PETER ODEMWINGIE has admitted he feels “like a teenager again” after graduating as a professional golfer last month.
The former Premier League forward starred for West Brom, Cardiff and Stoke between 2010 and 2016.
Since hanging up his boots in 2019 following a spell in Indonesia, Odemwingie has turned his attention towards a new sporting passion.
The 65-cap Nigerian international was in his thirties by the time he first picked up a golf club.
But despite coming to the sport late, the striker fell in love with it.
And he is now a teaching professional with an eye to playing on the Champions Tour when he turns 50 in 2031.
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“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 recently told the PGA website.
“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 training trips with West Brom, 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.
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“It was downhill so it carried further. I thought, ‘OK, there’s something in this’.”
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Odemwingie quickly fell head over heels with the sport, joining a local golf club and hitting as many as 500 balls in a day.
And being presented with a new challenge after finishing his football career reinvigorated him.
He admitted: “I’m 42 now and it feels like I was a teenager one more time.
“It’s a blessing really as I got to put my history and my football career to one side and I told myself, ‘You’re a young man just beginning a new journey in a sport that you fell in love with’.
“I saw myself as a young kid and felt young going to two classes on a residential week in England with mostly younger people.”
In addition to spreading the game in Nigeria, Odemwingie has an eye on both coaching and competing moving forward.
He concluded: “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.
“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 scored 37 Premier League goals in 129 appearances during his football career, while he also played for Nigeria at four Africa Cup of Nations and two World Cups.
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He infamously tried to join QPR on transfer deadline day in January 2013, even turning up at their training ground only for the move to fall through.
Upon retiring in 2019 he saw the funny side of the incident, while he also claimed that he’d love to coach in the Premier League one day – although golf now appears to have taken over as his No1 pursuit.
Source: Soccer - thesun.co.uk
