Anirban Lahiri Hasn’t Looked Back since a Meeting with Tiger Woods Last Year

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The best golfer in India played before an enormous gallery with the kind of buzz that is rare for his country. Anirban Lahiri wound up the winner, a day he won’t forget.

Except that he wasn’t the star that day. Tiger Woods was in town.

Lahiri and Shiv Kapur, who played college golf at Purdue, were asked to play a three-hole skins game at the end of an exhibition at Delhi Golf Club. Lahiri started playing golf about the time Woods won his first Masters, and Woods became a golfing hero.

“Meeting him in person, he had a strong, positive aura about him,” Lahiri said in a telephone interview from his home in Bengaluru. “It was nice to interact with him and pick his brain and get some perspective how he goes about his golf. He’s been an idol growing up, a larger than life figure.”

That was a year ago, and the 27-year-old Lahiri could not have imagined how much would change since then.

Lahiri will be at Doral next week for his first World Golf Championship in America. Woods, who was No. 1 in the world when he played the exhibition in India, didn’t qualify. Back surgery, a change in swing coaches and poor play has dropped him to No. 70 in the world.

Lahiri, the son of an Army doctor, won the Malaysian Open for his first European Tour victory. Two weeks later, he won the Hero Indian Open that effectively locked up a spot in the Masters. He will be only the third Indian to compete at Augusta National.

He is No. 34 in the world — just ahead of Brandt Snedeker and Ian Poulter — and is No. 5 in the Presidents Cup standings. Not bad for a guy who only a few months ago was in Q-school trying to get his European Tour card.

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