“It’s unbelievable,” says Peter Odemwingie. “I never thought I could get so obsessed with this game.” On a cloudy Tuesday afternoon in the affluent northern suburbs of Birmingham, the former West Brom, Stoke and Nigeria striker has just ripped a drive well beyond 300 yards down the third fairway at Sutton Coldfield Golf Club.
Watched by Odemwingie and his friend and fellow pro Lewis Pearce from nearby Aston Wood GC – not to mention Pearce’s pet dachshund, George – it is soon my turn to step up to the tee. Having somehow scrambled a par to win the 1st, my early advantage has evaporated thanks to a miscued tee shot into the trees at the 2nd. With the match level, the pressure is on. But sadly my tee shot fails to get off the ground and comes to rest in a big patch of heather no more than 80 yards away.
“I didn’t like golf initially because I thought it was a bit slow – I was a striker who liked to sprint and score goals,” Odemwingie says after wrapping up what turns out to be a comfortable victory despite my promising start. “But what attracted me was the challenge and trying to master it. The mental side of things is probably the hardest part.”
There is no shame in losing to Odemwingie given that he qualified as a PGA professional at the end of June, even if I have been playing for nearly 20 years longer. Remarkably, he had never picked up a golf club until a pre-season tour in the United States with West Brom in 2012, when curiosity finally got the better of him.
“Sometimes I would sit in the dressing room and I would hear the boys using all these terms: birdie and this and that. I didn’t understand because golf has a totally different vocabulary. We were at a golf resort in 2012 and the other players were on the putting green and the driving range. I was walking by wearing my slippers and I decided to have a go.”
Odemwingie then went on holiday with his family to Turkey and had some lessons. “The coach was very impressed with my putting even though I’d never done it before. On the way back, I passed by the pro shop and kitted myself out all Tiger Woods!”
Bitten by the bug, he began to play more regularly when he joined Stoke in 2014. Mark Hughes, the then manager, was a keen golfer and Odemwingie remembers him encouraging his players to get out on the course together. “They used it to make sure we trained properly – the reward was golf in the afternoon … It created a good bond between us and was part of the reason for our success at the time. We were really close and there was always lots of laughter.”
Odemwingie became a regular at Aston Wood, where he would hit balls on the driving range until it closed at 9pm “even when it was snowing”. But it was after his retirement in 2018 that he started to think about golf as a potential career. Odemwingie initially did some media work and considered becoming an agent before he realised “it wasn’t my calling – I was often on the phone and even my kids were noticing it”.
He had just started a law course at a local college which would have enabled him to begin a degree when he earned the opportunity to take a foundation level degree in professional golf studies at the University of Birmingham. Needing to shoot 15 over par or better across two rounds at the Belfry, Odemwingie had to hold his nerve on the last hole to achieve that and likened the experience to taking an important penalty. “It’s totally different doing it under pressure,” the 43-year-old says. “You see it even with the best players at the elite tournaments. You fight your thoughts constantly.”
After three years of studying areas including sports science, coaching and how to run a successful pro shop, Odemwingie – who now plays off three – plans to resume his studies next year to achieve his honours degree. After making starts on the Clutch Pro Tour (formerly the PGA EuroPro Tour) – two tiers below the DP World Tour – he is planning to have extra coaching this winter to see how far he can progress.
“I’m pretty fit and can still swing as hard as some of the younger players,” he says. “I still make some high numbers but there are times when I can make three or four birdies in a row. If I keep working hard on my swing and course management then you never know what can happen. But you need to be consistent.”
Odemwingie was born in Uzbekistan in what was then the Soviet Union and also lived in his father’s homeland, Nigeria, during his childhood. He acknowledges that his upbringing was totally different from that of his two children, who are keen cricketers having grown up with England’s Chris Woakes as a neighbour. “It’s a very interesting game and I’ve been reading about the history,” he says. “I feel at home here because of the culture of sport and fans.”
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Odemwingie was on CSKA Moscow’s books as a teenager after moving to the Russian capital from Tashkent via Chelny in Tatarstan, 150 miles from Kazan, where his mother, a doctor, originally came from. He started his senior career in Nigeria at Bendel Insurance in Benin City, where his father was the team doctor, and went on to play in Belgium, France and Russia before joining West Brom in 2010. Odemwingie reveals that he signed his contract at the Hawthorns before his move from Lokomotiv Moscow had been agreed so that West Brom could apply for a work permit that would enable him to feature in their next game. “I flew in and scored the winner on my debut against Sunderland,” he says.
Odemwingie captained Nigeria at the 2010 Africa Cup of Nations, won 65 caps and is West Brom’s highest scorer in the Premier League, having managed 15 in his first season and 30 in total. He remains upset at the fallout from his failed attempt to force through a transfer to Queens Park Rangers on transfer deadline day in January 2013. Sky’s cameras showed him waiting in his car outside Loftus Road having made clear on Twitter a few days earlier that he wanted to leave West Brom. According to him, the issues began a few months before, when he says the manager, Roy Hodgson, had questioned his attitude after he had recently signed a new deal.
“He made a few comments that I couldn’t accept and they behaved childishly as a football club,” he says. “When it came to QPR, everybody else’s reputation was more important than mine. They set out terms for how the deal could happen. I accepted the terms and went to London. That’s it.”
Asked what it felt like driving back after QPR failed to agree a deal with West Brom, he says: “I’m a guy with pride but I have a good heart so I knew that it would pass. It was hard because I was angry and it was a really tough period to go through. It was very embarrassing in many ways. But then I saw people for what they are.”
Odemwingie, who plans to take his football coaching badges next year with a view to becoming a manager in the future, is planning to write an autobiography in which he promises to tell the whole story. In the meantime, inspiring others through golf remains his main focus.
“When I watch the tour, I never see any west Africans in contention so I thought: ‘There’s something that can be done here.’ It would be great to have families tell me in the future that they read about my story and their kids decided to take up golf.
“I love to hear the passion from fans who remember me as a player and it’s the same feeling. Hopefully I can help attract some people to the sport which is now an Olympic event as well and we can see some African players coming through.”