Nine years ago, a frail 11-year-old left an obscure Uttar Pradesh village where electricity was a curiosity and found himself in Chandigarh, hoping to find a better life. Few could have imagined where that journey would end. Last week, 20-year-old former caddy Harinder Gupta became the fourth amateur in the country, and the first this young, to win a title in the Hero Honda Indian Open Golf Tournament.Where Gupta’s story begins, in a little-known village called Gorahbazar in Gorakhpur, golf is a Greek word. Gupta remembers the dark nights spent in the light of flickering candles and the long days that revolved around grazing cattle. While he did attend school—in a ramshackle building—his favourite pastime used to be riding his buffaloes.Then came the shift to Kishangarh near Chandigarh. Just 3 km away was the Chandigarh Golf Club, a favourite haunt of the city’s elite. Many boys of Gupta’s age in his poor neighbourhood would caddy at the club, and he joined them.Fate too played a role. While his brother, who is a vegetable vendor, wanted him to study hard and take up a government job, he had to drop out as his family couldn’t afford the fees. ‘‘I was a student of Class VI in my village, but here I had to start afresh from Class II. My brother wanted me to study hard.but destiny had something else in store for me. I could not complete my studies.’’Seven years on, he was ranked among the top three in the country in the under-18 category in golf. In a game with a pronounced elitist bias, he had yanked off the class barrier. Today he’s ranked third among the seniors. ONGC has given him a job, as a junior sports executive.The Hero Honda Chandigarh Open that he won last week included the cream of Indian professionals like Harmeet Khalon, Gaurav Ghei, Ashok Kumar, Mukesh Kumar and Vijay Kumar. Apart from winning the title, Gupta achieved another rare feat at the meet:On the second day of the event, he scored a hole in one (in cricketing terms, it is as good as scoring six fours in an over).Golf, Gupta says, had him hooked from the word go. ‘‘So enamoured was I that I got hold of an iron rod, bent it and carved something resembling a club out of it. As luck would have it, I soon found a broken club. Attaching it to a pipe, I started off my game with it,’’ he remembers.Impressed with his talent, the players for whom he used to caddy began to encourage him. Soon, he found himself playing with them. In 1999 he was ranked no 1 in the under-18 category. It was a ranking he maintained the next year as well.
