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A belief that often borders on assertion that golf is bound to grow has been bandied about since the recent announcement that the game will be part of the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

We’ll see. Meanwhile, there’s another new tournament on the block besides golf in the Olympics, and it ended today at the 12-course Mission Hills resort in Shenzhen, China, on a Jack Nicklaus-designed layout that is the home of the annual World Cup for teams of two pros who represent their countries.

That’s the Asian Amateur, of which the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews in conjunction with the Augusta National Golf Club, are major supporters. The Asia Pacific Golf Confederation conducted the tournament. Korea’s Han Chang-won won the tournament by five shots over fellow Korean Eric Chun. The 17-year-old’s prize was an invitation to the 2010 Masters.

"Anything can happen in a round of golf and I was very nervous towards the end,” Chang-won said. “I have to admit that it was the thought of playing in the Masters that made me nervous. I had never even thought it would be possible for me to be playing in the Masters as an amateur."

But now he’s Augusta-bound. Meanwhile, the question remains: Will the new tournament help grow golf in parts of the world where it’s not taken hold? Officials have said that’s its main purpose.

Again, we’ll see. The tournament did attract an international field of 117 players. The list of golfers included six from Bangladesh, one from Cambodia, two from Iran, one from Laos, one from Myanmar, and two from Nepal.

There was also a Canadian connection, in that Tenniel Chu, the executive director of the Mission Hills club, graduated from the University of Toronto. Born in Hong Kong, he lived in Toronto for more than 20 years and still has family, including his grandmother, there. He’s a man on a mission.

“Golf is still very young in China,” Chu said during a telephone interview from his office at Mission Hills. “It’s only in its 25th year. There are 3,000,000 golfers in China, with a growth rate of over 50% a year. (Twelve of them were entered in the Asian Amateur). The China Golf Association predicts that by 2020 the population of golfers will exceed 20,000,000.”

Chu figures that governments will start spending plenty of money on golf because it will be in the Olympics. That too remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: More and more Chinese people know what a golf ball is.

“When the first World Cup from Mission Hills was televised, in 1995, people couldn’t distinguish with the naked eye between a ping-pong ball and a golf ball,” Chu recalled. “Last year the World Cup here more than 192,000 spectators over the four days.”

Clearly, golf in China has come a long way in the last 15 years. And now, the winner of the first Asian Amateur will also go a long way; all the way to the Augusta National Golf Club, and the 2010 Masters.

Is golf an international game? Of course it is. Is it a global game? It’s moving in the right directions, but an accurate answer isn’t yet possible.