Hero Indian Open 2025: Is the Gary Player Course the toughest test in Indian golf?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Peering down the 17th fairway from the men’s championship tees of the Gary Player course (DLF Golf & Country Club) in Gurugram, you really have to scour the landscape to locate the landing spot that you’re supposed to be aiming for. “It’s only about 15 yards wide…they’ve narrowed it down," says Vani Kapoor.
Amateurs never get this view, and with good reason—the difficulty levels are off the charts. On this occasion your writer has elected to play from these tees with Kapoor, India’s top-ranked women’s professional, to get a taste of what the players at the ongoing 2025 Hero Indian Open face on the closing stretch. “The last three holes are crucial and that’s where the game can really turn.
I wouldn’t try any fancy shots…it’s really hard to recover," she adds. That point is driven home repeatedly over this misguided adventure in which Kapoor does well to shoot one-over par while your writer shoots his entire handicap in three holes. The crowds love drama.
When it comes to golf—a sport unrivalled in its ability to make good players look like rank novices—weekend amateurs derive a great deal of pleasure watching professionals falter and make a spectacle of themselves. Golf might be cruel, but it’s egalitarian, and everyone, ability no bar, is subject to the vagaries of the game. Besides, what sort of respectable quest comes without its share of travails? Certainly not the Hero Indian Open, that, much like the US Open, has acquired the reputation of being raw and unforgiving.
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