BackThe best (little) golfer in the world
Shubham Jaglan comes from a village where no one's heard of the game. Now his name is on a winner's list that includes Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy
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Questions, questions, questions. He is 10, and he’s got a lot of them. Like, why is Lionel Messi better than Cristiano Ronaldo? Or, can you film a remote-controlled toy car and make it look like a real one? In his measured, soft tones, he can talk through breakfast, 18 holes, lunch, tea, and dinner. On the golf course, he is silent, focused, assured. Off it, he wants to try a hundred things at once. He wants to jump across the 5ft gap between the roof of his uncle’s house and his own in their village; he has been wanting to do it for the last couple of years but no one lets him. The roof of his own house is rotting; if he lands on it, he will go straight through. “I don’t want to do that, I don’t want to destroy my own house."
He speaks English with a slight American twang and a sibilant lisp that turns all his s’s into sshhs. He speaks Hindi in a clipped, formal manner, and his Haryanvi is singsong. He, an only child, is being tricked by his parents. The roof is fine, but no one wants him to make the jump. He looks at the gap between the two roofs longingly. He loves a challenge. He doesn’t just like to win, he likes to beat people. “By 6, 7, 8, 10 shots," he says, cheerfully. “Winning is...how do you say it...secondary...it’s okay...I want to beat everyone by this much!" He holds his hands a foot apart, palms facing each other, fingers spread. “So this year was just perfect."
The best little golfer in the world is Shubham Jaglan and there are many things you don’t know about him, even though he is now on TV all the time, but you probably know this: He won the IMG Academy Junior World Championships on 16 July in San Diego, California, in the 9-10 age category, and the IJGA (Interntaional Junior Golf Academy) World Stars of Junior Golf in Las Vegas less than a week later.
Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy are his friends on Facebook. “But I don’t know if they are the real Tiger and Rory, there’s a lot of fake stuff that happens on Facebook, you know?"
Woods is part of the reason that Shubham loves golf. He would watch YouTube videos of Woods, on repeat play, and copy the strokes when he was starting out. Now he has his own swing; it’s nice and easy, pendulum-smooth all the way.
Funny thing about that swing; when he was 5, and it was his first week in golf, Shubham took a swing and put all his might behind it. The club made more contact with the ground than the ball, and a chunk of the turf came off. “It was a huge divot! And my coach said why are you trying to dig the ground with your club? And I thought he was telling me I did good. I thought yes! I am powerful! Every day I would go and look at that divot and feel proud. When I got to know it was a bad thing, I was still happy with it. I still feel proud when I think about it, I don’t know why!"
Now he rarely works up a big divot. Why, just yesterday he felt happy hitting a ball “perfectly...high, soft, you can hear the sound it makes and you know it’s good".
If you spend a little bit of time with Shubham, you begin to forget that he turned 10 on 16 August. He speaks and conducts himself like a thoughtful, calm and kind 30-year-old. You want to open up to him, seek his advice. He is unfailingly attentive; he can talk a lot, but he is also a great listener. Within minutes of meeting me, he wants to know how old I was when I was prescribed glasses. “How did you feel? Did you feel bad?" His cousin and his closest friend, Shalu, has just recently learnt that she needs them. “She feels bad. Why don’t you tell her what it feels like? Do you still feel annoyed that you have to wear glasses?"
Now wait, give me a minute. I have a few questions. What does it mean to win the World Juniors? Is that a serious thing? Does it indicate a bright future in golf?
At this year’s World Juniors, there were a little over 1,200 children (divided into boys and girls, across six different age categories, starting from Under 6 and going up to 15-17) from 56 countries. And who have been past winners at this tournament, which has been held annually since 1968? Why, a certain Eldrick Woods crops up when you look at the list. It crops up six times. 1984, Eldrick Woods, 9-10. 1985, Eldrick Woods, 9-10. 1988, Eldrick Woods, 11-13. Here’s a story about Eldrick “Tiger" Woods you’ve probably not heard before. In 1984, little Woods, then 8, a goofy boy with big glasses, was getting ready to tee off when his mom came with a pack of tiger-striped T-shirts for everyone in the golfing prodigy’s entourage. Woods refused to wear it. He didn’t want to scare the other children.
“There is very much a progression," says Shiv Kapur, one of India’s most successful golfers, currently playing on the European Tour. “In golf, talent is spotted early, and if managed properly, you can start winning very early on and keep going up the ladder, step by step." Kapur began playing in tournaments when he was just 9. By 11, he was playing in international tournaments.
Yes, no one from India has ever won at the World Juniors, or come close—except for Shubham, who, before winning it this year, finished runners-up in 2013 and 2014. But Shubham’s story is far more than this. It is about where he comes from, where he can go from here; about class divides, about golf and whether it is elitist, and where it’s headed in India; about parenting and the nature of sport itself that now demands, across games, that if you want to be a champion on the global stage, you better start as soon as you graduate from crawling to walking. But first things first. How did Shubham get into golf?
He comes from a village called Israna in Haryana, an hour’s drive from Panipat on a newly laid highway. It is an old village, with weathered houses joined to each other and thin brick lanes dappled with sunlight threading their way through the buildings. Shubham’s family has been living in this village since at least his great great great grandfather’s time. Like most families in the village, the Jaglans are into wrestling. Shubham’s uncle Joginder Pal was an international Greco-Roman wrestler before he retired. When he was 5, Shubham was introduced to the village akhara. A couple of months later, a strange new thing came up a couple of kilometres from the village—a golf academy.
Singh was born to a farming family in a village near Sonepat, and while studying for an engineering degree, he also competed as a national track-and-field athlete. An injury cut his track career short and in 1995, while working in Delhi as a customs officer, he came across some golf magazines at a pavement shop. He picked up copies and devoured them. He was hooked. By 1999, Singh had quit his job and gone to the US for a degree in golf management and coaching.
A year later, he was back, working at the Delhi Golf Club (DGC) as an operations manager, waiting for his US work visa to come through. By 2001, Singh had emigrated to the US and was working as a golf coach. “But then I realized that you can make a lot more money working as a civil engineer in the US than as a golf coach—kind of the opposite of what happens in India," Singh says in a phone interview from the US. Soon, Singh had a roaring business building houses. He was playing golf regularly, and so were his children. Watching his pre-teen son and daughter play in children’s tournaments across the US, Singh itched to see this happen in India. In 2008, in partnership with US Kids Golf, a golf equipment manufacturer for children that sponsors age-group tournaments in the US, Singh started a company to introduce golf training in schools in India, and hold tournaments for children. It took off, and Singh began to build a golf course on a bit of land his sister owned near Israna. “It was to be a business, and some social entrepreneurship," Singh says. “I had friends in the nearby cities—Panipat, Sonepat—doctors and engineers who wanted to play golf. I thought it would be perfect to set up a 9-hole course, a driving range."
By 2010, the course was open, and Singh was also running an academy for children. This was when Shubham’s grandfather decided that the family had enough wrestlers, and enrolled Shubham at the academy.
“We knew nothing of golf," says Jagpal, Shubham’s father. “No one in the village knew anything about it. I told my father, you do what you want but you don’t have my support, and I will not be involved. If you want Shubham to play golf, you take him to the academy."
“I loved it!" Shubham says about his first days at the academy. “I wanted to play all the time. So, in the first week itself, I was picking up a ball and this guy, his name is also Shubham, he didn’t see me and he took a swing with the club and it hit me right here"—he points to his right eyebrow—“I bled a lot, I had to get five stitches."
So golf was more dangerous than wrestling?
“Huh—that I’m not sure..."
The second time the thought occurred to Jagpal was a couple of months later, when the academy shut down (“because I could not find a person to run it," Singh says).
“But even in that short time, I could see that Shubham had a wonderful natural game, and a strange amount of desire that you do not see in someone who is five-six years old," Singh says. He gave Shubham two sets of golf clubs, and told his father to keep his son in the game.
Jagpal was warming up to the idea. He laid a patch of grass on one side of the courtyard of his house, dug three holes in it, and Shubham had a putting green. He took Shubham to the farm fields in the mornings, and the boy had a driving range. He found another golf course nearby, inside the Haryana Police Academy campus at Madhuban, around 50km from Israna, and got permission to allow his boy to play there. Someone suggested that Shubham watch videos online to learn more about the game, so Jagpal got a computer. Together, they watched and learnt. By 2011, Shubham had begun to enter tournaments.
“And from then on, it was a completely different life," Shubham says. “Wake up at 3, 4 in the morning, get into the car, drive long distances to tournaments and then play 9 holes and come back. I won the second tournament I played in, in Noida. I hit an eagle!"
This was about the time that Nonita Lall Qureshi, a former top ladies golfer turned coach at the Delhi Golf Club, began to take notice. She was then one of the coaches for the New Delhi-based non-profit Golf Foundation, which sponsors young golfers.
“Part of my job was to scout for new talent, and I saw Shubham’s name pop up at a number of events," Qureshi says. “If he won, he was winning by 12 shots, 15 shots. So I asked some of my kids about where he came from, which club he played at...but nobody seemed to know anything about him. So I told them, the next time you play a tournament and he’s there, please get me a number."
“We played on the B course," Qureshi says, “and I was blown away. Blown away. I had not seen a six-year-old play with that kind of aplomb." Qureshi has been coaching since 1999, and there is hardly a Delhi golfer of note now who has not gone through the grind with her; even Rashid Khan, the top pro in India in 2014 and playing in the Asian Tour now, learnt his game from her. Qureshi knows talent when she sees it.
Now things began to move really quickly. Qureshi recommended that the Golf Foundation sign on Shubham immediately, and explore ways of moving the family to Delhi so that the boy could have access to better facilities and coaching. The Jaglans—mother Anjana, father Jagpal and son Shubham—made the move to Delhi. The DGC stepped in to give Shubham playing rights for free, and golf became the centre of their lives.
What does it mean then for an eight-year-old, a nine-year-old, a 10-year-old to be consumed by a sport, to be always travelling, competing, playing, practising?
“I’m supposed to be serious, yeah, I’m supposed to be serious," says the best little golfer in the world, nodding his head thoughtfully. “It’s always been in my mind. I was told all these stories about wrestling right from the start, how you really need to be hard-working. A thousand push-ups a day, 1,000 sit-ups a day, that’s crazy, obviously. Or drink a whole jug of curd just like that, or a whole cup of ghee. That’s so annoying! I never can do it, I don’t want to. How can you drink ghee just like that?"
“Kids in sport, or music, or dance...if you are doing it seriously, it will take up all your time," Qureshi says. “If you can’t compromise on education, and I’m saying you can’t, the only time left for you to pursue these things is your leisure time. Something’s got to give."
How does Shubham handle it? Jagpal says there is no pressure on his son. “He is just very hard-working on his own. He gets it from his mother. When in school, he does school work. When he is playing golf, he is playing golf."
When Shubham is on tour, his world is circumscribed by the tiny radius of the golf course and the hotel.
“We’ve been to America, to Scotland, Thailand, but we’ve never seen anything," Jagpal says. “No Disneyland, no water park, no Grand Canyon. At most, we went to Walmart to pick up some things."
“How many holes are left?" Shubham asked calmly.
“Two."
“Really? Then I won’t lose."
“Some 200 people were following us at that time," Jagpal says. “Shubham seemed unaware of that. He hit a birdie, a 35-foot slider birdie. The ball went curving, curving, curving, all the way for the win!"
What about when he is not doing well? “Nothing, there’s no problem," Jagpal says. “Take a deep breath, sip some water, carry on. If your game’s not clicking, it’s not clicking, there’s no magic to fix it. You will always lose more than you win in any sport, but you have to keep playing."
The Jaglan family has lived a peculiar life since it moved to Delhi in 2012. Jagpal gave up his sources of income—selling milk and vegetables—to settle into a tiny apartment. The first few months were hand-to-mouth, uncertain. Qureshi helped them out with some money for daily expenses. Shubham left his village school on the Golf Foundation’s assurance that he would be admitted to a Delhi school, but months passed and that did not happen.
Qureshi too was worried—she had seen too many of her students, and other golfers who came from poorer backgrounds, quit school to try and make it as a golfer. “I tell all my kids, the day you quit school, find another coach."
Yet Shubham was already being celebrated as a golf prodigy, appearing on television shows and being promoted heavily as the face of the Golf Foundation. It was during a TV show, more than six months after he had moved to the city, that he was offered a place in a Delhi school. Now, Shubham goes to school on a full scholarship, the DGC pays him roughly ₹ 2 lakh a year for living expenses, the US golf equipment manufacturer Ping sponsors his gear, and the Golf Foundation spends around ₹ 12 lakh a year on his tournament appearances. The Jaglan family lives off this. They have no time to work because all their time goes into managing Shubham’s life. It’s a serious gamble. There are still eight more years to go before Shubham can even think of turning pro.
“He is so young, what has he seen of the world?" Qureshi says. “In between now and when he turns 18, he will travel, meet people, receive an education. He may become a damn good golfer, or he may not. We don’t know. For example, he’s going to hit a few growth spurts between now and 18, and he will have to change his technique, his equipment, everything. How well will he cope with that?"
Then there’s always the matter of a burnout.
“He is a fearless boy," says Shiv Kapur. “He’s come up to me and said, ‘Can I play?’ But I worry about the amount of attention he is getting. When children get put under the spotlight like this, sometimes the fun gets sucked out of the game. I’ve seen a lot of people, some of them my contemporaries, burn out after starting off as a brilliant young player."
Shubham’s mother Anjana worries about it too. The day he won the World Juniors, Shubham called her and told her about it, and she was happy. It was late at night in Delhi, so after the call, Anjana went to sleep. The next day, Jagpal called her and said, “Have you seen the news? No? Just switch on the TV!"
“So I did," Anjana says. “And I went down and got some newspapers. And Shubham was in them, and he was on the news. It’s good in a way, but it’s also scary. You get anxious, these things go out of hand, they get very difficult to control."
Is Shubham a sign of change for golf in India? A.K. Singh, the director general of the Indian Golf Union, the apex body for the sport here, says Shubham is just the latest example of how more and more children are getting seriously into the sport.
“The signs are everywhere you look," he says. “The Order of Merit for the Indian Tour is full of players under 30. Six years back, we ran around 20 competitions for juniors. Now we have over 50. We get so many entries that we are thinking of introducing qualification rounds from next year."
On an average, 100-150 children participate in these competitions.
Yet, access to the game remains the biggest hurdle in the sport, and it’s not really about class divides. Golf in India is hardly as elite as it is made out to be. Since the beginning of pro golf in India roughly 30 years ago, a majority of the pros have come from economically weak backgrounds, and they continue to do so. Ali Sher, a New Delhi-based golfer, was the first Indian pro to win the country’s premier event, the Indian Open, way back in 1991. He started off as a caddie. S.S.P. Chowrasia, the son of a greenskeeper at the Royal Calcutta Golf Club (RCGC), is now ranked No.3 on the Asian Tour.
Golf is an expensive sport of course, no matter where in the world you are. A good set of clubs costs upwards of ₹ 1 lakh. Then there are caddie fees and playing fees, and the sheer amount of time needed to play a full game. “It is, by its very nature, not as simple as playing a game of football or cricket in the nearby park," says Singh.
“The real problem is not where you come from," says Kapur, “but the lack of public golf courses in India. Almost all our courses are in private clubs like the DGC, so obviously you can’t just walk in and play there. If you look at any of the strong golfing countries—the US, for example—they have hundreds of public courses."
Even the St Andrews Links in Scotland, the “home of golf", one of the oldest courses in the world, and home to The Open Championship, is a public course. India has just over 200 golf courses, but only two of these—the Qutab Golf Course in New Delhi and the Kharghar Valley Golf Course in Navi Mumbai—are public, according to the Professional Golf Tour of India.
But who will build public courses? The size of courses varies from 50-120 acres. In 50 acres, you can have 50 football pitches, or 800 tennis courts.
“The people who have land and have lots of golf courses is the army, and civilian access is denied here," Qureshi says. “Perhaps the government should look into it and open it up? I am all for broadbasing golf, going to schools, holding clinics, but once you have these kids interested in the sport, where do they go? Shubham’s got it set, but how many Shubhams are out there who have no place to go and even try their hand?"
Shubham’s got it set on a golf course, and he is itching to get back on the greens, but right now he wants to pick guavas. There’s a small tree next to the little putting strip his father had improvised for him. The whole family is out in the courtyard for a bit of sun. Shubham’s mother is doing the dishes. His grandmother and some of his aunts are having a raucous conversation. Shubham and Shalu get busy looking for the perfect fruit. “This one!" He hands me a tiny green guava, just about ripe. “This one will be so sweet!"
He loves guavas. He also loves drinking milk straight from a cow’s udder. “Natural sweet milk! It’s hot, it’s sweet, and it tickles your mouth when it hits in a spray. I love doing that. I don’t get to do that now. You should do it. You’ve never done it?"
He loves snow. He saw it for the first time last winter when he was in Nohradhar, a village in Himachal Pradesh where his mother comes from. “I played a lot in the snow, I ate a lot of snow, I threw a lot of snow."
He loves eating mangoes, and he loves the colour red, and he likes the god Hanuman. He loves the story of how Hanuman thought the red setting sun was a mango and ate it and the whole world went dark. Hanuman has attitude.
“In basketball they say, ‘The king’s in the house, lights off’, and that’s what Hanuman did!"
I don’t get it. He is patient with me. “It means that the king has come, the best of the best, and everyone else is useless. They should go home, turn off the lights, just go to sleep.
“The king’s in the house. Lights off. Get it?"
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