Ali Sher, the first Indian winner on the Asian Tour seen in action at the 2022 DGC Open in New Delhi
Two weeks ago India Golf Weekly detailed how Indian golfers have trended downwards in qualifying for Major championships over the last four years compared to the period 1996 to 2017. This week IGW trained its lens on the diminishing number of victories of Indian golfers on Asian Tour over the last five years; this suggests that Indian golf has not only stopped progressing but might actually be losing ground.
Ali Sher’s victory in the 1991 Indian Open is widely considered to be the catalyst that sparked the growth of Indian golf (Sher would win the event again in 1993). His win proved that Indian golfers could compete with the best Asia had to offer and more victories soon followed. From 1996 to 2006, Indian players would win 18 times on the Asian Tour. India’s great triumvirate of Arjun Atwal, Jyoti Randhawa and Jeev Milkha Singh accounted for 17 of those wins, with Atwal and Randhawa winning six times each and Singh five times over those 11 years (Singh won his first Asian Tour event in 1995, which falls just outside our chosen date range). Shiv Kapur, then a young prodigy, picked up the remaining win in 2005 in his first year on the Asian Tour.
The success of India’s “big three” had a cascading effect and Indian golfers began to gobble up wins on the Asian tour like candy. Between 2007 and 2017, Indian golfers racked up 31 wins on the Asian Tour. To be fair, part of the reason was that India was hosting Asian Tour events more frequently, thereby increasing the number of opportunities for Indian golfers to win. Events on home soil also included more local golfers, so a wider range of India players had the opportunity to win. Yet it still required that Indian players seize these opportunities. And they did. Nine different Indian players accounted for those 31 wins.
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Gaganjeet Bhullar was the most successful of this group, winning eight times to tie Atwal and Randhawa for the most wins by an Indian golfer on the Asian Tour. Anirban Lahiri was right behind Bhullar with seven wins while SSP Chawrasia won six times. They were joined by Atwal, Randhawa, Rashid Khan and Kapur, who all won twice, while Shubhankar Sharma and Ajeetesh Sandhu picked up one win each.
Ajeetesh Sandhu with his Yeangder TPC winning trophy in Oct. 2017
When Bhullar and Sharma won again in 2018, and Viraj Madappa joined them as the youngest ever Indian winner on the Asian Tour at 20 years and nine months old, it seemed like the good times were here to stay.
Instead, those victories turned out to be the closing act. Indian players would not win again on the Asian Tour for almost four years. While Lahiri moved to the PGA Tour and Sharma to the DP World Tour (then known as the European Tour), none of the others were able to step in and continue winning. In fact, the new generation has yet to show it can even come close to matching India’s success from 1996 to 2017. Instead, Indian golf seems to have taken a step or two back relative to the rest of the continent where countries like China and Thailand are churning out winners at a furious pace. Any detailed study of how Thai and Indian pros compared on the Asian Tour until around 2015 and after that will show a stark divergence in fortunes.
India’s only win since 2018 was Bhullar’s 2022 Indonesia Open title, his 10th on the Asian Tour.
Perhaps a new generation of golfers will emerge to turn this trend around again, but for now it leaves Indian golf in a precarious position, one that is lacking the necessary system that identifies, provides for and nurtures champions the way that institutions in Korea, China and Thailand do.
Credits:-
Photo – DGC Open