Daily Times

KARACHI: The 1st Pakistan Golf Federation (PGF) Development Tour concluded at Airmen Golf Club here yesterday after three rounds of competitive golf with top honours falling in the lap of Mohammad Imran of Defence Raya Golf Club. Out of a total of 100 participating second tier professional golfers of the country, Imran stood out as the outstanding one with rounds of 71, 77 and 76 and a three days aggregate score of 224. This development golf tour has been introduced by the PGF for the first time to support the second tier of golf professionals who are otherwise struggling in their golfing careers. To make life a little easier for them, the top 40 ranked golf professionals of Pakistan are not eligible to take part in these development tour events and this gives an opportunity to the slightly less skilled ones, who do not enjoy a high technical rating, to emerge well in this category of competition and add to their livelihood earnings.

In this first championship, while the glorified one was Imran, others who did well were Tahir Nasim (Lahore Gymkhana), Mudasir Iqbal (Karachi), Zahir Shah (Peshawar), Mohammad Shahzad (Lahore Garrison) and Mohammad Afzal (Okara). All these five contenders were bunched together at the second position at a similar aggregate score of 228. Some others who came up with good scores were Shahid Haneef (Lahore Gymkhana) and Arshad Rasheed (Karachi). These two finished the three rounds competition at an aggregate score of 230. Asad IA Khan, PGF vice president, said that the development tour events would be rotated amongst all provincial golf associations while the first one was conducted by the Sind Golf Association. The prize money for first event was one million rupees.

Published in Daily Times, August 2^nd 2018.