by LAL GUNESEKERA

K. Prabhakaran is his name. He is a budding golfer and has no connections with LTTE supremo Prabhakaran. Golfer Prabhakaran is the talk of the town, both here in Colombo and in Nuwara Eliya in particular where he established his name as a golfer with a fine display to bag the Sri Lanka Amateur Open Championship which was worked off for the first time on stroke-play system on his ‘home’ course last week.

He won by 4 strokes over the strong favourite Lalith Kumara, who had a miserable fourth-round score of 80 after he even equalled the course record (65) in the third-round and scores of 73 and 66 in the first and second rounds. Prabhakaran had scores of 72, 70, 66 and 72. Both Prabhakaran and Lalith Kumara (captain of team) together with Tissa Chandradasa and Amarapathma who finished in third and fourth places respectively at Nuwara Eliya left yesterday (Saturday) to play at the Bangladesh Amateur Open Championship in Dhaka on December 11, 12, 13 and 14. This too is a stroke-play competition.

Speaking to the Sunday Observer Prabhakaran, said that he returned from Abu Dhabi after a two-year stint as Course Marshall at the Abu Dhabi Golf Club in July. He said that he did not get the opportunity of playing frequently in Abu Dhabi (he figured in only two tournaments in the two years) and decided to return to his motherland. The Sri Lanka Open Amateur Championship was his first big success.

Prabhakaran, who is now 23-years-old, started golf when he was only eight years of age. As usual, where these caddies are concerned, their home was near the NEGC and seeing the “mahathayas” playing this sport, he too got interested. He studied at St. Xavier’s in Nuwara Eliya, but only upto Year nine and since his first tournament in 1992, has been gradually climbing the ladder of success, by winning all the titles for offer at the NEGC for the Caddies. He won at the Victoria GC too in 2001 and was richly awarded with a Honda motorcycle.

His late father was involved in the vegetable trade, while his mother worked as a farm hand.

Prabhakaran’s elder brother, Savundraraja (24) too played golf in Sri Lanka, but he too is now serving as a marshall at the Abu Dhabi Golf Club. His younger sister, Dharshini (13) is yet a student at a convent in Nuwara Eliya. Prabhakaran, who is employed at the NEGC Pro Shop is engaged to Krishnakumari who has qualified to enter university.

Prabhakaran said that he gets a lot of assistance from members of the NEGC who had even donated a set of “clubs” for his use and other equipment needed. Even the Captain of the NEGC, Sunil Jayakoddy, has helped him a lot, and was very pleased that Prabhakaran won the Sri Lanka title at Nuwara Eliya where Jayakody is the captain. Coincidentally, when the last Sri Lankan to win the title – Anura Rohana (who has now turned professional) won at the RCGC, the RCGC captain was Shiran de Soysa with Jayakoddy serving as President of SLGU, and when Prabhakaran won at Nuwara Eliya, Jayakoddy is the captain of NEGC and De Soysa the President of SLGU.

Prabhakaran’s ambitions – to bring honour to the country and not let down the persons who have been helping him right along.

Mithun Perera hates golf. He is passionate about gathering stamps. He proudly boasts of having collected roughly 50,000 stamps from all over the world by visiting post offices of every city he travels to for tournaments.

He has also stamped his class in the sport inspite of his dislike for it.
“I hate golf,” the short and stocky Sri Lankan adds, rather unconvincingly. “I play just to earn my living. I love football. I used to play a lot. By playing golf, I have become like a football.”
For someone with such loathing for the sport, Perera has been taking giant strides and almost single-handedly brought Sri Lanka on the map of pro golf.

He did that again on Thursday, when he equalled the course record at the Bombay Presidency Golf Club, outclassing some of the top Indian pros in the process. His score of 8-under 62 in Round Two of the Louis Philippe Cup, an IPL-style competition, helped his team Navratna Ahmedabad leapfrog to the top of the table in the eight-team tournament.

Sri Lankan golfers have been making waves on the Indian tour of late. Two of them feature in the top five of the Order of Merit and Perera, second on the table behind Anirban Lahiri, has been leading the charge. But the journey hasn’t been a smooth one. Because the country was embroiled in ethnic strife, there was hardly any time for sport. Golf in particular.

Impact of civil war

Perera was 11 when the sport felt the biggest impact of LTTE’s activities. “I was very young and can’t recall the tournament’s name. In 1997, Sri Lanka was to host its first professional tournament; equivalent to the Avantha Masters in India,” he says. “But on the eve of the tournament, the city (Colombo) was rocked by bomb blasts. The tournament was cancelled and the sponsors, who had invested a lot of money, never returned.”

After that incident, sponsors were hard to come by and professional golf never really became popular. “We did not have proper roads, how could we dream of having golf courses? Sponsors too stayed away from the sport, it was too big a financial risk,” Perera says.

Sri Lanka has only three golf courses, — in Colombo, Kandy and Nuwara Eliya. The players are amateurs and since golf clubs are not affordable, most have learnt the art by using makeshift equipment made of palm tree branches.

In such circumstances, the 27-year-old has been fighting an uphill battle and following the footsteps of his father, Nandasena, who is considered to be among the all-time greats in his country.
He depended on donations from individual golf enthusiasts and started competing on the Indian tour. He became the first Sri Lankan to have multiple wins on the