Korea. Their ability to shadow you was unflappable. I tried unsuccessfully to give them the slip a couple of times during the week but each time I returned one of the shadows was standing to attention watching me reappear.

Despite our global desire for homogeneity, there are, thankfully, plenty of cultural traits to remind you you are somewhere very different. The driving range was a separate entity, a five-minute trip away. It prided itself on being the largest driving range in the world. If you can imagine an oversized football pitch enclosed by a single story stand then you can picture the Korean range. Everyone hit into the middle of the range.

There was elevator music droning out of speakers set by the practice putting greens. If there was a rules issue the minders got on the phone to a translator in order to explain the situation. Unless a foreigner was on the leaderboard it was difficult to figure out who was leading and who you had to beat when it came to the crunch on the back nine.

KJ won the SK Telecom Open and Retief finished third.The beauty of the proximity of the professional golfers three most visited places at a tournament; airport, hotel and golf course, was we didn't have far to go to escape from the virtual reality of life on a faraway golf tour once our duty was done on Sunday last.