World of Dan
Daniel Chopra is worthy of support in this week's USPGA Championship, if only because he is almost certainly the only player on the American golf tour who is pro Democrat.
The 1993 United States Ryder Cup team refused to meet the then President, Bill Clinton, on the grounds that he was thinking what a pro golfer would regard as the unthinkable. That is to say, he was considering increasing taxes. What's more, he was, in the words of Tom Lehman, 'a draft-dodging baby killer'.
Chopra, in contrast, plays a round with Clinton every year and has supper with him afterwards. This annual meeting which was initiated after Chopra's wife, Samantha, saw him in a shopping mall and, thinking 'seize the day', introduced herself as the wife of a pro golfer who supported the President's policies.
'Dan had always said he was one of his dream four-ball pairings so I went up to him and asked if he wanted a game,' says Samantha.
Clinton was as stunned as only a man who has been waiting five decades for a golf partner who shared his enthusiasm for the politics of triangulation can be stunned. He promised to ring in a year's time to arrange a round when the Chopras were back in town, came good on the promise, and now it is an annual fixture.
'Everyone criticises him for taking mulligans [shots retaken],' says Chopra, 'but I say fair enough because he never has time to hit balls so he has to get his practising in while he is playing. Because they close down the course when he is on it you can get round in under three hours.
'If I could vote I would vote for Barack Obama because, like Bill Clinton, he's not just an American leader, he's a world leader. What Clinton is so good at is that when he is talking to people he makes them feel their country is the most important country, whether it be Uganda or Northern Ireland. When you are with him he makes you feel you are the only person with him. When I asked him what was the neatest thing about being President, he didn't go for the usual perks, like Air Force One, but instead said it was being able to invite great musicians to come and play.'
Not only his politics mean the 34-year-old Chopra stands out from the crowd, there is also his peripatetic upbringing. Born in Stockholm to a Swedish mother and an Indian father, he had lived in Sweden, Hemel Hempstead and India before turning pro and playing on just about all the major tours in the world. This makes him, to be portentous, the first golfer of the globalisation age.
He is both a Swede who is fanatical about cricket and an Indian who is more likely than not to represent Europe in a Ryder Cup, possibly even next month as the captain's pick.
Above all, however, Chopra is his own man. There is no hole in which to pigeon him, which makes him admirable if not endorsable. He must be the only top-100 golfer - he is currently ranked 89th in the world - without a main sponsor in any of his homelands. There is no entourage. It is just Dan, Sam and Cosmo, a dog they describe as a 'puggle'. When they win they share all the proceeds, when they lose there are no PRs and yes men to cushion the blows.
As with many a European player his introduction to the game was miniature golf. 'I loved putt-putt and watching on the TV, which was not that often in those days,' Chopra says.
He first played the game properly in Delhi. His parents had divorced, his mother had remarried and 'the original idea was that I would stay in India for a few months, maybe six, and that became a year, two years and then eight years'.
His grandfather, Dev, who had worked for the Indian Tobacco Company, helped found the Delhi Golf Club and his uncle, Praveen, gave him his first few lessons. 'It was very tough for us, because it is such a busy golf club and during the winter there were not enough tee times in the day to accommodate kids,' he says. 'So we used to bet on par-three chipping and putting competitions. It is probably why I am one of the better putters because all I used to do was chip and putt, chip and putt, chip and putt.'.
'It may have seemed I was a spoilt little brat because even though I was eight I had a caddy. He needed the rupees more than me.' His name is Jaichand and he caddied for Chopra's uncle and still caddies for Daniel when he plays in India. In return, the Chopras buy a couple of buffalo for his village every year.
'I was quite good, quite quickly, and when I was 12 I dreamed of becoming a golf pro. By 14 I was in no doubt about what I would do with my life,' Chopra says. 'I was spending far more days away from school than at school. My grandparents were relatively conservative but as modern as an old Indian couple could be.
'I was thinking all the stuff I would ever need to learn I could learn later. I guess I was smart enough to know that 14 to 18 was a vital stage. If you're good at 14 but then don't play much till 16 and you grow a foot and a half then all the skills you've learned go out of the window. Golf is a physically technical sport.'
Chopra made rapid progress. In 1988 he was the youngest ever winner of the All India Junior Championship and progressed to become the first player from India to win the Doug Sanders World Junior title, in Aberdeen in 1991. It made little impact in his homeland. 'The people at the Delhi golf club were very nonchalant about it.'
'While playing as an amateur I kept a statistical record of how much I would have won had I been a pro and I realised I could pay my way,' Chopra says. The Indian Tour had a solid infrastructure, the legacy of Empire, but was pretty small beer. 'When I was a junior, any time a golfer with white skin appeared it was a huge event. Now there are two European Tour events in India and, in the Indian Open, you are playing for a million dollars. Golf has grown exponentially.'
Chopra, now playing as a Swede, turned out on the European Tour for the first time in 1996 and for a few years performed respectably. 'I was keeping my card but I was treading water,' he says. To try to get ahead he decided to play the Japanese Tour as well in 2000. 'I succeeded in losing my card on both. Basically I was suddenly almost broke with nowhere to play.' He could not even afford to get to qualifying school in America to attempt to make the PGA Tour. His friend Jeev Milkha Singh stepped in with a $5,000 loan. Within a fortnight he had won the 2001 Mercuries Masters in Taiwan and was in a position to give the cheque straight back.
'To win I had to two putt from the back fringe straight down one of the grainiest greens in Asia. I thought my first putt was perfect and it trickled, trickled, trickled until it was maybe 18 inches from the hole. As I put my marker down I thought, "My God, what if you miss this?" And I never forget saying to myself, "One, my grandma could make this putt with one hand, and two, I could make this with one hand and never ever miss."'
The next credit crunch came in 2003 when he reached final qualifying for the European Tour in the same week as second-stage qualifying for the PGA Tour in America, the two being scheduled against each other to deter golfers from playing both tours. 'I thought, "If I go to America and miss I'll have nowhere to go,"' he says. 'I rolled the dice and pulled out of European qualifying school.
'Looking back it was a ballsy decision. I had to make a five-footer and it was the biggest putt of my career. If I had missed it I would have been mixing concrete.'
The necessity to achieve the cut to earn the money for the next tournament had a detrimental effect on his game. 'I developed bad habits, I was playing to make the cut rather than win.' It needed Olaf Skipper, who had worked with Jesper Parnevik, to help him undo these habits. 'He explained everything using scientific techniques, demonstrating why I should do something that worked because I am not the kind of person who does something because someone tells me to do it.'
Chopra's game came together and he was rewarded with his first tournament victory at the Ginn sur Mer Classic in Port St Lucie, Florida, late last year. 'They couldn't have made it more difficult mentally.' At one stage during the last round he was four shots clear but the play was constantly interrupted. 'It was stop start, stop start, we started at dawn and by sunset we still hadn't finished.' And by then he was in a three-way tie for the lead with three holes to play. Undaunted, he managed to get some sleep before closing out the win.
It was his 133rd start on the US tour and his first win. It lifted a burden because three starts later he won the Mercedes Championship in Hawaii, the opening event of 2008. 'The human mind is a horrible thing, always looking for worst-case scenarios. Golf is a hugely mental game. It is about succeeding against yourself. You keep believing that round the corner is the perfect round of golf when you know for a fact that no one has ever played one.'
To relax there is the cricket. Growing up in India his first heroes were Sunil Gavaskar and Dilip Vengsarkar. 'I also loved the West Indies team except when they played India because they beat the crap out of us.
'I've always said that if India and Pakistan had a combined team they would be world-beaters. They would have the best batsmen, the best bowlers and the best supporters. The IPL has changed everything. When Shoaib Aktar got out Verinder Sehwag in Calcutta the whole stadium erupted. It was Indians cheering a Pakistani for getting an Indian batsman out. If you'd said that would happen people would say you were crazy. But it happened.
'I paid for my subscription to watch the IPL in the United States and I was so keen I was considering becoming a part owner of a team until I discovered how much it would cost. I might have to win a couple of majors before they take me seriously.'
Chopra has ambitious plans for a golf tournament tie-in with the IPL players. Perhaps 'A Round with Tendukar' might attract the sponsors and TV interest. And then, so fluid is the Indian economy, so pregnant with potential, then ka-boom the whole thing might explode.
Chopra laughs. 'Jeev and I might be sitting in our wheelchairs one day saying these bloody idiots are getting all the money and all the recognition.'