Cricketers, footballers, athletes, tennis and hockey players, why even a racing driver or two. They have all been produced and matured in abundance from Bengaluru. But golfers? Bengaluru, leave alone Karnataka, hasn’t had a tradition of producing quality golfers, something even more surprising when you consider that one of the oldest golf courses anywhere in the world is the Bangalore Golf Club whose origin dates back to June 1876. The best came from Kolkata, Delhi and Chandigarh.
But this is all set to change with a crop of Bengaluru based youngsters who have not just hopped on to the national golf – amateur and professional – circuit with a winning panache, but have even more credibly, recently sailed into hitherto unchartered waters on the European, Asian and the toughUS PGA tours. Trishul Chinappa, the reigning all-India amateur champion, amateur Jaibir Singh led India to a memorable win in the SAARC Golf Championship in May; pros Khalin Joshi, who has triumphed in two Professional Golf Tour of India (PGTI) events and finished runner up at the Bangladesh Open in May, S. Chikkarangappa (who is ranked No 2 on the PGTI), and a host of others like Syed Saquib Ahmed, C. Muniyappa (who won the Indian Open in 2009) and M. Dharma have all honed their skills in Bengaluru and have done the city proud.
But the jewel in the crown has to be Anirban Lahiri, the world’s 38th best professional golfer. He won two events on the Asian tour – CIMB Niaga Indonesian Masters and the Venetian Macau Open in 2014 and two more on the competitive European tour – the Maybank Malaysian Open and the Hero Indian Open – in 2015, but the piece de resistance has to be his fifth place finish (where he picked up a cool Rs. 23.52 million in prize money) last week at golf’s final major of the year, the PGA Championship. It is one of the four most prestigious golf tournaments on the professional men’s calendar – the other three being the Masters Tournament, the U.S. Open, and the Open Championship.
And statistics, they say, don’t lie. So what’s making this happen? Certainly not a fluke or a coincidence.
It was a conscientious effort started in the early 2000s by the Southern arm of the Indian Golf Union (IGU), wherein then IGU council members from the South – Dilip Thomas, K N Shantha Kumar, Raian Irani and Vijay Divechadecided to launch the South Zone Junior Development Program. The objectives of the program was to produce future generation of golfers and “to produce the champions of the future”.
Vijay Divecha, Lahiri’s coach says, “We started by encouraging golf clubs to start junior development programmes which would run through the year to impart the fundamentals of the game at a young age, encourage golf clubs to conduct camps to introduce children to the game and to provide coaching to promising juniors by helping them to find the next level. The IGU, at the National level had also embarked on an initiative to produce qualified coaches through the National Golf Academy of India’s ‘Education and Certification Program’. By producing good coaches we would be able to produce good players.”
Between 2003 and 2005 junior programs were started at the Karnataka Golf Association (KGA), the Bangalore Golf Club, Madras Gymkhana Club, JWGC Mysore, Coorg Golf Links, Coimbatore Golf Club, and other golf centres in South India.
In 2003, the South Zone Junior Tournament Circuit was also started .
While in 2003 there were just three tournaments, where junior players were herded into a mini bus and taken, today there are 10 tournaments conducted annually.
Divecha adds, “It was our belief that if we stuck to the task the results would come. Lahiri, Chikkarangappa, Khalin Joshi, Chinnappa, Udayan Mane Syed Saquib Ahmed and many others are products of that initiative.” Divecha adds “The golf clubs in Bengaluru stuck to the tasks and did not allow ‘politics’ or the ‘lack of initiative’ to come in the way. It is important to remember that to produce good players we have to stick to the basics.”
