One of the finest cricketers of all time, captain and coach Kapil Dev, presented the Vishwa Samudra Open golf championship, featuring some of the best players and offering two crore prize money, to be played at the Delhi Golf Club from Tuesday.
As the president of the Professional Golf Tour of India (PGTI), the champion cricketer, Kapil has vowed to strengthen Indian golf.
“The overall prize money of PGTI has been 24.58 crore this year. I am confident that it will be 50 crore within the next three years. Indian golf will be at a different level soon,” said Kapil, as he interacted with the media on Monday.
“When I started playing golf, only Roger Binny used to play among the cricketers. Internationally, many cricketers play golf. I wish I had started golf earlier. I would have scored at least 2000 more runs in cricket. This game teaches so much about how to concentrate on the ball,” said Kapil.
Conceding that some of the leading golfers were busy with international events, Kapil pointed out that if dates were confirmed early, a lot of Indian players would opt to play in the country.
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Kapil hoped that golf would become so popular in the next few years that the aspiring young generation would opt for golf if they could not make it in cricket.
Olympian SSP Chawrasia said that “the course is playing fantastic,” after having played 18 holes in training with Ajeetesh Sandhu on Monday.
The field will have other leading players, Rahil Gangjee, Gaurav Ghei, Rashid Khan, Khalin Joshi, S Chikkarangappa, Yuvraj Sandhu, apart from Om Prakash Chouhan, Udayan Mane, Veer Ahlawat, Karandeep Kochhar and Manu Gandas.
There will be 12 foreign players in the 126-strong field, including Stepan Danek of the Czech Republic, Sukhraj Singh Gill of Canada, Makoto Iwasaki of Japan, Americans Dominic Piccirillo and Digraj Singh Gill, apart from a few from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal.
The Managing Director of Vishwa Samudra Engineering, an infrastructure company based in Hyderabad, said that his organisation was committed to golf for the last few years and was happy to partner with PGTI.
The champion will get 30 lakh rupees and the runner-up 20 lakh.
