By Rahul Banerji
Weeks shy of heading into his first senior tournament, Jeev Milkha Singh will make a rare appearance at a Tata Steel PGTI event in Kolkata.
Starting Tuesday, Jeev will tee off at the Players Championship at the Tollygunge Club in a top-quality field heading into next week’s DGC Open, an Asian Tour event.
The revered ‘Tolly’ will host the fourth event of the 2022 Tata Steel PGTI season offering a prize purse of Rs. 50 lakh and has drawn a field of 132 including 129 professionals and three amateurs.
The stellar field features some of the biggest names in Indian professional golf.
Besides Jeev, S.S.P. Chawrasia, Rahil Gangjee, Udayan Mane, and Rashid Khan are all in the fray.
Also in the line-up are Khalin Joshi, Viraj Madappa, Ajeetesh Sandhu, Chikkarangappa S., defending champion Karandeep Kochhar and PGTI Order of Merit leader Kshitij Naveed Kaul, to name a few.
Jeev will be playing a professional event in Kolkata for the first time since 2016.
Historic result
In the previous PGTI Players Championship at Tolly in 2016, Karandeep Kochhar, while still an amateur, created history by becoming the youngest player to win on the PGTI at the age of 17 years and 163 days.
That outcome gave him the honour of becoming the first Indian amateur to win on the PGTI.
The overseas players competing are Sri Lankans Mithun Perera, Anura Rohana, N Thangaraja and Vijitha Bandara and Md Zamal Hossain Mollah and Badal Hossain from Bangladesh.
Besides SSP, Rahil Gangjee and Viraj Madappa, the other prominent Kolkata-based professionals in the field are Shankar Das, Feroz Ali Mollah, Sunit Chowrasia, Divyanshu Bajaj and Mohammad Sanju.
The three Kolkata-based amateurs participating are Rohan Shroff, Samridh Sen and Rahul Batra.
“We are delighted to host such champion golfers at our club,” said Tollygunge Club president Joydeep Datta Gupta.
“This will provide our golfers, particularly juniors, the inspiration to aspire to be champions. It will also motivate many more of our members to take up golf.”
Added Tollygunge Club golf captain Gaurav Ghosh,“We are very pleased to host the Players Championship which will be the first PGTI event to be staged at Tollygunge Club in two years.
“The tournament promises to be a great spectacle for our club members with India’s top golfing stars teeing it up. We’re confident the professionals will enjoy the excellent playing conditions.”
Also read: Kaul eases to Mujib Borsho Chattogram Open win to lead Order of Merit
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