Home club’s snobbery angers Pakistan’s best golfer
Champion’s ‘lowly origin’ sees him banned from deluxe clubhouse used by the country’s elite
SHABBIR IQBAL used to watch in awe as smartly-dressed businessmen teedoff at the Islamabad Golf Club, an oasis of greenery just 200 yards – a respectable shot with a driver – from his tiny concrete home in a ramshackle village abutting the course.
Mr Iqbal learnt fast. Copying the strokes of the Pakistani elite, he rose from ball-boy, to caddie, and finally to an unparalleled mastery of the links: now 39, he has won 140 tournaments in a career that has seen him become the most celebrated golfer in the country.
And yet it is Mr Iqbal’s origins that lie at the heart of an ugly dispute between him and the notoriously exclusive club where he took his first swing.
According to a petition filed in the Islamabad High Court last week, Mr Iqbal, along with four other professional golfers, has been barred from entering the course’s deluxe, three-storey clubhouse, where until last year he hobnobbed freely with paying members. Another of the five, Azhar Shah Bukhari, who was Mr Iqbal’s coach, has even been forbidden from setting foot on the greens by the Islamabad Golf Club management.
This amounts to “social and class discrimination”, according to the complaint filed by the two men’s lawyer. Neither was offered a reason as to why the privileges granted to them as honorary members were withdrawn.
“It is widely accepted,” the petition reads, that the five professionals who grew up in poverty have been banned “due to perceived low social status”. Their history serving as caddies meant “senior bureaucrats…consider it below their dignity to sit and eat next to the same table [as them]”.
The Islamabad Club – which grants full membership only to those who have some combination of a top gov- ernment job, family connections, or a great deal of money – last year incited the wrath of locals by putting up signs warning “maids and guards” not to approach the facilities.
Its subsidiary golf club spreads across 142 hectares overlooking a large lake, and the nearby villages in which Mr Iqbal and Mr Bukhari were born have produced many of the golf staff who tend to it. “I was so impressed by the rich people and the amazing place as a child,” Mr Iqbal told The Sunday Telegraph, fresh off the green Karachi-CNS Championship, where he tops the leaderboard. “It created this desire in me to become a golfer. But some of the members are jealous.”
Mr Bukhari, 42, a US-certified coach, said: “They don’t want to see poor people getting up.”
The history section of the club website still boasts of its connection to the “champions”. Mr Iqbal hopes his petition will force management to rethink, and once more serve him food alongside the elite who still see his background as an insurmountable handicap.