From bad to worse

From bad to worse
EXPRESS NEWS SERVICE

New Delhi, March 17: That the Classic Golf Resort is at the back of beyond would be stating what has already been overstated in the run up to the Wills Indian Open. It would be expected that the organisers, International Management Group as also the sponsors, ITC, besides the Asian PGA Indian Golf Union, would take care to make everything as close to perfect as possible.

On Thursday, everything that could go wrong did. First some of the players, who had an early tee off -- at around 7.15 am -- apparently did not get the promised bus to take them from Radisson to the CGR. One of the players, Amritinder Singh, had to take a private taxi from the hotel, which burnt a hole in his pocket before he could burn the course. He barely reached in time and then teed off with hardly any warm-up. The result: two double bogeys in first three holes and a five-over card for the day.

Add to that the chaos caused on account of golf buggies. The media was not provided with any, saying it would disturb the players. At the same time, all and sundry sporting a ``staff'' badge were cruising around. The hole-by-hole scores were not available till late in the evening, the leaderboard was incomplete most of the time and there was no provision to get the leading players for an interview. Then when the scores did arrive the photocopier started malfunctioning and when it began to work, an electrical point tripped and the media centre was in darkness. It was sometime before sanity was restored, but by then some scribes had missed deadlines.

If the last edition in Calcutta was bad enough, this one promises to be worse. Surely the Indian Open deserves better.