The Pro From Transylvania

Paul Tomita was the rare golfer behind the Iron Curtain

As Luke Donald made his captain’s selections for the 2023 European Ryder Cup team last week, I was hoping Adrian Meronk, from Poland, would be one of his choices. It would have made a friend of mine who lives in Krakow very happy. And it would have been more history for the 30-year-old Meronk, the first golfer from Poland to win on the European Tour.

One of his three career victories came earlier this year in the Italian Open at Marco Simone, where the Ryder Cup will be played at the end of the month.  

“I wanted to play well in front of Luke, and to win the tournament is just such a relief," Meronk said then. “I saw [him] this morning in the locker room. He said, ’Keep it going. Good luck.’ So nice, encouraging words from him.”

However, four months later, Donald apparently didn’t put that much stock in Meronk’s vittoria a Roma nor the tall Pole’s tie for second at the Ryder Cup site in the 2021 Italian Open. The European captain named Tommy Fleetwood, Justin Rose, Shane Lowry, Sepp Straka, Nicolai Hojgaard and Ludvig Aberg as his six picks. I was bummed for Meronk and my friend. but also disappointed that a golfer from that part of world wouldn’t be debuting in an important international golf competition in Italy, just as someone else from Eastern Europe had done 55 years ago.

With Meronk in the Ryder Cup conversation, my thoughts had turned to that unlikely entrant in the 1968 World Cup of Golf, Pavel (Paul) Tomita.

I knew nothing about Tomita until the spring of 1984. I’d recently joined the staff of Golf World, then located in Southern Pines, N.C., my hometown. After just a couple of months on the job, I realized visitors occasionally stopped by the office, which was located on a frontage road adjacent to U.S. Hwy 1 up from a restaurant called the Lob Steer Inn (first salad bar I ever saw). In those years if you were on a golf trip to the Pinehurst area, you likely followed the game closely and therefore knew the weekly publication that helped you do so was printed there. I gave Billy Andrade the 50-cent tour once during a North & South Amateur.

Paul Tomita in Romania in 2002 sporting a 1971 World Cup cap. (Emanuel Tanjala/Alamy)

The man who popped in that morning four decades ago sported a mustache, spoke with an accent, and smoked a pipe. Tomita was a lively man inching up on his 70^th birthday and he greeted Golf World’s longtime chief editors, Dick Taylor and Ron Coffman, warmly, having come to know them when he played in the World Cup from 1968 to 1973. He was a making a stop in North Carolina before traveling to New York to be honored for his World Cup participation at the Metropolitan Golf Writers Association banquet.

“I am the pro from Romania,” Tomita told me. As I discovered that afternoon when we played at Pine Needles, his was a remarkable golf life. He was the pro in his homeland for many years, a curiosity behind the Iron Curtain instructing ambassadors, wealthy businessmen and royalty in Bucharest, a “professor of golf,” as his business card stated. By 1984, he was retired and had returned to his native village, Pianu de Jos, 220 miles northwest of Bucharest and not far from Alba Iulia, the ancient capital of Transylvania.

“Dracula?” Tomita liked to deadpan. “Scratch golfer.”

He took his game and his jokes on the road in 1968 for the first time since the late 1930s, finally, at age 54, able to get a travel visa from the Romanian Communist government. But a snafu meant Tomita didn’t arrive until the second round of the World Cup at Olgiata Golf Club was underway. Tomita was allowed to tee it up anyway for a ceremonial nine holes, shooting 39. “I just wanted to see the Romanian flag raised with all the other nations,” he said, according to Sports Illustrated.

Tomita—with his assistant pro in tow as his partner—traveled the world over a handful of years after that first trip to Rome, teeing it up in the World Cup in Singapore, Buenos Aires, Palm Beach, Melbourne and Marbella.

He didn’t drive the ball very far, but a sharp short game allowed Tomita to shoot in the low 80s in some of his World Cup rounds. “I never stop trying,” he told the Associated Press after an 85 in 1970. “I feel my pupils in Bucharest. Never lose sight of the fact that this is a game.”

Tomita discovered golf as a teenager, when he was summoned to Bucharest by an older brother who already had moved there to make a living. He became a caddie and subsequently apprenticed for a French golf pro who was teaching Romanian royalty. Later, he got to travel to England to study how to become a golf instructor. Tomita settled in as head pro at the Diplomatic Club in Bucharest. The course was reduced from 18 holes to only six during the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu, but Tomita stubbornly hung on even as the secret police kept close tabs.

“Ceausescu hated golf,” Tomita told The Baltimore Sun in 1999, when writer Toby Smith sat down with the old pro in Pianu de Jos. “The Communists wrecked my course in Bucharest. But as long as I was there Ceausescu didn’t have the courage to touch me, to completely shut me down. He knew I knew all these important diplomats and prime ministers from five continents.”

With Ceausescu dead and the Iron Curtain lifted, Tomita began in the early 1990s the unlikely goal of building a course in his home village. Nine scruffy holes were created on rolling land amid impressive oak trees, some of them older than the Open Championship, opening for play in 1995. The second nine was opened in 2002.

“About 80 percent of the people I meet say I’m crazy to do a course here,” Tomita told The Baltimore Sun. “But this isn’t crazy. This is my dream and one day people will see that dreams pay off.”

Tomita died in 2004, a month after his 90^th birthday. In old age, Tomita still had caps from his World Cup appearances, when the flag of his country was raised along with those of nations whose golfers possessed more talent but not more grit. Someday, if golf grows the way Tomita wanted it to, there could be a Romanian at a prize giving or on a podium, and it will be a nod to the pro with the pipe, a little man who dreamed big.