LAHORE: Hamza Mansoor of Lahore Gymkhana won the 31st Governor’s Punjab Golf Championships at his home course here on Sunday.

On the final day of the three-day event, Hamza managed to successfully ward off all the challengers as he aggregated the score of 209 to win the net event. He carded 70 on the last day. His cards on the previous two days were 68 and 71.

Punjab Governor Chaudhry Mohammad Sarwar was the chief guest on this occasion.

Earlier on Sunday, Hamza was three strokes behind the leader, Jamal Nasir, but when the round progressed the latter could not maintain his momentum.

Contrarily, Hamza stepped forward aggressively towards victory with accurate hitting on the fairways and fine putting on the greens to gain advantage over his main opponents — Ahsan Khawaja and Ameer Khawaja, .

The pars came with regular intervals and then the two birdies on the 16th and 17th holes did the magic and consolidated Hamza’s position as top player of the tournament.

Other prominent contenders for the main title were Waleed Zubair and Brig Mohammad Masood.

Ahsan remained the runner-up with scores of net 69, 68 and 74 and an aggregate score of 211 while Ameer came third with scores of 70, 72 and 72 (aggregate 214).

Meanwhile, in the gross category the first position went to of Lahore Gymkhana’s Wazir Ali — the elder brother of Hamza — who recorded three-day aggregate gross score of 223. The second best was Mohammad Rehman of Royal Palm (aggregate 225) followed by third-placed Robin Bagh of Sargodha.

In the seniors section the net winner was retired Col Ikram-ul-Haq (Garrison) and gross winner was Javed A. Khan (Gymkhana).

Amongst the ladies Ana James Gill (Royal Palm) emerged as the net winner and the top one in the gross section was Zaib-un-Nisa of Royal Palm.

Published in Dawn, November 25th , 2014