Lahiri is looking forward to an exciting LIV Golf 2023 season
With the 2022 season in the books for the men and women, we look back at how the three Indian pros playing full time on the major global tours, Anirban Lahiri, Aditi Ashok and Shubhankar Sharma performed on the PGA, LPGA, and DP World Tours, respectively. Back in June this year, we at IGW had put together a half-yearly report card for the same three players, which you can read here.
Anirban Lahiri
When we wrote the half-yearly report card, Anirban Lahiri was still a PGA Tour member who was enjoying his best season in terms of earnings and the LIV Golf Tour was just getting off the tee. Fast forward to today and things are more complicated. Lahiri ditched the PGA Tour for the LIV Tour, which has challenged the established tours, even if it hasn’t quite delivered on the actual golf.
Where LIV has delivered is for the players. Lahiri, who had made just over $3million on the PGA Tour this season from 24 events, made $4.2 million from just four events on the LIV Tour. The team element on the LIV Tour helped boost Lahiri’s earnings significantly as well. The 34-year-old won $2.66 million individually but another $1.56 million from the team competitions. Put the two tours together, and Lahiri has pocketed over $7 million in 2022, by far his highest single season earnings ever. And this doesn’t count his sign up fee from LIV, rumoured to be around US$4 million a year for two years.
When it comes to scoring, on the PGA Tour, Lahiri averaged 70.87 strokes a round which ranked 89 th.
The LIV Tour does not provide scoring statistics, so we couldn’t tell if his scoring was better, worse, or the same. Lahiri did have two top-10s in his four LIV events though, including a second-place finish in Boston, where he lost in a playoff to Dustin Johnson.
By comparison, he had three top-10s on the PGA Tour, including a second-place finish at the Players Championship. Of course, the fields on the LIV Tour are much smaller and they play three rounds compared to four on the PGA Tour.
Given the different nature and format of the two tours, a direct comparison of Lahiri’s 2021-22 season with his previous PGA Tour seasons except in one respect: money earned. And by that measure, Lahiri had his best season by some distance.
Aditi Ashok
Aditi Ashok at the Hero Women’s Indian Open earlier in October
It is safe to say that Aditi Ashok’s results in 2022 have been disappointing. Ashok raised expectations with her fourth-place finish at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo in September 2021. But she failed to register a single top-10 finish this year, with a best finish of T13th in her first event in January. By way of comparison, in 2021 India’s top-ranked female pro-golfer posted three top-10 finishes.
Last year Ashok made 12 of 19 cuts while this year she made just 15 out of 26 and went through a stretch where she missed five out of six cuts.
Looking at the underlying statistics, Ashok’s scoring was actually better this year by a small margin – 72.00 to 72.13 – but she actually ranked worse this season than last – 106 to 100. In other words, Ashok’s lower scoring average is more likely the result of scoring on tour being lower this year in general rather than any particular improvement on her part.
Given her struggles, Ashok earned just $178,900, which is lower than the $231,225 USD she made in 2021. Hopefully the 24-year-old Ashok will be able to bounce back in 2023.
Shubhankar Sharma
Shubhankar Sharma has booked his berth for the upcoming Open Championship at Liverpool
Sharma’s world rankings trajectory from 2022 provides an illuminating snapshot of the kind of season he had. The 25-year-old was ranked 281st heading into the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship, a Rolex Series event, back in February. He finished tied for second and jumped to 159 th in the world. A tie for 13 th in Kenya in March moved him to 157 th but then he missed the cut in eight of his next 10 tournaments and dropped out of the top-200.
Then from September through mid-October, he missed another five cuts in a row, and dropped to 255 th. However, he rebounded by making the cut in his last three tournaments on the DP World Tour, which included a third-place finish in the NedBank Golf Challenge, to end the season ranked 227th.
In other words, he ended the year roughly 50 spots higher than he started, but at the same time, his ranking is 70 spots lower than where it was at its peak during the season.
Given his results, it’s no surprise that Sharma’s scoring average was up from 70.35 in 2021 to 71.97 in 2022. For context, that’s an increase of more than six shots over the course of a 72-hole tournament. On top of that, in 2021 the tour average was 70.75, so Sharma was better than the average pro on tour and ranked 62 nd in scoring. This year the tour average was 71.14, meaning Sharma was worse than average & his scoring ranking of 160 th reflects that.
When it comes to money earned, the story is different. Sharma’s top 3 finishes in 2022 were in two of the DP World Tour’s richest Rolex series events so he finished 29 th in the Race to Dubai rankings with earnings of US$ 1. 72 million in 2022, US$ 700,000 more than in 2021.
But perhaps the biggest concern for Sharma is that it has now been almost five years since his last professional win, which came in Malaysia at the Maybank Championship in February 2018. That’s a long drought and recent results suggest it might get longer unless Sharma can fix his scoring woes.
So in 2023, India will not have a regular player on the PGA Tour for the first time in 6 years, only one player on the European Tour compared to earlier years 2016-2021 when we had 3-4 regulars and Aditi will get limited starts on the LPGA Tour finishing 99th in the LPGA rankings where the top 60 automatically get full playing rights.
Credits:-
Photo – Asian Tour/ LET/ DPWTR