Triumph with a tee: A Wknd interview with golfer Anirban Lahiri

It was the crisp autumn morning of October 8, at last year’s Shriners Children’s Open. Sitting alone in the TPC Summerlin locker room in Las Vegas, Lahiri watched eager young faces buzz around him, full of hope and optimism as they tried to make the most of their early-season playing opportunity on the PGA Tour. Lahiri, on the other hand, was finding it hard to drag himself onto the course.

The 34-year-old, who last week finished runner-up in the $20 million Players Championship, the richest golf tournament in the world, is the only Indian with a full card (eligibility to play all events) on the lucrative PGA Tour. During the 2022-23 season, the total prize money on the Tour is a whopping $481 million. Money is supposed to make the world go round, but on that day, Lahiri felt the motivation to play drain out of him.

Calling his career on the Tour “seven years of solitary confinement”, Lahiri was suffering from a problem rarely acknowledged in elite-level sport: Loneliness.

He had battled hard towards the end of the previous season to keep his playing privilege. “You would think that someone who’d gone through such an ordeal to just get his card back, would be raring to go. But when I came back out, I was thinking, ‘Oh God… I have to go through all this again? Do I have to go through another year of loneliness? What am I doing it for?’” he says.

Lahiri shifted to the US in 2016, with the aim of playing in the majors and against elite fields. He hit a career-high world ranking of 33 in 2015. The dejection he felt now was linked partly to his performance. He slipped from that high of 33 to 472 in 2021. His finish at the Players Championship elevated him to 89.

This was not what he had envisioned when he left Bengaluru, swapping a life full of friends and family for a solitary struggle in the ultra-competitive PGA Tour. “Of course, I have Ipsa and Tisya [his wife and four-year-old daughter] at home, but tournament weeks can be hard, even more so when you are not playing well,” Lahiri says. “I started asking myself, why the hell am I here?”

Things were so bad that at one point he made the cardinal mistake of forgetting to enter a tournament. He flew from Miami halfway across the US to Dallas, on the first leg of a trip to Hawaii for the Sony Open, before realising at the Fort Worth airport that his name wasn’t on the playing list.

“That’s the kind of space I was in. Only my core team knows about this and I’m sharing it for the first time,” says Baan, as he is called by friends and fans. “I spoke to Ipsa, who had a front-row seat to what was happening. I was this close to making a decision to move back to India and play just a limited number of tournaments from there.”

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Coming home has always helped. Every December-January, Lahiri returns to India to spend time in Hyderabad with his parents, and in Ahmedabad at his long-time coach Vijay Divecha’s academy.

He looks forward to these weeks, when he gets to spend time with a close group of fellow pros who also coach with Divecha, and gets to interact with enthusiastic juniors and amateurs. The 2021 trip was different.

“I sat down with Vijay Sir, my parents and my performance coach, Nimrod Mon Brokman. Vijay Sir is like a life guru to me. It was like I had to completely rewire my brain with him and Mon,” Lahiri says. “There were a few technical issues that were stopping me from playing well. But Vijay said the main thing missing from my golf was that I had stopped having fun.”

As always, Divecha had a plan. It was simple: get Baan’s friends together and let them have fun.

“He called all the guys who were close to me to Ahmedabad at the same time. Even Shubhankar (Sharma, who has a different coach) came down for a few days and practised with me. Chikkarangappa S, who is like a brother to me, came down twice, in between very important tournaments. Udayan (Mane, the No1 player on the domestic PGTI circuit) was there. They were all involved in this ‘Resurrect Baan’ plan. We went about challenging each other, like can you hit a shot like this from here? Can you make a birdie from this spot? It was golf as I used to play in my childhood, carefree and spontaneous.”

At the end, Divecha sat Lahiri down and asked: What do you want to do? Will you be happy on the PGTI circuit, or would you rather stay on the PGA Tour, playing against the best in the world? “I knew the answer by then,” Lahiri says.

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Although he is smiling more on the course and the Players Championship proves there is an uptick in his performance, Lahiri feels his journey to happiness is not complete.

“I haven’t celebrated at all since Monday, because I will only celebrate with the people I miss. I miss sitting down with Rahil (Gangjee) or Chikka or my friends in Bengaluru or Delhi. I miss being able to come home to my parents after a tournament and share that joy with people who mean so much to me. The ones who will drop everything and rush to you when you need them, and when you want to celebrate,” Lahiri says.

The $2.18 million cheque he won is the largest individual earning in the history of Indian sports, so celebration is due. There is another reason as well. Anirban and Ipsa Jamwal Lahiri, 32, a homemaker, will have their second child in May.

“That is going to be very exciting,” Lahiri says.