Ex-Premier League star, 42, is now a PGA pro as he shares his golf plans

Premier League cult hero Peter Odemwingie is now a professional golf player and hopes to make the senior PGA tour. Odemwingie says he picked up golf while playing for West Brom and now has bold ambitions to go far in both playing and coaching careers.

Now 42, the former Nigeria international is keen to grow the sport in his home country and in Kazakhstan, where he believes there could be the potential for golf to catch on. He points out that golf offers a lengthy career that football does not.

“My eyes are on the senior tour in the future because I definitely know there is a player in me. This game offers us longevity and if you stay healthy you can play for a long time, as someone like Gary Player shows,” Odemwingie told the PGA.

“Hopefully when I’m old with a lot of grey hairs I’ll be able to tell a pretty cool story about my time playing golf.”

Odemwingie graduated as a PGA member in May and now has big plans to take the sport around the world. He was born in Uzbekistan but moved to Nigeria at a young age and was educated in Russia. The former Cardiff and Stoke forward believes both countries, and some surrounding Russia, would be open to growing golf among their population.

“These are very sporting nations, but they don’t have golfers representing them on the world stage, which is a shame,” he says.

“I’ve had to put my studies first these past few years, but now I have graduated I am in a position to do something and I hope to get backing to organise some tournaments in Nigeria for decent prize money.

“The former USSR is a huge territory and places like Kazakhstan have hosted Challenge Tour events, so I’d like to go there and speak with people about opportunities to grow the game in that part of the world too. Hopefully now with my status as a PGA Professional it will open doors and people will take it seriously, and from there you go step by step towards your goals.”

Odemwingie scored 37 goals in 129 Premier League appearances. He is perhaps best known for waiting at QPR’s training ground on transfer deadline day without the permission of West Brom.

But while with the Baggies, he was honing his golf skills and credits a pre-season trip under Roy Hodgson.

“I started playing just at the end of my West Brom days because a few of the boys played, and I could see the excitement they had for it,” Odemwingie revealed.

“They would go and play on a Tuesday after training, and they’d have their golf gear and be talking about it, but I couldn’t understand it because the golf vocabulary is so different to anything else.

“Then on one of the pre-season trips, Roy Hodgson took us to a golf resort and people were doing putting and playing full rounds on days off, so I was just passing by the range, and I thought I’d try and hit some balls. I was wearing slippers, but I hit a few, and I loved the sound and watching the ball fly. I thought, ‘OK, there’s something in this’.”