Akshay Bhatia makes emotional golf debut in India at Hero Indian Open

Akshay Bhatia has waited a long time to make his competitive debut in India.

He signed a contract in 2019, not long after he turned pro, to compete there in 2020. Back then, Bhatia had no status and was playing on a sponsor’s exemption but the tournament was canceled, a casualty of COVID, less than a day before his flight was scheduled to depart.

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Six years later, Bhatia made an 18-hour trip to Delhi from Orlando via Amsterdam to experience the homeland of his ancestors at the Hero Indian Open, a DP World Tour event played at DLF Golf and Country Club this week. (This also is why he missed the TGL Finals for Jupiter Links GC.)

“To come here, inspire people and to play in front of people that look up to me is really cool. I’m very blessed to be in this position,” Bhatia said.

It didn’t go the way Bhatia dreamed of it all these years — he hit his opening tee shot out of bounds, lost a ball and shot 44 on the front nine before battling back to shoot 77. “At least I didn’t shoot 80,” he said with a self-deprecating smile. “It’s a wild golf course. It’s very hard, very narrow and not a lot of scorable holes.”

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Bhatia, a Hero brand ambassador, is ranked No. 22 in the Official World Golf Ranking, the top-ranked player in the field after winning the PGA Tour’s Arnold Palmer Invitational earlier this month and notching third career Tour title. He’s one of the hottest golfers on the planet, having finished T-16 or better in his last five worldwide starts.

Bhatia, 24, took an unusual path to professional golf, forgoing college and turning pro at just 17. Speaking last August at a media event hosted by Hero, fellow Indian-American pro Sahith Theegala noted that children of Indian-American parents still emphasize studies and test scores rather than athletics. He said he felt pressure to succeed.

“I went back to India quite often as a kid. My grandparents, especially, asked me, ‘How are the studies going? How are you doing?’ I just kind of lied and said, ‘It’s going great,’” recalled Theegala, who’s also a Hero ambassador. “They would always say, ‘OK, when are you going to stop playing golf and focus on your studies, for being an engineer, a doctor, whatever.’ It’s a funny thing but somehow or other I’m the dumbest person in my family. Everyone turned out to be a genius, and they actually are an engineer or a doctor. I go back to India, they’re all doctors or the top of the class and all that. So I was like, I need to be successful with this golf thing, or else I’m just going to be the black sheep of the family. But they really got into it as I got later in life because they saw the passion I had for golf. They saw it wasn’t just for me either. My parents really supported me, they realized how much golf had brought to my life and into their life as well.”

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Bhatia, who grew up in North Carolina, noted that his father always believed in his dreams. “My dad made a lot of sacrifices for me, and my mom worked very hard for me to be able to just compete and play junior golf, travel a little bit,” he said. “It was definitely a tough decision from my mom’s point of view, just because she knows how important education is, and she’d always say, ‘If this doesn’t work out what’s your backup plan?’ I didn’t have one, but I think I always believed in myself that I could make it out here. I was kind of listening to my dad. He always felt like he was right. And so when you feel that from your parents, you just kind of buy into that and realize that your dreams can come true.”

Bhatia has looked forward to this trip to the Subcontinent for some time and is meeting distant relatives that still live there. At the Hero media event, Dr. Pawan Munjal, the CEO of Hero MotoCorp., made Bhatia a promise that made his eyes light up. “We’ll take you to see the Taj Majal,” he said.

This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Akshay Bhatia makes emotional golf debut in India at Hero Indian Open