Jeev Milkha Singh and Golf Take Over India
It is always a good thing when business and sports mix, money gets pumped in one way advertising gets sent the other and the entire sport and brand being advertised gets elevated. In a place like India where sports equals big bucks, major corporations have already flexed their significant financial muscles and have made serious inroads into the Indian economy. Major global brands are already being sold in India and a lot of them are being produced in India as well, not to the level of China but still it is a significant amount.
There is an ugly side to money being pumped into sports and that is the fact that it usually leads to matches being fixed and allegations of corruption flying around. We saw this firsthand recently with the decline of the IPL; the T20 league of India which was doing phenomenally well, maybe too well, has fallen flat on its face because of serious corruption allegations and even money laundering allegations.
It was so severe that the IPL chief Lalit Modi was suspended and a member of the government resigned. This ugly side of sports and business colliding has led to many sports in India seeing a decline in ratings and popularity, which paves the way for a whole raft of new sports to emerge from the shadows.
One of those sports is golf. With India’s economy experiencing unprecedented levels of growth every year, a burgeoning middle class has emerged. With the rise of the middle class the rich of the society have gotten richer and richer. Being rich in a country like India where the rich and powerful control almost everything, the tastes of rich Indians have evolved.
They don’t partake in cricket or hockey anymore. Polo will always be around as a rich person’s sport, but they needed something new, something fresh and exciting that would let them say this new sport is ours. They needed something that would be out of the reach of the average Indian and they found their sport; golf. Golf is something that costs a lot of money to enjoy, the equipment to play the sport itself is very expensive and out of the reach of most, then there is the fact that usually to play golf you have to be a member of some snotty club which has a golf course in it. That again is out of reach for most average Indians, except for the fact that the poor can continue to serve the rich as caddies. That is all that was missing in this equation, the rich couldn’t be seen carrying their own clubs around and so why not hire poor people who will work for peanuts and will be very happy doing it too.
So golf has slowly become more and more popular in India. “The most well-known face in the sport is Jeev Milkha Singh, the highest-ranked Indian golfer and the first to break into the top 50 in the world,” (BBC). with Jeev Milkha Singh becoming a famous face in India it will encourage more of the younger generation to take up the sport and will lead to more Indian players coming to the international golfing arena very soon. “Unlike traditional golf markets where the sport is promoted mainly among the middle-aged and older population, golf in India is generating a huge following among young people and children from middle-class families. These are people who can afford to pay for expensive lessons and are keen to take it up as a career,” (BBC).
Now all the sport needs in India is the corporate market to sit up and take notice, with a huge number of golfers being produced in India every year it will become a very lucrative market very soon. And as more sponsors get involved in the sport the bigger the sport’s reach will become and it will suddenly have mass appeal amongst a very wide stretch of the population. It might even be that in the next few years people will see Jeev Milkha Singh holding a cola drink in his hand on a huge billboard instead of a Bollywood star and people will be saying Tendulkar, who’s he?
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