Lost golf balls are lucrative business
Vasantha Arora
R

Punjab cricket on upward swing
Sushil Kapoor
The Punjab Cricket Association (PCA), the apex body responsible for managing the game in the state of Punjab with its headquarters at the world famous PCA Stadium, Mohali, is all set to provide the latest equipment and infrastructure to all its affiliated district units to ensure that the players get the feel of the best facilities when playing in their own backyards.

Slump in football exports
Ravi Dhaliwal
The Jalandhar-based football manufacturing industry, which accounts for more than 90 per cent of football exports, has been caught in a quagmire as a non-government organisation (NGO) has brought the multi-million dollar industry to its knees by alleging that child labour is rife in the industry.

Where have these swimmers gone?
Qaiser Mohammad Ali
As India prepares for next month’s Asian Swimming Championships in China, a quartet that could have earlier garnered a fair amount of medals will be sorely missed.

Lost golf balls are lucrative business
Vasantha Arora

Retrieving lost golf balls from ponds and rivers is a lucrative business in Florida, USA.

The pond balls, as they are often called, are recycled and resold to golfers via discount stores and the Internet. The reconditioning and reselling of used balls is a $200-million-a-year industry, according to two golf retail industry associations estimates.

Two enterprising young men, who discovered the "white gold" have now made it their business to don scuba gear and dive deep into the murky, slimy, alligator-infested ponds and rivers, filled with golf course pesticide and fertiliser runoff, to find the lost balls.

These pond balls sell at retail for as little as 25 cents each or as much as $3 for a Titleist Pro V1, which costs more than $55 a dozen when new, according to a New York Times report.

Jimmy Lantz, a professional golf ball diver, starts his day early, plunging into a dozen ponds or channels on an average Florida golf course, pawing the silt-covered bottoms and the rocky ledges with bare hands.

Eight hours in these muddy waters might yield as many as 10,000 golf balls, it is said.

Lantz (30), and his diving partner, Greg Siwek, 36, began their own business of retrieving golf balls 18 months ago.

Called the Golf Ball Outlet Company, the two have chalked out a precise five-year business plan, which includes opening a golf ball store next year.

This year Lantz and Siwek expect to recover a million of the approximately 300 million golf balls lost annually on American golf courses.

All these balls are generally retrieved by amateurs and professionals nationwide, from 10-year-olds getting into the ponds barefoot to those living next to golf courses who scour the nearby ponds with clam rakes at night to large corporations that hire dozens of divers and fill airplane hangers with golf balls waiting to be shipped.

A Times report quoted Jim Helm to say that "as golf has gotten bigger, it’s pulled in a diverse group of divers." Helm is a former golf ball diver who now owns National Golf Inc., a Fort Lauderdale company that recycles balls.

"A long time ago, it attracted the gamblers and drinkers. They were the kind of guys who, as soon as they found 20,000 balls and got a little money in their pocket, we wouldn’t see them for a while. That’s changed, but it still attracts a strange breed."

This is also so because the job is perilous. While a brush with an alligator or a crocodile cannot be ruled out at least in Florida, the real danger is drowning.

In Florida alone in the last decade, the state has recorded a handful of drowning deaths involving golf ball divers.

"Some people freak out down there," Siwek said. "It’s not like diving in the ocean or a freshwater pond. You can’t see, and fish and other stuff keep bumping into you. Even experienced guys start to panic."

The balls are cleaned of dirt and grime with a liquid formula which Lantz and Siwek keep secret, a common practice since everyone in the recycled golf ball business believes he has the best method.

Most professional golf ball divers can make in the range of $50,000 annually if they work at it year round, five days a week. If they can pull in a million balls a year, they are in the elite category, earning perhaps $70,000, the Times report said. IANS

Punjab cricket on upward swing
Sushil Kapoor

The Punjab Cricket Association (PCA), the apex body responsible for managing the game in the state of Punjab with its headquarters at the world famous PCA Stadium, Mohali, is all set to provide the latest equipment and infrastructure to all its affiliated district units to ensure that the players get the feel of the best facilities when playing in their own backyards. The PCA has the distinct advantage of having apart from the international Mohali stadium, the Burlton Park Stadium at Jalandhar, Gandhi Grounds, Amritsar, Dhruv Pandove Cricket Stadium, Patiala and the Sector 16 Stadium at Chandigarh which allows the luxury to the Punjab players to practice in top-class conditions throughout the year.

The efforts of the PCA to provide the best infrastructure has resulted in cricket growing at the grassroot levels. Cricketers at the under 14, under 17 , under 19 and the senior levels have competition at the inter-district level on regular basis before they are pitted against other states in the tournaments run by the BCCI. In between the tournaments, regular coaching and conditioning camps at the district centres along with centralised coaching at the PCA headquarter at Mohali have given a lot of confidence and teeth to the Punjab team in the various age groups.

Punjab’s Ranji Trophy team has been reaching the last four in the National Championship for the past two years running and Punjab has given four talented players, Dinesh Mongia, Yuvraj Singh, Harbhajan Singh and Reetinder Singh Sodhi to the Indian squad. The first three of them are in the present Indian team in England. Apart from this Vikram Rathore and Pankaj Dharmani have donned Indian colours on earlier tours Munish Sharma and Ravneet Ricky played in the under 19 World Cup winning squad in Sri Lanka Chandan Madan in the under-19 World Cup 2002 and medium pacer Vineet Sharma is the latest addition to the list of Punjab players who have played for India A against Sri Lanka this year. Apart from this Sarandeep Singh and Harvinder Singh who are now playing for Delhi and Railways had their international baptism as members of the Punjab team.

To ensure that the Punjab cricketers get to play on bouncier tracks and help the state to produce more fast bowlers, the PCA is laying hard and green wickets under the watchful eye of Mr Daljit Singh, a cricketer of repute who is on the BCCI pitch committee. The facilities for players is being upgraded in the coming years under the watchful eyes of Mr M.P. Pandove, the Secretary of the PCA, who himself has captained the state team in the early 70s.

He and Mr I.S. Bindra, President of the PCA, are always putting their heads together to see that the latest equipment and technology is available to the players of the state. With this in mind the PCA has decided to send its Ranji Trophy team for a 20-day tour of Kenya in July-August to play against the Kenyan national side and also to play a few side games. The PCA is also hosting the All-India JP Atray Memorial Cricket Tournament which is slated in the third week of September, just before the start of the Ranji season, where the top 10 teams of the country will be competing, including two teams of the PCA.

Slump in football exports
Ravi Dhaliwal

The Jalandhar-based football manufacturing industry, which accounts for more than 90 per cent of football exports, has been caught in a quagmire as a non-government organisation (NGO) has brought the multi-million dollar industry to its knees by alleging that child labour is rife in the industry.

The industry is facing the wrath of a New Delhi-based NGO, Global March Against Child Labour, which has alleged that nearly 10,000 children are ‘illegally’ engaged in the sewing of footballs.

However, Mr Navdeep Singh, Project Manager of the Sports Goods Foundation of India (SGFI), alleges that the NGO is playing into the hands of vested interests which can be gauged from the fact that it was the same NGO, which just before the 1998 France World Cup, had released a report titled ‘A Sporting Chance; tackling child labour in India’s sports goods industry’. Buyers like Adidas, Mitre and Umbro had bitterly questioned the ethics of involving children in the stitching of football. One overseas giant, Puma, even took its business out of India.

Mr Navdeep Singh countered that last year too, it was the same NGO that had released a report titled — ‘Kick child labour out of football’ which again had an enormous impact on the industry.

The SGFI claims that the NGO wakes up when any soccer mega event is just around the corner.

The Geneva-based SGS India Private Limited, the world’s largest independent monitoring organisation, has regularly been sending teams to Jalandhar to get first hand information about child labour. The SGS has recently reported that just 166 children were engaged in the sewing of footballs and out of them only 16 were not going to schools.

Football exports, which constitute 44 per cent of all the country’s sports exports, plummeted by nearly 23 per cent. Whatever be the assertions of both the SGFI and the NGO, exports have definitely hit rock bottom and the SGFI is doing its best to improve the sagging image of the industry.

Where have these swimmers gone?
Qaiser Mohammad Ali

As India prepares for next month’s Asian Swimming Championships in China, a quartet that could have earlier garnered a fair amount of medals will be sorely missed.

Officials lament the loss of these talented swimmers — Nisha Millet, J. Abhijith, Sangeeta Rani Puri and Supra Singhal — who brooked no competition at the South Asian and national levels in the late 1990s.

All of them left the scene abruptly, causing immense frustration in the Swimming Federation of India (SFI).

Millet was the first Indian swimmer to qualify for the Olympic Games, Abhijith specialised in the backstroke and breaststroke while Puri’s forte was the backstroke. Singhal surprised everyone when she turned out for Uganda at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

There are whispers that some of these swimmers "used" the good offices of the SFI and the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) for their selfish motives. Once they achieved their "goals," they disappeared from the scene.

Take the case of Millet, who took part in the 200 metres freestyle at Sydney. The Bangalore-based swimmer made it to the Olympics when she bettered the qualifying mark of 2:07.27 seconds at the Australian Junior Championships in 2000.

She was at the time training in Perth under Bernie Mulroy, one of the world’s best coaches, on a scholarship from the International Olympic Committee - itself a rare honour for India.

Millet’s coaches expected her to reach the finals and even drew long-time plans for her, under which she was to return to Australia three months after the Olympics.

However, Millet, who received the Arjuna Award, India’s highest sporting honour, just before the Olympics, failed miserably at the Games and never entered the pool again.

Abhijith’s case is perhaps the most mysterious of the quartet. The swimmer, who was with the Border Security Force (BSF), excelled in his events at South Asian meets and monopolised them at home. He also won two gold medals at the 1999 World Police Games at Stockholm. Two years ago, he quit the BSF and dropped out of sight.

Dharampal Tokas, his coach in the BSF , when queried about the reasons for Abhijiths departure, simply said: "His heart was not in the sport anymore."

The SFI and the IOA secured for her a wild card from FINA, the governing body of the sport, for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Puri, however, failed to set the pool on fire and promptly returned to the Caribbean Islands.

Angry SFI officials now allege that Puri came to India with the "specific purpose of getting the seal of an Olympian.

"She thought there is no better place than India to secure a place in an Olympic team," disclosed a coach. IANS

Like millions of Indians, I too remained glued to my TV set during the football World Cup matches. I was also very happy when South Korea reached the semifinals. But it was no consolation. After all the South Koreans did not play for Asia. They played for their country. Is there any sport in which we Indians have the potential to excel? Whenever our hockey team participates in any competition, I develop a feeling of dejection. It has been decades since any Indian hockey team has returned after winning a major tournament. In football, I have been hearing the names of the clubs like East Bengal, Mohammdan Sporting and Mohun Bagan. But we have been unable to produce a team of footballers which could have given us genuine happiness. About volleyball and basketball, the less said the better. In badminton, lawn tennis and table tennis, a victory here and there provides little consolation. Even in cricket with which we Indians now proudly associate ourselves, we are not consistent. I still continue to cherish the moments when Kapil and his team had defeated the West Indies to win the World Cup in 1983. These days some former Indian cricketers are trying to entertain us with their ‘constipated’ commentaries. Some achievement this, off the field! The only disciplines in which we have excelled are kabaddi and kho-kho. But I am sure South Korea, China or Japan will defeat us in kabaddi in the next Asiad.

Serena’s win

Serena Williams earned plaudits for claiming the Wimbledon crown. The sibling rivalry came to the fore when she vanquished her sister Venus Williams 7-6, 6-3 in straight sets in the final. Thus she deposed Venus not only as number one but also shattered the top seed’s dream of a Wimbledon hat-trick. It is rumoured that it is their father who pre-determines who should win when they face each other in a final. Venus won the US Open defeating her younger sister and Serena won the French Open overcoming her elder sister. Going by that Wimbledon was to be won by Venus. But Serena scotched all those rumours by subduing her all-conquering sister who, of late, has failed to keep pace with Serena. Congratulations on her marvellous performance.

Chef-de-Mission

The president of the Indian Olympic Association, Mr Suresh Kalmadi, has nominated a defeated politician, Mr Jagdish Tytler, as Chef-de-Mission for the forthcoming Asian Games to be held at Busan in Korea. Mr Jagdish Tytler has no practical experience in sports. People like Milkha Singh have contributed immensely towards upliftment of India sports. But they have been ignored.

Policy needed

FIFA deserves all congratulations for organising the 17th football World Cup where 32 countries participated and 64 matches were played. The stadiums were beautifully decorated the live telecast was fascinating. It has not only popularised foot ball but aroused a lot of interest in the game. In India athletics, football, and hockey have been sidelined due to emphasis on cricket. The Sports Minister should evolve a policy to provide a boost to all games.