Golf may be more appealing as team sport in India

By Rishi Narain


India is a country that follows cricket, overwhelmingly. Second in popularity is football, and then perhaps kabaddi or hockey – all team sports. Despite India’s success on the world stage, including Olympic medals in tennis, shooting, wrestling, weightlifting and boxing or world titles in Billiards and Badminton, it’s been tough for individual sports to capture attention.

Golf shares the same space. Indians have had unprecedented success in the Asian Games (Three medals in three Asian Games – Gold at 2002 Busan, Silver (team) at 2006 Doha and Silver (team) at 2010 Guangzhou). On tours, no other sport can boast of over 50 international titles won by Indians in the past 20 years.

Teams that represent cities, countries or even continents are intrinsically more likely to attract the fans’ interest. The biggest event in world golf is the biennial Europe Vs USA tour called the Ryder Cup, which enjoys the highest television viewership of any golf event. The Passion of 50 million avid golf players across the world will find an outlet this September when the 40th edition of the Ryder Cup is played in Scotland. Some half a million visitors are expected to visit the country for it.

Recognising the rise of golf’s popularity outside Europe, the Americans initiated the President’s Cup 20 years ago, in which USA takes on a Rest of the World team (dominated by South Africans and Australians). It has caught on and is the second, albeit distant, most popular team format.

The latest addition to the intercontinental tournaments is the Eurasia Cup, to be held over one week in late March 2014. The top 10 Asians take on their rivals from Europe with $300,000 waiting for each member of the winning team and $100,000 to the losing team. Bangalore’s 25-year-old Anirban Lahiri and Kapurthala’s 24-year-old Gaganjeet Bhullar are automatic choices by virtue of having finished third and fifth, respectively, in the final 2013 Asian rankings.

While the Eurasia Cup is ‘officially sanctioned’ by the Asian and European tour organisations, the ‘unofficial’ Asia vs Europe match, the Royal Trophy, has been held for eight years now. India’s Jeev Milkha Singh played a crucial role in winning the cup for Asia in December 2012.

On the Indian landscape, in an effort to get more sports fans to pay attention to India’s golfing stars, a professional golf league– the Louis Philippe Cup–just concluded its third edition in Mumbai with nine teams of three professional players each representing Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Colombo, Delhi, Greater Noida, Gurgaon, Kolkata and Mumbai vying for the top prize. There is little doubt that the tournament garners some media attention and has created better engagement with fans than individual formats. Ahmedabad’s second victory in three years has supported the rising interest in golf in that city, where more new golf courses were opened in the past decade than any other Indian city.

Team formats work for smaller sports because fans identify themselves with a city or country and are more likely to follow the team’s progress. Of course, it’s tough for any sport to match the mother of all events– the IPL. Even so, every sport is trying the format, including Badminton, Kabaddi and even wrestling. So should Golf.

The author is a former Asian Games gold medallist.