Shashi, Sonam top golfers
Hyderabad’s Shashidhar Reddy and Sonam Chugh, representing Hyderabad team Ramesh Swiss Watch, emerged champions at the 10th annual TAKE Solutions World Corporate Golf Challenge National Final held at Glenmarie Golf & Country Club at Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia.
Both Shashidhar and Sonam will participate as the corporate team from India at the World Championship of Corporate Golf, to be played in Portugal in July.
Among other players at the National Final was former Indian cricket captain Kapil Dev who, with his teammate Deepak Gupta, represented Delhi’s Dev & Dev Associates. The duo finished a few points behind the top three teams.
Speaking on his struggles on the greens, Kapil said: “It just wasn’t my day, but such wellplanned tournaments are rare and this is one of the only golf events each year I really look forward to,” he said.
In a hotly-contested final round, 26 golfers representing 13 corporate teams from various cities, all winners from three regional qualifiers held in Delhi and NCR, Mumbai and Pune and Bengaluru, competed for the right to represent India in the World Finals against teams from around 30 different countries.
Shashidhar (4 handicap) scored 29 points while his partner Sonam, playing with a handicap of 5, scored an equal number of points as they emerged the best of the lot, with 58 points.
Bengaluru team, Garden City, comprising David D’Souza, a scratch golfer (28 points) and Sagar Muthappa (30 points, 10 handicap) scored an equal number of points but finished second on the basis of a higher aggregate handicap.
Sonam is the first woman to qualify for the World Championship. Reacting to her win, she said: “I am so excited to go to Portugal. The rules and scoring format were really fair which gave ladies an equal chance of winning.”
The teams who were seen in action were Ramesh Swiss Watch, KGA 2, DasaPrakash Group and Garden City from the Bengaluru leg; Dev & Dev Associates, Swiss Military, Prime Tree Capital, CPC Group and Rampur Fertilizers from Delhi and NCR; Siemens, Websym, Oxford Group and Infosys from Mumbai and Pune.