Anirban Lahiri gained nearly seven strokes on the field with a brilliant 64 on Saturday at the Corales Puntacana Resort and Club in the Dominican Republic. The round moved Anirban to T7, six strokes behind the leader Adam Long, who is 17-under through 54 holes. Hudson Swafford is in second place at 15-under with another rising Asian star, Xinjun Zhang in fourth at 13-under.
At the time the PGA TOUR went into suspension, Lahiri flew back to India with his family. During the lockdown, he went into work with his coach Vijay Divecha, trying to recalibrate his game. It was a back to the basics journey for the 33-year-old Indian, who has been playing on the PGA TOUR since breaking through in 2015.
At the end of the round, Anirban caught up with the media onsite for the Corales Championship.
Q. Beautiful round of golf today. Anytime you don’t make any bogeys with this wind out here today, bogey-free 8-under 64, how much fun was this today for you?
LAHIRI: It was great. It was, like you said, especially nice to have a clean card.
I’ve made a bunch of silly errors over the last two days and I’ve been playing better than my
score would suggest, so I knew that I had to come out and kind of tighten up, focus a little bit
more. Hit my irons a lot better today, put some work in yesterday afternoon and I’m glad.
Q. So was that the key, the iron play today?
LAHIRI: Yeah. I’ve been driving it great all week. I’ve driven it really, really well, so if you do that right, then the only thing left is to hit the greens and I haven’t quite done justice with a lot of my irons and my wedges. Just had a little grind session yesterday, chatted with my coach and just got back to basics and felt a lot more comfortable today.
Once I hit a few good ones, it was easy to get into a good rhythm and it felt great.
Q. For our listeners, give us an idea of the course conditions today, hole locations, and it’s kind of breezy coming down the coastline here.
LAHIRI: Yeah, it’s the windiest it’s been all week. I think the players are going to be happier because it’s less hot. You don’t feel as sweaty and as humid as the last two days have been. But no, I think the conditions are not that easy. It is a lot stronger, like I just said, with the wind, but I think certain tees, you have a lot of options here with moving tees back and forth.
Like 18, the last couple of days if you hit a half decent drive, you’ll have 100 yards in. Today, you’ve got to almost carry it 300 to have a wedge. If you carry it 280, you’ve got 4-iron. That’s how wide the window is and you’re going straight into a wind. So you have to focus and you have to make a lot of good decisions, which can be hard to do in wind, heat. And it’s
already Saturday, so we’ve been doing this for a while already. It was nice to keep my head on my shoulders.
Q. Congratulations on the round, 11 under. You never know where you’re going to stand going into tomorrow.
ANIRBAN LAHIRI: I’m just happy that I have a chance, an outside chance one way or the other, and I played well so I can take a lot of pride in that.
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