Rory McIlroy’s superpower about to meet its match

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’s not done yet, either. Not even close, as evidenced by McIlroy’s whereabouts this week: New Delhi, India, where he’s 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.

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, which has managed to attract to its tee sheets a glittering roster of Europeans, including McIlroy, Tommy Fleetwood, Viktor Hovland and Shane Lowry, plus a couple of notable Americans in Ben Griffin and Brian Harman.

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 — it is short by modern Tour-setup standards (6,912 yards) and tight by any golf course’s standards. The average width of the fairways, according to the club’s 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. “The intimidation factor,” said Shubhankar Sharma, a standout Indian golfer who has won twice on the Asia Tour and finished 8th at the 2023 Open Championship.

Sharma has a home-field advantage given he grew up playing the course (“it felt like I never left,” 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’t to say Lahiri mastered the course from the jump. Far from it. “Terrible,” is how he described his first several starts on the layout designed by five-time Open Championship winner Peter Thomson. “You can’t try and overpower this golf course,” Lahiri said Tuesday. “I think that was 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 lay off the gas. “I pulled the driver out of the bag, something you’ll find a lot of players doing this week,” he said. “I’d be very surprised to see too many of the stars carrying a driver.”

Lahiri has shared that advice with several caddies this week, including McIlroy’s looper, Harry Diamond, who, it seems, passed on the intel to his boss.

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

“You 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.”

Who knew the solution to golf’s distance problem was indica trees and sticker bushes?

Hovland had seen and played only five holes at DGC when he spoke to the media earlier this week, but he’d seen enough to understand the course’s challenge. “I’ll just kind of stick to the 3-iron or maybe 3-wood a couple places here and there,” he said. “There will be a lot of irons this week.” Hovland added that laying off the driver is just what the doctor ordered for the sore neck he’s been fighting 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 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.

And all those irons off the tee? They’ll result in something else pro-golf fans don’t see much of: mid- and even long-irons into greens. ”I like courses like this a lot more, because you just hit a variety of different clubs more often,” Ben Griffin said. “Whereas in America we’re so used to hitting maybe drivers and wedges a lot more. It’s something I haven’t competed on in quite a while to be honest with you. Excited for it.”