‘Tightest golf course I’ve ever played’: Pros face suffocating test this week

Patrick Reed has made 448 starts in his professional golf career, from California to Qatar to Kawagoe (that’s in Japan) — and everywhere in between. But even for the well-traveled Masters champ, this week’s stop is a new one. 

“Never come around a golf course like this before,” he said Wednesday. “It’s one of those that it’s completely different than I would expect.”

Reed was referencing the Lodhi Course at Delhi Golf Club, site of this week’s 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. 

Take the par-3 12th hole, for example, where, the course’s website will tell you, “the 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.” Or the par-4 16th, where a tree in the middle of the fairway “acts as a ball magnet.” Or one of the course’s so-called easier holes, the the par-4 1st, which is “definitely a good birdie opportunity” assuming “you can manage to stay out of the bushes.”

So it goes at DGC, where players who get just a little off line can quickly find themselves DFL.     

“Tightest golf course I’ve ever played,” said Thomas Detry, a Belgian who plays for LIV. 

So tight that Detry took his driver out of the bag this week. “Swapped with a 3-iron so I have a little bit more options off the tee,” he said. His conservativeness didn’t 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.  

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.  

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. “To me it just didn’t make sense,” he said. “I’m here to win the tournament. I’m not here to hit drivers. I think the best chance will be by keeping the driver in the bag.”  

A year ago, at the inaugural DP World India Championship, Tommy Fleetwood showed DGC who’s 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 — but has a new obstacle in his way: much juicer and more penal rough than what the field encountered in 2025.   

“Without question, you have to be playing the golf courses from the fairway,” he said. ”It 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?” This year, Fleetwood said, feels more like a U.S. Open: “You hit it in the rough and you’re just hacking it out.”

When Reed began scouting the course, he thought it was going to be a pushover. Not even 7,000 yards? LOL. 

“Guys are going to shoot nothing,” Reed recalled thinking. “There is going to be so many birdies. It’s going to be a bunch of wedges.” Then he played the course, which was redesigned by Peter Thomson in the 1970s before a 2019 Gary Player renovation. “With how narrow the fairways are and how thick the rough is, basically it’s reload [when you miss a fairway].”

Reed said his Wednesday practice round was the first time he’d ever played two par-5s backward, as in iron off the tee and 3-wood for his second. “You just sit there and you’re like, wait, this is the kind of stuff you do at home when you play your home course,” he said. “Like when I play my home course it gets so boring playing it over and over again. You almost get too comfortable. I’ll 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.”

Therein lies the beauty of DGC: It makes players think in ways they are rarely asked to. Most weeks, it’s driver-wedge-repeat. In Delhi, it’s a chess match. And we’re not talking moving a pawn two squares instead of one — 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. 

Reed gets it.   

“The biggest thing is sticking to the game plan, being comfortable with that game plan, and actually going out there and executing,” he said. “Because it’s one of those golf courses that you get just a hair off-line, you’re going to be in trouble.”