Patrick Reed has made 448 starts in his professional golf career, from California to Qatar to Kawagoe (that\u2019s in Japan) \u2014 and everywhere in between. But even for the well-traveled Masters champ, this week\u2019s stop is a new one.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cNever come around a golf course like this before,\u201d he said Wednesday. \u201cIt\u2019s one of those that it\u2019s completely different than I would expect.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reed was referencing the Lodhi Course at Delhi Golf Club, site of this week\u2019s DP World India Championship. The course plays just 6,912 yards all stretched out, but is tighter than a 15-handicapper playing Augusta National with Tiger Woods. Doglegs. Pinched landing zones. Ball-gobbling rough. Fairways lined by jungle and Mughal-era ruins. You name it, DGC throws it at all comers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Take the par-3 12th hole, for example, where, the course\u2019s website will tell you, \u201cthe right side of the green is protected not only by a deep bunker but also the trees that overhang and can ricochet the ball into the jungle.\u201d Or the\u00a0par-4 16th, where a tree in the middle of the fairway \u201cacts as a ball magnet.\u201d Or one of the course\u2019s so-called easier holes, the the par-4 1st, which is \u201cdefinitely a good birdie opportunity\u201d assuming \u201cyou can manage to stay out of the bushes.\u201d<\/p>\n
So it goes at DGC, where players who get just a little off line can quickly find themselves DFL.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cTightest golf course I\u2019ve ever played,\u201d said Thomas Detry, a\u00a0Belgian who plays for LIV.\u00a0<\/p>\n
So tight that Detry took his driver out of the bag this week. \u201cSwapped with a 3-iron so I have a little bit more options off the tee,\u201d he said. His conservativeness didn\u2019t help Detry on the par-4 15th, where on Thursday he yanked his tee shot into the bush and had to reload on his way to a double.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Still, Detry played well in the rain-shortened first round (which roughly only half the field finished), shooting a five-under 67 that had him only one back of leader-in-the-clubhouse Niklas Norgaard.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The driverless strategy is a popular one this week. Rory McIlroy also is going without, leaving what typically is his most dangerous weapon in his hotel room. \u201cTo me it just didn\u2019t make sense,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m here to win the tournament. I\u2019m not here to hit drivers. I think the best chance will be by keeping the driver in the bag.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
A year ago, at the inaugural DP World India Championship, Tommy Fleetwood showed DGC who\u2019s boss by posting 22 under over four rounds on his way to his eighth-career DPWT victory (but first in front of his son, Frankie). Fleetwood, who shot a two-under 70 in the soggy first round on Thursday, is hopeful to repeat the feat this week \u2014\u00a0but has a new obstacle in his way: much juicer and more penal rough than what the field encountered in 2025.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWithout question, you have to be playing the golf courses from the fairway,\u201d he said. \u201dIt was like that before. But last year I felt like if you did miss fairways, as uncontrollable as the rough was and the way that bermuda plays, like you could hit it towards the green and you could have the option of trying to figure out where do I want to miss it?\u201d This year, Fleetwood said, feels more like a U.S. Open: \u201cYou hit it in the rough and you\u2019re just hacking it out.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Reed began scouting the course, he thought it was going to be a pushover. Not even 7,000 yards? LOL.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cGuys are going to shoot nothing,\u201d Reed recalled thinking. \u201cThere is going to be so many birdies. It\u2019s going to be a bunch of wedges.\u201d Then he played the course, which was redesigned by Peter Thomson in the 1970s before a 2019 Gary Player renovation. \u201cWith how narrow the fairways are and how thick the rough is, basically it\u2019s reload [when you miss a fairway].\u201d<\/p>\n
Reed said his Wednesday practice round was the first time he\u2019d ever played two par-5s backward, as in iron off the tee and 3-wood for his second. \u201cYou just sit there and you\u2019re like, wait, this is the kind of stuff you do at home when you play your home course,\u201d he said. \u201cLike when I play my home course it gets so boring playing it over and over again. You almost get too comfortable. I\u2019ll go out there and play odd clubs only or even clubs or irons only. This one feels like irons only. Iron off the tee then what am I going to do from there going in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Therein lies the beauty of DGC: It makes players think in ways they are rarely asked to. Most weeks, it\u2019s driver-wedge-repeat. In Delhi, it\u2019s a chess match. And we\u2019re not talking moving a pawn two squares instead of one \u2014 we mean Magnus Carlsen-level tactics, like transporting your king two squares toward a rook and leaping the rook to the adjacent square to protect the king.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Reed gets it.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe biggest thing is sticking to the game plan, being comfortable with that game plan, and actually going out there and executing,\u201d he said. \u201cBecause it\u2019s one of those golf courses that you get just a hair off-line, you\u2019re going to be in trouble.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Patrick Reed has made 448 starts in his professional golf career, from California to Qatar to Kawagoe (that\u2019s…","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17023,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"csco_display_header_overlay":false,"csco_singular_sidebar":"","csco_page_header_type":"","csco_page_load_nextpost":"","csco_post_video_location":[],"csco_post_video_location_hash":"","csco_post_video_url":"","csco_post_video_bg_start_time":0,"csco_post_video_bg_end_time":0,"csco_post_video_bg_volume":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[55],"class_list":["post-17022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tommy-fleetwood","tag-tommy-fleetwood","cs-entry","cs-video-wrap"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/vive.im\/@fogolf\/117448609825669361","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/pros\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/pros\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/pros\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/pros\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/pros\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/pros\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17022\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/pros\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/pros\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/pros\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/pros\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}