PRIDE OF JORDAN

SHERGO AL KURDI is following a MENA Tour-paved path to his Olympic Games dream.

- KENT GRAY

Mousa Al Kurdi pleaded with his son to withdraw but as 16-year-olds with big golf dreams are want to do, the advice fell on deaf ears. â–¶ It’s late November, the evening before the MENA Tour’s 2019 season-decider at Ayla Golf Club in Jordan and Shergo Al Kurdi is in “extreme” discomfort. The Surrey-domiciled Jordanian teen would battle through intestinal pain and inexplicable fatigue for three rounds for a share of 59th place in Aqaba, unremarkable without the context of what happened next. â–¶ It might have been seasons end but Al Kurdi Jnr., clearly upset with a closing round of 81 in Aqaba that included a quadruple-bogey nine, retired to the club’s par-3 course to get some practice in for the King Hamad Trophy in Bahrain the following week. â–¶ “That is the first time I saw my son crying from the pain,” said Mousa Al Kurdi who put a club in his son’s hands before Al Kurdi Jnr could walk. “For me as a father I felt hopeless. Seeing my son in that level of pain and not being able to do anything about it.”

Ayla Oasis, the resort of which Ayla Golf Club is the centrepiece and Shergo Al Kurdi is attached, summoned their duty doctor who arranged transport to a local hospital. “They gave him morphine to stop the pain. The following morning we were on a plane to his next competition to play the King Hamad Trophy in Bahrain where he made the cut and, if I remember correctly, finished 24th.”

Shergo Al Kurdi is clearly a tough kid. But the often excruciating pain in Aqaba were the warning shots of Crohn’s disease, an inflammatory bowel disorder that is now a constant and unfriendly companion.