Larry Ngala is not a name you just skip by especially when it comes to sports. As a well seasoned journalist, Larry knows all the ins and outs about sports, including golf. We talked about the importance of the Safaricom Golf Tournament not just to the players, but the caddies and prospective kids who aspire to become golfers.
Kindly tell me who you are and what you do.
My name is Larry Ngala and I’m a sports journalist. I started writing for The Nation in the early 60s while still in high school. I wrote mostly about sports for Taifa Leo.
After high school, I went to the United States for my studies. Later I worked with Voice of America, then United Nations before finally returning back home. I took up a full-time job with Nation as a writer focussing mainly on news and sports.
At one point, I realized sports were more on-demand so I decided to concentrate on sports. I wrote anything and everything including football, volleyball, horse racing, and boxing. As time went by I picked on golf.
One reason for picking golf was the fact that the golf correspondent then, 1975, Mr. Charles Disney was keen and only wrote about the big clubs like Karen and Muthaiga and I was very keen on knowing why he wasn’t covering other ‘smaller’ events.
In his response, he told me how those people weren’t playing any serious golf. So I asked whether I should cover them and he agreed. Charles retired in 1979 and suggested to the editor that I should be his replacement since I knew a thing or two about golf back then. That’s how I took the realms of covering golf full time.
At that time, I had joined the Kenya Railways Golf Club as a member. This was after John Mucheru, a great friend, insisted that I should know how to play golf since it would be easier to follow and also to write about.
Since then, I would go outside Nairobi and cover golf events including the Kenya open.
How did the Junior Golf Foundation come about?
At that time, we did not have the junior golf program in place although Kenya Breweries Limited (KBL) used to have a series of events called Tusker Festival of Golf and the proceeds from the event used to go to the Kenya Golf Union to help then develop golf through the junior program.
In 1994, I prepared a proposal asking them to start a special wing that would deal with the Junior program and that is how the Junior Golf Foundation was born.
It has been on since 1995 although not with much aggression as we had expected. This was until ten years ago when I sat down with the then chairman of the union and told him how we needed to expand this program across the country and not only in Nairobi. The purpose was to expand and reach talented junior golfers all over the country.
Four years ago, the then chairman of the union and former NMG Chairman Mr. Richard Wanjala wrote me a letter to join the Junior Golf Foundation which I gladly accepted because I have so much passion for these junior golfers. I joined as a trustee in 2018-2019 and then in 2020, I was appointed the President of the Junior Golf Foundation.
It was a real challenge on where I would start but since I knew what I wanted to do, I took it.
The first thing I did was to introduce golf outside golf clubs and that entails going to schools and so on. One reason for this was that we believed and still believe that there is a lot of undiscovered talent out there.
How is Safaricom playing a role in the organization?
We all know it’s actually hard to develop a sport without adequate resources. So last year, we started writing to corporates to support this course.
We had a few corporate partners that were supporting us like Crown Paints and Prime Bank but we needed more to develop programs specifically the training bit of it.
So I approached Safaricom, gave them our proposal, they went through it and actually understood what we wanted to do since that is what they have been doing to other sporting activities supporting junior programs like Chapa Dimba, the Safaricom Athletics Series, Safaricom 7s and so on. They accepted and for a start they gave us 12 million shillings per year for the next three years.
That boosted us a lot and we did a program of 14 events fully sponsored by Safaricom.
The first event was in Nanyuki and it was a success. We had 35 juniors playing, and 50 attended the clinics. So far, it’s going very well, we are very grateful to Safaricom and NCBA bank for agreeing to support us because I believe there is no way you can develop sports without adequate resources.
Also, starting from the grassroots is the most effective way to tap on rich unexploited talents. With the clinics and all the programs in place, I believe in the next year or so we would probably have reached our target of having at least 6,000 junior players. So far we have about 2500.
How does golf impact young players?
Golf is a great game, especially for children. First, it changes their mentality, molds them to grow with a lot of integrity, and discipline, and patience. As we educate our juniors about the game we tell them about the requirements of the game which is the etiquette of the game.
We also encourage the juniors to focus on their studies because golf goes hand in hand with education. One of our programs is to actually enable the kids to get scholarships to study abroad.
For us to grow and sustain this game, we must focus on the juniors. Golf should start at an early age. Kenya Open has been played since 1967 and the best a Kenyan has ever done was to finish second. That was way back in 1998 by Jacob Okello. We want to change and I believe that this group of young players is the one to change this.
Tell us about the US Kids Golf Program
From the word go, I knew the US Kids Golf Program a great way for these children to start the game.
The program gets the kids to be more and more interested to come back tomorrow and play unlike what we were doing before. We have put in specifics on how to be good at playing and scoring and we have so far trained 45 coaches so far across Kenya.
Finally, last year they came to Kenya and apart from South Africa, we are the only country that has partnered with US Kids Golf. I, therefore, believe that with focus, in the next few coming years we are going to produce massive talent. I want to leave a legacy.
One of the things that Safaricom strives to do is reach out to young people and let them know that golf should not be a rich people’s game. What role does the organization play to ensure this narrative is done away with?
This is something I’ve been trying to demystify over the years. If it were a rich man’s game, I wouldn’t have played golf.
Golf was a preserve of whites before the 60’s when the pioneers, the likes of Nginyo Kariuki and John Mucheru had to fight hard to make the game accessible to everybody.
This was also the reason why Jon Mucheru wanted m to start so that in my writing I could demystify that it’s a game that’s played by anybody and not just the rich. A look at our top golfers today are not rich people. Some even don’t own cars. Talk of stars like Dismas Indiza. His story of how he started playing golf is just epic.
So what happens if a child wants to play golf but doesn’t have clubs?
We have a few sets particularly for the clinic because most of them don’t own the equipment necessary for training.
My biggest hurdle is when they start playing and for this, we rely mostly on donations from our sponsors and well-wishers. My appeal is for members to donate kits they are not using so that we can distribute them to the kids.
The US Kids Golf Program has a partner that deals with golf equipment so we discussed with them and they told us the best way to help was to send us the pieces the get someone to assemble them for us. That will be cheap for us so we are doing that very soon.
I’ve also had tremendous support from the kids’ parents. It usually starts with the parents because the kid needs that support. Also, they are our stakeholders so I work closely with the parents.
I started a forum 3 years ago called Junior Golf Foundation Parents’ Forum and through this, they are able to communicate among themselves and also with us. They also tell us what they think we should do to improve. It is a great forum that has helped us improve a lot.
