Rory McIlroy’s superpower is about to meet its match

Rory McIlroy has a year: green jacket; career Grand Slam; Open championship in his home country; thrilling victory at the Irish Open; and of course a member of the victorious European Ryder Cup team at Bethpage Black late last month. His 2025 is not over yet either. Not even close, as evidenced by McIlroy’s whereabouts this week: New Delhi, India, where he will not only make his first-ever visit to the vibrant country of 1.45 billion, but also play a course that will test his game in ways no other location has this year. . . or, for that matter, pretty much any other year.

We’re talking about the Lodhi Course at Delhi Golf Club, a prestigious venue a short distance from the Taj Mahal and this week’s host venue of the DP World India Championship, which has managed to attract a glittering selection of Europeans to its tee sheets, including McIlroy, Tommy Fleetwood, Viktor Hovland and Shane Lowry, plus a pair of notable Americans in the form of Ben Griffin and Brian Harman.

All of these players are used to competing in large, sturdy ballparks, where the strategy on most par-4s and virtually all par-5s begins and ends with a full-driving driver off the tee. The longer the better, accuracy be damned. However, the Lodhi trail is not big or difficult; it’s short by modern Tour setup standards (6,912 meters) and tight by each golf course standards. The average width of the fairways is 80 feet, according to the club’s website, including a chute on the 16th fairway with a bottleneck just 45 feet wide. The landing zones feel even narrower because of the walls of native trees and shrubs that flank them. More courses than fairways. “The intimidation factor,” says 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 court advantage, as he grew up playing on the court (“I 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 event at DGC in 1999 and won the India Open there in 2015. That’s not to say Lahiri controlled the course from the jump. Far from it. “Terrible” was how he described his first few starts on the track designed by five-time Open Championship winner Peter Thomson. “You can’t try to overpower 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, which is something you’ll see a lot of players doing this week,” he said. “I would be very surprised if too many of the stars saw a driver driving around.”

Lahiri shared that advice with several caddies this week, including Harry Diamond, McIlroy’s looper, who apparently passed the information along to his boss.

“I would say the next time I run into 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 feel like the risk is worth the reward. I’d rather leave myself two or three clubs and hit a 7-iron into a par-4 instead of hitting a wedge, where you just take the ball off-line here and the ball is gone. You hit it into the jungle and you can’t get it out. You can rack up a really big number very quickly.”

“You just keep hitting it down the middle, 260, 250, 260 every time, and if you do that, you can do really well on this golf course.”

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

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’ll stick with the 3-iron or maybe 3-wood a few times here and there,” he said. “There will be a lot of irons this week.” Hovland added that sacking the driver is just what the doctor ordered due to the sore neck he has been dealing with this year, an injury that controversially sidelined him on the final day of the Ryder Cup.

Brian Harman said iron play will be so prevalent this week and good decision-making is so essential that in some ways the Delhi WG will feel more like a links golf test than a park-style test, regardless of the fact that the course is more than 900 kilometers from the nearest coastline.

And all those irons off the tee? They will result in something else that pro golf fans don’t see much of: mid and even long-irons in greens. “I like these types of courses a lot more because you visit different clubs more often,” said Ben Griffin. “Whereas in America we’re so used to hitting a lot more drivers and wedges. It’s something I haven’t competed in in a while, to be honest. I’m excited about it.”