Golf can be very ruthless, almost cruel. Teeing up for hundreds of tournaments in search of a title ends more often than not in disappointment. The law of averages works differently in several sporting disciplines, and golfers understand this as well as some of the shooters and archers do. After all, these are disciplines in which your rivals do nothing to stop you. If you didn’t win, you were not good enough on the day.
Jeev Milkha Singh, the country’s most decorated golfer, spent seven winless seasons before claiming the honours in the Volvo China Masters in April 2006 and ending a phase of poor form and injury. Jeev’s other favourite triumph came six years later in the 2012 Scottish Open. Since then, he has not won any event of note. Now 50, Jeev has chosen to move on and play in the PGA Tour Champions, previously known as the Senior PGA Tour and the Champions Tour.
For Anirban Lahiri, too, victories on the Tour have been few and far between. The two-time Olympian’s highest world ranking is 33, achieved on March 29, 2015 after claiming two European Tour titles in a month — Malaysian Open and Indian Open.
Seven years later, Lahiri’s wait continues. On the brighter side, the runner-up finish in the recent $20 million The Players Championship (TPC) — the PGA Tour’s flagship event — proved far more rewarding than all of Lahiri’s professional titles.
After all, his most famous performance in 15 seasons since turning pro came in the world’s richest golf event and earned him a whopping paycheque of $2.18 million (₹16.52 crore).
The windfall is more than what Lahiri earned on the PGA Tour in any single season. In fact, once Lahiri moved to the USA in 2016 to play on the PGA Tour, he has had a few strong top-10 finishes but has never come as close to winning as he did at TPC.
In what was the strongest field of the year, Lahiri needed a final-hole birdie to force a playoff with eventual champion Cameron Smith, but fell short. “The Players Championship is actually the fifth Major, at least for the players,” he says. “The turnaround came from finding the missing link. I’ve been hard at work with pretty much all departments of my game, including the mental, my processes and those things have started to fall into place over the last few weeks. I just had my iron-play that was really troubling me and kind of damaging me, and definitely there was a big up-tick.”
Taking a leap
Lahiri, 34, has also re-entered the World top-100 to be ranked 89th, taking a leap from 322.
This finish was far more rewarding than Lahiri’s previous best performance on the Tour. In August 2015, Lahiri finished fifth in the PGA Championship and became the highest finisher from India in a Major. Also, Lahiri’s 13-under, with rounds of 70, 67, 70, 68 made him the only Indian to shoot four sub-par rounds in a Major.
Since then, in seven seasons, Lahiri has struggled to live up to the expectations. Overall, in 16 appearances across all four Majors, he has missed the ‘cut’ nine times. If one takes away the 2015 PGA Championship, Lahiri’s next best finish is a distant 30th at The Open championship in 2015. He has not made the cut of a Major since finishing 75th at the 2017 PGA Championship.
Frustrating phase
Does this frustrating phase for Lahiri denote a deficiency in the skills required to challenge elite golfers?
Lahiri is among the long hitters in the game. In fact, he once won the PGA of America’s pre-tournament long drive contest by sending the ball 327 yards.
Though Lahiri’s short-game — chipping and putting — looks fine, it is the iron-play, mainly his approach shots from the fairway, that has been inconsistent. Understandably, this has taken a toll on his confidence. Looking for solutions, Lahiri has changed his golfing equipment and opted for more weights on his irons. Fortunately, at TPC almost every aspect of the game came together for Lahiri.
Asked to reflect on the kind of player he thinks he is, Lahiri says, “On the golf course I’m a very ‘feel’ based, very visual kind of player, but off the golf course I am quite left-brain. I like to analyse things, I need to process things, I like breaking them down and making them digestible. For me, it was easy to kind of compartmentalise what had been going on with my game. You’ll be hearing me like a broken tape recorder say the same thing for the next week. I just know that my game is in good health, but one part of my body isn’t functioning. Everything else in my body is moving fine, but my right leg is not working, sort of, and that’s been my focus the whole time.”
Candidly, Lahiri admits how his approach shots to the green have let him down, consistently.
“Now I can hit the fairway, I’ve been hitting fairways. I know I can make putts, I’ve been making putts. I’ve been chipping okay, but I haven’t been hitting greens. I haven’t really put the ball in a place where I can take advantage even from fairways. And once I start hitting it better leading into the tournament, I can actually go and express myself; otherwise I’m just standing there, at 140 yards, thinking, okay, where is this ball going to go. That’s where I was for the longest time.”
If one takes a closer look at Lahiri’s golfing life, it is clear that the impact he made on the domestic PGTI Tour (12 titles) and later on the Asian Tour (7 titles) gave him the confidence to have a go at the European Tour (2 titles). Thereafter, like all golfers, who dream of playing on the world’s richest golfing circuit — the PGA Tour — Lahiri made a conscious decision to move base to America. He lives in Florida with his wife Ipsa and four-year-old daughter Tisya. In fact, in May, the Lahiris are expecting their second child.
Not so long ago, battling loneliness on the Tour, Lahiri was contemplating returning to India for good. During his annual visit to India in December 2021, he travelled to Ahmedabad, as always, to meet his coach Vijay Divecha, along with his performance coach Nimrod Mon Brokman. Sensing Lahiri’s state of mind, Divecha called the golfer’s close friends S. Chikkarangappa, Shubhankar Sharma, Udayan Mane and let them have fun on the golf course.
“It was golf as I used to play in my childhood… carefree and spontaneous,” revealed Lahiri as he rediscovered the importance of having “fun” while playing with purpose. The process also led him to the solution to the question of whether to stay in America or return home.
Armed with this clarity and the much-needed performance at TPC, Lahiri says, “It can’t get worse because I’m staying on top of my departments that I’m doing well. I’m doing my work, I’m staying on top of that, so I’m confident that it won’t desert me and I won’t be that bad. And the part that hasn’t been working I know that I’m improving, so it can only get better.”
