Lahiri pieces his game together after finding the ‘missing link’

The 34-year-old golfer, who describes himself as ‘very feel-based’ on the course and ‘quite left-brain’ off it, appears to have turned things around — if his famous run at The Players Championship is anything to go by. He thinks his iron-play, a source of frustration, has experienced a ‘big up-tick’

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.”