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Jeev Milkha Singh puts down his glass of Cabernet, leans back in his chair and lets out a long, bellowing yawn. "Man, I'm jet-lagged," he says, his bloodshot eyes scanning this French-fusion restaurant on the outskirts of Tucson. "I'm really feeling it."
Little wonder. It is the week of the Accenture Match Play Championship, and Singh arrived two days ago from his native India, a 24-hour odyssey of connecting flights from Delhi to Frankfurt to Chicago to Denver to Tucson. Then again, Singh's jet lag is a decade in the making. He has long been golf's most frequent flier, powering through a maniacal travel schedule that has taken him to every corner of the golf world. At various points in his career Singh has held cards on the European, Japanese, Asian and Nationwide tours, often playing more than one tour in the same season. In 2006 the quality of Singh's golf finally caught up to the quantity, as he produced one of the more remarkable years in the annals of the sport, playing 39 tournaments in 17 countries on four continents, along the way racking up 20 top 10 finishes, including two victories in Japan, one in China and the biggest win of his career at the European tour's prestigious season-ending Volvo Masters, in Sotogrande, Spain. The Volvo Masters and the double dip in Japan came during a blazing stretch last fall during which Singh established himself as the hottest golfer in the world. (Tiger Woods was merely the hottest golfer in North America.) "There were times when I awakened in a hotel room at two in the morning and had no idea what country I was in," says Singh, a 35-year-old bachelor.
"I was so zonked out and confused-not a nice feeling-but I was playing so well, I felt I couldn't take a week off."
You can't blame the guy for trying to cram a whole career into a year. His victory last April at the China Open ended a seven-year winless drought marked by injuries and crushing self-doubt. Now, after so many years of road-tripping, Singh has arrived at the ultimate destination: Next week he will become the first Indian to compete in the Masters. (Vijay Singh, no relation, can trace his roots to the subcontinent, but he is a Fijian national.)
To a kid growing up in Chandigarh, a relatively prosperous city in northern India, Augusta National was a distant wonderland glimpsed only on a flickering TV screen. Every year a member at Chandigarh Country Club with relatives in the U.S. would pass around videotapes of the Masters, with strict orders to return the tapes within two days. Singh remembers staying up late into the night, transfixed by the beauty of Augusta National. "I grew up on a course with literally no grass," he says. "Not a single blade. It was just dirt. So Augusta totally blew my mind. Even as a kid on the putting green, I would say, 'This is to win the Masters.' Everyone would say, 'You're crazy. Indians don't play in the Masters.' It seemed impossible, but here I am."
That Singh could conceive of competing on a world stage is surely due to the exploits of his father, Milkha Singh, who in the late 1950s and early '60s was one of India's preeminent athletes. Known as the Flying Sikh, Milkha cut an unforgettable figure with his long hair and full beard. In '58 he set records in the 200 and 400 meters at the Asian Games and followed that performance with a gold medal at the Commonwealth Games. He was a favorite in the 400 at the '60 Olympics in Rome, and he set a blistering pace over the first 200 to take the lead. In an agonizing fade that is still replayed in India, Singh was passed by three runners in the home stretch. The disappointment turned Milkha into a beloved tragic hero and, says Jeev, "to this day, everywhere my dad goes people shout out his name."
Milkha, who became an administrator of public sports programs, tried to dissuade his son from pursuing a career in athletics. "You know how Indian parents are, they all want their sons to be doctors or engineers," says Jeev with a laugh, but he had a natural athleticism that couldn't be denied.
"Growing up we played cricket, football [soccer], badminton, field hockey, you name it, and he always dominated," says boyhood friend Amrintinder Singh, no relation. (Singh is the Indian equivalent of Smith.)
At 12 Jeev began focusing on golf, an unlikely choice. "Back then golf was virtually unknown in India," says Daniel Chopra, the half-Indian, half-Swedish PGA Tour veteran who grew up in Delhi and regularly competed against Jeev in junior events. "A couple of times a year I would fly to Singapore just to buy golf balls. They were like diamonds. Jeev's father was famous, but they weren't rich, and he had to struggle like the rest of us."
Jeev Singh is self-taught and learned to play with only five clubs, for which he is thankful. "You have only a nine-iron and a five-iron, you learn to invent shots," he says. Even as a kid he became known for a punishing work ethic. "My dad always said, 'Hard work and discipline is what it takes to succeed,'" he recalls. "I've heard that a million times, maybe more."
By his middle teens Singh, competing as an amateur, was routinely beating pros in small Indian tournaments, and far-flung travel in the summer brought him to the attention of Vince Jarrett, then the coach at Abilene Christian. (Jarrett now coaches at the University of Houston.) Singh accepted a scholarship and packed up for Texas, where he immersed himself in local customs, barbecue included. "My parents, my sisters, they refuse to eat beef," says Singh, who's Sikh, but follows the cultural norms of his countrymen. "When I'm in India, I don't either, but when you're away from home, you must adapt."
In 1993, as a sophomore, Singh led the Wildcats to the Division II national championship while also winning individual honors, and shortly thereafter he turned pro. He reached the Asian tour in '95, winning twice and finishing third on the money list. In '98 he decided to test himself against tougher competition, becoming the first Indian to play the European tour, just as he had been the first Indian to play college golf in America. "With Jeev, he always gave us the feeling we could move onward and upward," says Chopra.
To help himself feel grounded on the road, Jeev begins every morning with 30 minutes of yoga, during which he puts himself into a meditative state. He follows with a long workout. Through the years he has earned the reputation as a lone wolf, but that's largely because he prefers to spend his evenings in the company of old friends: the dozens of DVDs he brings on every trip, plucked from a collection of more than 1,000. After his nightly movie he ends his day by reading from a dog-eared copy of Joseph Murphy's bestselling The Power of Your Subconscious Mind. Says Chopra, "He's a very private person, very set in his ways. He's all about routine."
