‘Nobody knew what was going on’: How golf and sports stopped at the Players Championship

SILVIS, Ill. — In a different year, at a different moment in time, Anirban Lahiri might be laser-focused on his golf, on improving his position in the FedExCup standings, on ensuring he is properly tending to his singular pursuit of a successful career at the highest level of his sport. This is not that year. Now is not that moment in time. “I don’t think COVID is going to wait,” Lahiri explained Wednesday in the midst of a coordinated and urgent plea to golf fans around the world to assist worthy organizations that are helping his native India emerge from a deadly spring surge of the COVID-19 virus. “It has its own schedule. It doesn’t wait for the season to end and the offseason to start.” A 34-year-old native of Pune, India, Lahiri is well-versed on the challenge of emerging from a bout with the coronavirus. He is two months removed from his own frightening episode with the virus, which he, his wife and 2-year-old all contracted in April when his vaccinated coach visited from India, only to discover he’d been exposed to the virus. “I had a pretty serious bout with it,” said Lahiri, a 14th-year professional and veteran of five PGA TOUR seasons. “I was very fortunate that my wife didn’t have a very serious case. I was so bad that she actually had to drive from Palm Beach to Hilton Head seven hours while she had COVID to come and take care of me because she was the only person who could have had access. It was a very difficult time for the family. I think when someone has COVID, it’s probably the family members who feel the most helpless.” Lahiri made two hours-long visits to an emergency room, spiked a fever of 104, and ultimately lost 15 pounds over a span of 10 days. At its worst, the illness raised concerns of pneumonia. Lahiri declined to say if he feared for his life at that point, but indicated he saw that fear in his wife. His personal concerns were severely compounded by the growing crisis in his homeland. Official numbers list in excess of 400,000 deaths and more than 30 million infections in India since the advent of the pandemic, but, in late June, the Wall Street Journal cited modeling by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation that suggested the actual death count in the country was three times that official figure. Even with vaccinations available for months, India endured a crippling second surge that saw daily infections increase exponentially, from a low of fewer than 9,000 new infections on Feb. 8 to a peak of 414,000 on May 8, according to the worldometers.info website. While the worst now may be over — on July 5, daily cases were cited at fewer than 35,000 — Lahiri is encouraging donations to organizations such as the Akshaya Patra Foundation for COVID relief, which are working to helping the least fortunate surviving victims in his homeland. Lahiri noted he and his family are not coming forward with a specific fundraising initiative, and he said the foundation cited above is far from the only group doing extremely vital outreach for Indian families who lost means to an income and children who lost parents. In the coming days, he plans to use his social media platforms — @anirbangolf on Twitter and @banstaa on Instagram — to share links to important and trustworthy organizations in need of financial assistance. “The whole idea is to bring that awareness to the golfing audience, especially this part of the world, and encourage them to donate as much as possible to some of the Indian charities,” he said of his decision to share his story on the eve of the John Deere Classic. “The reality is people’s lives have been destroyed. The reality is people don’t have a job. The reality is a lot of futures have been compromised. The way my family, myself and my wife look at it is what can we do to make a better future. It’s about faith in humanity. The pain and the suffering are real. That’s the message I want to send out.” Lahiri’s own immediate future includes two final pre-FedExCup Playoff starts, here at the Deere and at next week’s Barbasol Championship in Nicholasville, Ky., with the hope of continuing his personal post-Covid rebound and improving his FedExCup ranking of 119. Beyond that, he will represent India in a second consecutive Olympiad July 29-Aug. 1 in Tokyo. Given his monthlong absence from the TOUR while recovering from the virus, Lahiri might have opted to bypass the Olympics in favor of playing more TOUR events in advance of the Playoffs, but his sense of duty to country won’t allow that. “In a country where golf is a young game, still maturing and developing, the Olympics is the beacon, it’s the torch of all international sports,” he said. “I’ve seen the impact on badminton a gold medal had in India. I’ve seen the impact on wrestling and shooting, where we’ve had success. If I can somehow do my best and we can see more kids coming out of India on the PGA TOUR, that’s something I would like to leave behind.”

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