The DP World Tour makes its way from Singapore to India for the Hero Indian Open, the second event of the Asian Swing. Here are your five things to know.
The Asian Swing continues in India
After a dramatic finale at the Porsche Singapore Classic, the Asian Swing continues this week at the Hero Indian Open.
With plenty on offer during this swing, including automatic qualification into the 'Back 9' events and a $200,000 bonus, there is a lot to play for over the next four events.
The Hero Indian Open, which takes place in Dehli at the DLF G&CC, is the second of five events in this swing. A one-week break will follow, before the world’s best golfers descend on Augusta National Golf Club for the first Major of the year.
The Tour then visits South Korea and Japan for the second editions of the Korea Championship and ISPS HANDA – CHAMPIONSHIP respectively, before a Swing Champion is crowned after the Volvo China Open, which is returning to the schedule for the first time since 2019. The second Major of the year, the subsequent U.S. PGA Championship, will immediately follow, but while points accrued in the Major Championships will count on the Race to Dubai Rankings, they will not count in the Swing Rankings.
DLF Golf & Country Club
The DLF Golf & Country Club is hosting the tournament for the fifth time this week, played over the challenging 18-hole Championship Course designed by Gary Player, is one of the toughest tests on Tour. In last year's tournament, 11 of the 18 holes played over par, with just seven bogey-free rounds and a cut mark of four over par.
The host course itself was opened in 2015 and that same year staged the Hero Indian Open for the first time, but the venue itself has previous history with the DP World Tour that stretches back further in time.
The venue started in 1999 with the opening of an 18-hole Arnold Palmer-designed parkland course, where almost 15,000 trees were planted during construction and almost 200 floodlights were installed to allow night golf. That course hosted the DP World Tour for the first time at the Johnnie Walker Classic, several years prior to Player being commissioned to build a new course when new land became available in 2015. His design saw him build nine holes on the land and reconfigured nine of the existing Arnold Palmer-designed holes.
The two nines are very distinctive. The intimidating course is filled with dramatic bunkering and is routed around two large lakes, featuring the Lakes Nine (1-9) and Quarry Nine (10-18).
A unique feature is that both the second and 12th holes have two green options for tournament officials to choose between. This year, it has been decided to revert back to the green on the left at the 12th hole, following feedback from the players about the green on the par-three in 2023.
"Here at DLF golf and Country Club, we've got two holes where each hole has got two greens," explains Tournmaned Director Jose Maria.
"On hole 12, which is a par three, traditionally we've been playing the green on the left. But last year we decided to try play the green on the right, and it proved to be extremely difficult. We were struggling to find enough pin positions and the greens were extremely fast, so the feedback from the players was that the green was really, really tough to find pin positions and the green on the left, which is maybe 20 yards longer, was better. It's got more pin positions, so we decided to revert to the green on the left this year."
Inside the field
Last year, Marcel Siem ended a near nine-year wait for his fifth DP World Tour title, winning by one stroke from compatriot Yannik Paul. Siem is not in the field this week after recently undergoing surgery on a hip injury, but Paul returns to Delhi hoping to go one better than last year’s performance.
They are joined in the field by two past champions - Stephen Gallacher and Anirban Lahiri - as well as a raft of DP World Tour winners that include Rasmus Hojgaard, Matteo Manassero and Darius van Driel.
There is also plenty of emerging talent ready to make their mark on the DP World Tour, including last week's Challenge Tour winner Rasmus Neergaard-Petersen. Another one of those players is Kazuma Kobori, who is making his first DP World Tour start outside of Australasia this week after being recently crowned Number One on the Challenger PGA Tour of Australasia’s Order of Merit. With that victory, Kobori - who won three times on the PGATA in the space of four weeks at the start of 2024 - secured playing rights on the DP World Tour for 2025, having only turned professional in November.
Representing India
Since the co-sanctioned event became part of the DP World Tour Schedule, it was initially dominated by Indian stars. Anirban Lahiri beat SSP Chawrasia in a play-off to clinch the 2015 title, before Chawrasia won back-to-back editions in 2016 and 2017 to take his DP World Tour victory tally to four. The duo also created history with their play-off in 2015, as it was the first all-Indian DP World Tour play-off as well as the first Indian one-two in European Tour history.
The popular event has been won 13 times by homegrown players, including PG Sethi, who remains the only amateur to win the event when he was crowned the champion in 1965.
While the last three editions have yielded non-Indian winners, there is a strong contingent of players hoping to regain the title on home soil this week, including Shubhankar Sharma, Gaganjeet Bhullar and Anirban Lahiri.
In 188th place, Sharma is currently the highest-ranked Indian player on the Official World Golf Ranking, and will be hoping to build on his tied seventh finish in last week’s Porsche Singapore Classic. The two-time winner has a strong record in this event, with a high of tied seventh in 2018 and a tied 13th in last year's edition.
One other name to watch out for this week is Om Prakash Chouhan. Fresh from a top ten on the Challenge Tour, Chouhan finished first on last year’s TATA Steel PGTI Ranking, which earned him playing rights on the DP World Tour for 2024. He won four times in 2023 and became the first player in history to earn more than 10million rupees in a single season. He is yet to find his stride in this event or on Tour this season, but with a strong result behind him, he'll be optimistic about this week.
20 Years of Hero MotoCorp
This year marks the 20th anniversary of Hero MotoCorp’s title sponsorship of the historic event, which is in its 57th staging this week.
The tournament, which is co-sanctioned with the Professional Golf Tour of India, one of the DP World Tour’s Strategic Alliance partners, celebrates a long-standing association with Hero MotoCorp.
Hero MotoCorp Chairman and CEO Dr Pawan Munjal is a proud supporter of golf, with Hero’s support also extending to the Hero Dubai Desert Classic, the first Rolex Series event of the 2024 Race to Dubai, last year’s Hero Cup, the PGA TOUR’s Hero World Challenge, and host of the innovative Hero Challenge series.
