New Delhi: It took a long time coming, but eight years since he turned professional, Pukhraj Singh Gill finally has an international win under his belt. The Ludhiana-born golfer won the ADT Players Championship at the Saujana Golf and Country Club in Shah Alam, Malaysia earlier this month in a thrilling three-way playoff featuring Filipino Sean Ramos and Thai teenager Thanawin Lee.
To Gill and to those acquainted with his recent run of form, the win doesn’t come as a total surprise. In December last year, he won the IGPL Order of Merit. Then came the International Series in Singapore in April where his T-26 was the joint best Indian finish alongside Gaganjeet Bhullar. The win in Malaysia came a fortnight later.
“I was quite confident going into the playoff. I trusted my long game. However, after leading the field for better part of the tournament, I shouldn’t have let the game get to the playoffs,” remembered Gill, who blew hot and cold for better part of the final day allowing Ramos and Lee to catch up.
“It’s the first win of my professional career and it has given me the confidence to do bigger things,” he said. That includes “winning a major someday and getting into the top-50 in the world.”
“It’s not impossible. Past few days have shown we have the right genes, so that argument is out of the window,” Gill said, referring to Briton’s Aaron Rai’s — of Indian lineage — epochal win at the PGA Championship.
That said, Gill is part of the generation of domestic pros that has proved to be Indian golf’s glorious false dawn. Shubhankar Sharma, Viraj Madappa, Yuvraj Sandhu, Manu Gandas, Honey Baisoya, Karandeep Kochhar, and Gill turned professional within a few years of each other and seemed primed to take the baton from the pedigreed SSP Chawrasia, Shiv Kapur and Anirban Lahiri. None, barring Shubhankar, could really graduate.
“It’s definitely an opportunity lost, considering the talent these guys had. A combination of injuries and form has played its part, but all these guys are still around and doing well domestically. There’s a lot more money in India now which has kept a lot of pros from going abroad. The uptick is that golfers typically mature in their late 20s-early 30s. That’s when you truly begin to understand your game. All of us are entering that stage and I hope things will change,” he reasoned.
For Gill, the understanding arrived about two seasons back. He started relying on his long game, began spending more time in the gym, and found the knack for the right equipment. He has not had a coach for at least two seasons now, a decision he feels has helped him take more ownership of his results.
“Post Covid, as I began playing more competitions, I got to know more about my game. It was a period of self-discovery, and since I didn’t have a permanent coach back then, I enjoyed the process even more.” Gill has since stuck to his no-coach, no-permanent-caddy policy. “At the end of the day, golf is an individual sport and you are responsible for your results. But, that’s just my recipe and so far it has worked for me.”
Gill is next headed to Morocco for three events, starting with the $160,000 IGPL Rising Stars (May 28–31), a joint-sanctioned event with the Asian Development Tour. That will be followed by the $500,000 Asian Tour’s Bharath Classic and the $2,000,000 International Series Morocco (June 11–14). “I’ll be playing a few evennts on the main Asian Tour as well, including the Internatioanl Series India in Bengaluru in October along with a bunch of ADT events. The year-end goal will be to finish inside top-10 of ADT to secure a season card for 2027,” Gill said.
