When you think of golf, a vivid image of pristine courses, sturdy kits and even ice rinks might play in your head.
However, challenging the notion of golf being a posh sport confined to grassy courses are some of the poorest slums in Mumbai that have flipped around the rutted and unpaved gullies into a makeshift golf course.
Devoid of the usual niceties and polite clapping from watchers, the gullies-turned-courses are a bustling conundrum of residents bustling in and out of their houses, buses travelling and tuk-tuks honking.
Slum golf, a version of the game using homemade clubs and balls, makes use of the cracks and crevices in the Chembur locality of the hustling, bustling city for its course and small divots in the ground as its holes.
Stemming out of the need for making the sport accessible and free of upper echelon notions, the makeshift game was created in 2000 in Mumbai by Suresh Mehboobani and others who worked as caddies at the Bombay Presidency Golf Club (BPGC) at a time when they were not permitted to play for free.
In a cricket-frenzied nation that considers all other sports secondary, Mehboobani hopes that his version of the sport of golf will make it more familiar, especially to his 6-year-old daughter, Asmi. He introduced her to the game when she was just five years old after she saw her father playing on the streets and expressed her interest in ‘hitting the ball’.
Unlike the general devotion towards the typical bat and ball sport, Mehboobani’s was always fascinated by small, white ball and long, thin golf clubs. On his route to and from school, he walked past a golf club and upon watching through the fence as the members drove, chipped and putted, Mehboobani was hooked. He picked up a job at the BPGC caddying to sate his passion for the sport. But when he wasn’t permitted to play at the members-only club for free, he came up with another method to play — reimagining the Chembur slums as a golf course, with tee positions varying from on the floor to the tops of buildings. After some trial and error, Mehboobani and others found they could use waste material from buildings to fashion clubs – hammering the end to form the face of the club – and use cylinder pipes as grips, as the Timesnewsexpress describes.
Although Mehboobani and his colleagues have found a more traditional locale to play golf, he’s still hopeful that slum golf can be an introductory way into a sport that, as he himself knows, can often be inaccessible.
According to CNN, the BGPC now allows caddies to play on Mondays which according to Mehboobani was a result of a video of Ashmi playing golf going viral.
He hopes that his daughter’s early start on the streets will propel her to success later in her life.
‘‘We [hope] to make her the ladies champion because if the club has supported her this much, she is likely to show good results in the future. She will make the club proud, and she will make the name of her mother and father shine as well.”
— Mehboobani
Urban golf has always been a familiar concept across different parts of the world. While the stereotypical image of the golf domain will always be associated with green fairways and smooth courses over the concrete roads and roofs, slum golf has undeniably opened doors to a sport previously unattainable to many in Mumbai. From gullies to the golf course, the slum golf saga is one for the books!