Rory McIlroy’s superpower will face its match

Rory McIlroy has a year: green jacket; Career Grand Slam; Open Championship in his hometown; stirring it up Irish Open win; and, of course, a member of victorious The European Ryder Cup Team at Bethpage Black late last month. Even his year 2025 is not over yet. Not even close, as evidenced by McIlroy’s location this week: New Delhi, India, where he is not only making his first visit to the vibrant country of 1.45 billion people, but also playing a golf course that will test his game in ways no other country has this year. . . or, for that matter, almost every other year.

We talk about the Lodhi Course at Delhi Golf Club, a prestigious venue a short hop from the Taj Mahal and this week the host site of DP World Championship Indiawhich has managed to attract a glittering list of Europeans, including McIlroy, Tommy FleetwoodViktor Hovland and Shane Lowryplus some notable Americans in Ben Griffin and Brian Harman.

All of these players are used to competing on big, burly fairways, where the strategy on most par-4s and almost all par-5s begins and ends with sending the driver completely off the tee. The longer the better, accuracy be damned. Lodhi’s course, however, is neither big nor stout – it’s short by modern tournament layout standards (6,912 yards) and tight any golf course standards. The average width of the fairways, according to the club’s website, is 25 yards, including a hole on the 16th fairway that has a choke point that hits the knee just 14 yards wide. Making the seating areas feel more cramped, walls of native trees and shrubs surround them. More corridors than freeways. “The intimidation factor,” said Shubhankar Sharma, a prominent Indian golfer who has won twice on the Asian Tour and finished eighth in the 2023 Open Championship.

Sharma has a home-court advantage given that he grew up playing the course (“it felt like I never left,” he told reporters earlier this week). The same goes for another Indian star, Anirban Lahiri, who played his first junior tournament at the DGC in 1999 and, in 2015, won the India Open there. Which is not to say that Lahiri learned the course from the jump. Far from it. “Terrible,” is how he described his first few starts in the layout created by the five-time Open Championship winner Peter Thomson. “You can’t try to dominate this golf course,” Lahiri said Tuesday. “I think that’s what I tried to do when I was younger and more fearless.”

Lahiri said he finally unlocked the course by learning where to be aggressive and where to let off the gas. “I took the driver out of the bag, something you’ll find a lot of players doing this week,” he said. “I would be very surprised to see many of the stars carrying a driver.”

Lahiri has shared that advice with several golfers this week, including McIlroy’s looper, Harry Diamondwho apparently passed on the intel to his boss.

“I’d say the next time I hit my driver will be in Abu Dhabi,” McIlory joked on Wednesday, referring to the upcoming Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship. “I don’t think I’m going to hit a driver this week. I just don’t think the risk is worth the reward. I’d rather put myself two or three clubs back and hit a 7-iron on a par-4 than hit a wedge, where if you just get it out of line here and the ball is gone. You’re hitting it in the jungle and you’re not going to hit a big number very quickly.

“You keep hitting it down the middle, hit 260, 250, 260 every time, and if you do that, then you can do pretty well around this golf course.”

Who knew the solution to golf the distance problem was it indica tree and climbing shrub?

Hovland had only seen and played five holes at DGC when he spoke to the media earlier this week, but he had seen enough to understand the challenge of the course. “I’m just going to stick to the 3-iron or maybe the 3-wood a few places here and there,” he said. “There’s going to be a lot of iron this week.” Hovland added that the driver layoff is just what the doctor ordered for the neck pain he’s been battling this year, an injury that controversially sidelined him for the final day of the Ryder Cup.

Brian Harman said iron play will be so prevalent this week and good decision-making will be so essential that Delhi GC, in some ways, feels more like a links golf test than a park, despite the course being more than 600 miles from the nearest coastline.

And all those irons off the tee? They’ll result in something else that pro golf fans don’t see much: middle and even long– ironed on greens. “I like courses like this a lot more because you just hit a bunch of different clubs more often,” Ben Griffin said. “Whereas in America we’re used to maybe hitting drivers and wedges a lot more. It’s something I haven’t competed in a long time to be honest with you. I’m excited about it.”