ADITI ASHOK
AGE 23 • BANGALORE, INDIA
It would be an exaggeration to say that Aditi Ashok came from nowhere to establish a promising career as a tour player. After all, she grew up in Bangalore, India—a city of almost nine million people. But in golf vernacular, India really is out-of-bounds. It has just 200 courses for 150,000 golfers, out of a total population of 1.4 billion. Even though Ashok represented India in women’s golf at the Rio Games as a newly minted 18-year-old professional, more than half of Indian sports fans surveyed ahead of the Games didn’t even know golf had returned as an Olympic sport.
Ashok aims to change that, in Tokyo and on the LPGA and LET tours. “I read that after the Olympics, Google searches for golf in India were huge,” says Ashok, who started playing at age 5 when she and her parents began taking lessons at Bangalore Golf Club—one of the oldest clubs in the world outside the British Isles (established in 1876). “Just seeing the impact it had and the exposure it got at the time was a big deal for me.”
The Rio Olympics were just the next step in a progression that saw Ashok become one of the most decorated young players in the game. After thrashing the limited amateur competition in India—she won the National Women’s Amateur as a 13-year-old in 2011 and was a three-time national junior champion—Ashok validated those credentials by winning the Ladies British Amateur Open Stroke Play in 2015. She turned pro in
2016 and had one of the best seasons for an 18-year-old this side of Tiger Woods. Flashing a deadly short game that offsets below-average length, Ashok briefly led in
Rio during the second round before fading to 41st. After the Games, she made a successful trip through LPGA qualifying school and followed it with her first two professional wins back-to-back weeks at the Hero Women’s Indian Open and Qatar Ladies Open.
Since then, Ashok has been trying to juggle playing the American and European professional tours while navigating the severe COVID challenges facing Bangalore and all of India. For months, she was restricted to hitting balls into a sheet on the terrace of her parents’ home in Bangalore, and travel restrictions limited her to just a handful of LPGA events in the first half of 2021—and none in Europe—before she got back to work in mid-June.
“I’m the kind of golfer who thrives on momentum,” she says. “There’s no right time for things you can’t control, but the world is dealing with bigger things right now.”
FOR MONTHS, SHE WAS RESTRICTED TO HITTING BALLS INTO A SHEET ON THE TERRACE OF HER PARENTS’ HOME IN BANGALORE.