Steady as she goes
October 7, 2022
Aditi Ashok’s golf bag features a bouquet of head covers. Her lowest lofted iron is a 5.
Aditi Ashok is a pleasantly engaging 24-year-old LPGA player from Bangalore, India. The two-time Olympian finished in fourth place in 2020, agonizingly close to a medal. Although she has yet to win an LPGA event in 5 years on tour, Ashok has two Ladies European Tour victories on her resume.
Ashok is an adept putter and short game specialist, which is a very good thing considering her current 235-yard average driving distance puts her in 160th place among her peers. She depends on short game skills to make up for that disadvantage and has done nicely for herself on the LPGA money list.
The Bay Course at the Seaview Resort hosts the ShopRite LPGA Classic presented by Acer. The links-like layout is the shortest on the LPGA Tour, at about 6,100 yards. I decided to watch how Ashok played the course in the second round of the June 2022 edition. She played the first round in even par and based on the overall scoring for the field, it looked like she might be challenged to make the cut.
I should not have been concerned. She shot even par again, tying with thirteen other players for 63d place and making the cut on the number.
I liked several things about the way she played this round, especially the smiling banter between her and her caddie/father Ashok Gudlamani. They discussed most shots as they came up but made decisions quickly.
This may have been the only professional round I witnessed where the golfer made a single birdie, a single bogey, and the rest pars.
Ashok’s lack of distance off the tee was noticeable on several holes, but on others she kept up with her playing partners, Ashleigh Buhai and Yaeeun Hong. Six of Ashok’s drives went from 244 to 256 yards, even while keeping to her normal low trajectory.
On the other hand, the rest of her drives ranged from 200 to 228 yards, often giving up between 20 and 55 yards to Buhai or Hong. That created some difficulties on the long par 4 holes such as the second and sixth.
Ashok came up 10 yards short of the green on the second hole but after a good chip saved par with a putt from two feet. Her chip shot from the front fringe of the sixth green failed to crest a ridge 6 feet from the hole and rolled back to 15 feet away. That led to her only bogey.
A short drive into the right rough on the long par 4 14th led to a second shot that also finished in the rough, about 20 yards from the hole. This time Ashok’s third shot stopped 7 feet past the hole, and she made par.
Ashok made her longest par putt of the day on the long uphill par 3 fifteenth hole. She missed the green and pitched from the left rough to 12 feet below the hole. She made a broad grin after sinking that putt.
Ashok’s distance control was remarkable on most of her first putts. Her only birdie came from 4 feet away on the third hole. However, ten other first putts were from 15 to 30 feet.
Fifteen of those putts finished well inside 3 feet, with 8 of them no more than a foot from the hole. Her last putt for birdie stopped three inches from the 18th hole, resulting in Ashok’s easiest par for the day.
We chatted after the round, focusing first on her putting. “I think the conditions were easier, so I was always looking at birdie today, but I didn’t hole many putts. I felt like I could have. I holed two [long] par putts coming in which was important, but I feel like I could have made three or four birdies and only made one, so maybe [I’ll] try to be more agressive tomorrow, try to hole some birdie putts,” she said.
Ashok also discussed lengthening her drives. “Yeah, I’m kind of working on getting more speed with the driver,” she said. “This week hitting low helps because you can use the fairway to run out, but I’m trying to get more speed and hit it center of the club face more often. Because as the speed goes up sometimes you mishit it and that costs more than swing speed. You are almost better off swinging it not 100 percent but hitting the center every time. So that’s what I’m working on,” she said.
Ashok’s final round the next day was a bit more varied. She made five birdies and three bogeys for a 2-under par 69. That tied her for 42d with eleven other players and resulted in a $7,021 payday.
Local club competition results
The Kings Creek Ladies 9-Hole group played a Low Net game Sept. 29. Katie Heintz won first place in the first flight, with Amy Micholas in second and Kim Parks in third.
Celeste Beaupre won the second flight, with Anne Farley in second and Carol Loewen in third.