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Rory McIlroy has been having a year: green jacket<\/a>; career Grand Slam; Open Championship in his homeland; stirring Irish Open win<\/a>; and, of course, member of the victorious<\/a> European Ryder Cup team at Bethpage Black late last month. His 2025\u2019s not done yet, either. Not even close, as evidenced by McIlroy\u2019s whereabouts this week: New Delhi, India, where he\u2019s not only making his first-ever visit to the vibrant country of 1.45 billion but also playing a golf course that will test his game in ways that no other venue has this year . . . or, for that matter, just about any other year.<\/p>\n We speak of the Lodhi course at Delhi Golf Club, a prestigious hangout a short hop from the Taj Mahal and this week the host site of the DP World India Championship<\/a>, which has managed to attract to its tee sheets a glittering roster of Europeans, including McIlroy, Tommy Fleetwood<\/a>, Viktor Hovland and Shane Lowry<\/a>, plus a couple of notable Americans in Ben Griffin and Brian Harman.<\/p>\n All of these players are accustomed to competing in big, burly ballparks where the strategy on most par-4s and virtually all par-5s starts and ends with full-sending driver off the tee. Longer the better, accuracy be damned. The Lodhi course, however, is neither big nor burly \u2014\u00a0it is short by modern Tour-setup standards (6,912 yards) and tight by any<\/em> golf course\u2019s standards. The average width of the fairways, according to the club\u2019s website, is 25 yards, including a chute on the 16th fairway that has a knee-knocking choke point measuring a mere 14 yards wide. Making the landing zones feel narrower still are the walls of native trees and bushes flanking them. More hallways than fairways. \u201cThe intimidation factor,\u201d said Shubhankar Sharma, a standout Indian golfer who has won twice on the Asia Tour and finished 8th at the 2023 Open Championship.<\/p>\n courtesy delhi golf club<\/span> Sharma has a home-field advantage given he grew up playing the course (\u201cit felt like I never left,\u201d he told reporters earlier this week). Same goes for another Indian star, Anirban Lahiri, who played his first junior event at DGC in 1999 and, in 2015, won the India Open there. Which isn\u2019t to say Lahiri mastered the course from the jump. Far from it. \u201cTerrible,\u201d is how he described his first several starts on the layout designed by five-time Open Championship winner Peter Thomson<\/a>. \u201cYou can\u2019t try and overpower this golf course,\u201d Lahiri said Tuesday. \u201cI think that was what I tried to do when I was younger and more fearless.\u201d<\/p>\n Lahiri said he finally unlocked the course by learning where to be aggressive and where to lay off the gas. \u201cI pulled the driver out of the bag, something you\u2019ll find a lot of players doing this week,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019d be very surprised to see too many of the stars carrying a driver.\u201d<\/p>\n Lahiri has shared that advice with several caddies this week, including McIlroy\u2019s looper, Harry Diamond<\/a>, who, it seems, passed on the intel to his boss.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cYou just keep hitting it down the middle, hit it 260, 250, 260 every single time, and if you do that, then you can do very well around this golf course.\u201d<\/p>\n Who knew the solution to golf\u2019s distance problem<\/a> was indica trees and sticker bushes?<\/p>\n Hovland had seen and played only five holes at DGC when he spoke to the media earlier this week, but he\u2019d seen enough to understand the course\u2019s challenge. \u201cI\u2019ll just kind of stick to the 3-iron or maybe 3-wood a couple places here and there,\u201d he said. \u201cThere will be a lot of irons this week.\u201d Hovland added that laying off the driver is just what the doctor ordered for the sore neck he\u2019s been fighting this year, an injury that, controversially, sidelined him for the final day of the Ryder Cup.<\/p>\n Brian Harman said iron play will be so prevalent this week and good decision-making so essential that Delhi GC, in ways, feels more like a links-golf test than a parkland one, no matter that the course is more than 600 miles from the nearest coastline.<\/p>\n And all those irons off the tee? They\u2019ll result in something else pro-golf fans don\u2019t see much of: mid- and even long<\/em>-irons into greens. \u201dI like courses like this a lot more, because you just hit a variety of different clubs more often,\u201d Ben Griffin said. \u201cWhereas in America we\u2019re so used to hitting maybe drivers and wedges a lot more. It\u2019s something I haven\u2019t competed on in quite a while to be honest with you. Excited for it.\u201d<\/p>\n Rory McIlroy has been having a year: green jacket; career Grand Slam; Open Championship in his homeland; stirring Irish Open win; and, of course, member of the victorious European Ryder Cup team at Bethpage Black late last month. His 2025\u2019s not done yet, either. Not even close, as evidenced by McIlroy\u2019s whereabouts this week: New … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6383,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Rory-McIlroys-superpower-about-to-meet-its-match.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6382"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6384,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6382\/revisions\/6384"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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