Tommy Fleetwood took down the DP World India Championship by two shots on Sunday, dismantling the notion that he cannot win outside Europe, the UAE, and the United States.
His path to the win included 24 birdies, four bogeys, an eagle, and…zero drivers. Thanks to SMS on Tour, we know that Fleetwood was among the 42% of the 138-man field who elected to keep driver out of the bag this week.
Prior to the tournament, Rory McIlroy joked that the next time he’d hit driver would be in Abu Dhabi. I wonder who was more saddened by his comments: the fine fans in India who realized they wouldn’t get an opportunity to watch one of the greatest drivers of all time hit his most lethal weapon? Or the good folks of Utah who ascertained that McIlroy would be skipping the Bank of Utah Championship?
The Lodhi Course at Delhi Golf Club measures about 6,900 yards and generally features dense trees on both sides of ultra-narrow fairways, taking the penalty for errancy to an extreme. The 15th hole, for example, is only 338 yards long and has just 36 yards of width from jungle to jungle at one of the widest parts of the golf hole.
The 15th hole at the Lodhi Course at Dehli Golf Club (Google Earth)
For reference, the average fairway width at the Plantation Course at Kapalua is just shy of 50 yards. As a more useful reference, the average fairway width at Torrey Pines (South) is between 25 and 30 yards. However, Torrey does not harshly penalize a wide miss, one of the key differentiators for why players throttled back in India, yet they always hit driver on virtually every non-par 3 at Torrey Pines South.
The first hole at Torrey Pines South (Google Earth)
The field at the India Championship averaged 269.3 yards off the tee for the week, nearly 30 yards lower than the DP World Tour season average, a feather in the cap of those who believe that adding trees is the solution to the distance problem in professional golf.
I’d just like to suggest that if you go far enough down this line of thinking, Butler Pitch & Putt would be a wonderful venue addition to the professional golf calendar. It is a nine-hole par-3 course in Austin, Texas. You’d get an average driving distance closer to 84 yards. Problem really solved!
