The first thing that Sreepadrenu said he’ll do when C Muniyappa returns home with the Indian Open trophy is to invite the player over for tea and tell the latter that he’ll beat him hollow in their next golf round together.

“And he’s going to laugh heartily at that,” Sreepadrenu, the Karnataka Golf Association (KGA) member who Muniyappa used to caddy for years ago, told The Indian Express from Bangalore on Sunday.

After his maiden Asian Tour win at the DLF Golf & Country Club, Muniyappa spoke of how he learnt his early golf practising with just two clubs. “I started out working as a forecaddie at the KGA when I was seven, working for Re 1,” the 32-year-old said. “But I saw that a lot of caddies had turned professional as players, and I thought of doing the same. I practised watching the members play, and would play with a seven iron and a two iron given by Sreepadrenu.”

Muniyappa turned professional a few years after he started playing, picking up in consistency on the domestic tour before a sudden spurt in the 2007-08 season, where he had 12 top-ten finishes in the 17 tournaments he played, and the worst finish through the season was a tie for the 16th place. It was capped by his first ever professional win — the Toyota Altis Open in his hometown. The international bug had still not hit though.

“We would keep telling him to play in Asia, but he wouldn’t,” fellow Bangalore player Anirban Lahiri, who also travels with Muniyappa on the Asian Tour, said.

... contd.