Japanese golf may have a new star on its hands, but golf definitely has a new Nakajima to appreciate.
Keita Nakajima, the former world amateur No. 1, completed a four-shot victory in the DP World Tour’s Hero Indian Open on Sunday in New Delhi at the DLF Golf and Country Club. It was his second top-five finish of the season and vaulted him to 13th on the Race to Dubai. It also places him in prime position to fulfill his 2024 target of earning graduation to the PGA Tour.
If the name sounds familiar, it’s likely for one of two reasons. The first is that Tsuneyuki Nakajima, better known as Tommy, was the first Japanese golfer to translate prolific form on home soil to regular appearances on the first page of major-championship leaderboards.
Popular with the galleries, the elder Nakajima (no relation of Keita) cracked the top five in the Official World Golf Ranking in the 1980s and recorded six major-championship top 10s but is somewhat unfortunately best remembered for two golfing disasters.
At the 1978 Masters, he played his ball onto his own foot and later dropped a club in a pond, incurring a two-shot penalty for both rules violations, on the way to signing for a 13 at Augusta National’s par-5 13th hole. Three months later, he putted into the Road Hole Bunker on St. Andrews’ Old Course in the Open Championship and needed multiple attempts to escape the trap, prompting British newspaper headline writers to immortalize the incident as “The Sands of Nakajima.”
"I’m very proud to have won on the DP World Tour and very honored to be playing here. I want to try and finish in the top 10 on this tour and then go to the PGA Tour in 2025.”
Keita Nakajima
While the younger Nakajima will be hoping to repeat the successful career of his namesake (who won 48 times on the Japan Tour), he will hope to do so with no outrageous episodes. He also will aim to do most of his winning on the PGA Tour like his hero and countryman, Hideki Matsuyama. Like Matsuyama, Nakajima won the 2021 Asia-Pacific Amateur Championship to qualify to compete in the 2022 Masters, where he missed the cut.
The 23-year-old’s latest triumph is no great surprise after a stellar amateur career and impressive introduction to the paid ranks.
He topped the WAGR for a record 87 weeks (overhauling the previous best of 60 by Jon Rahm), was the first two-time winner of the Mark H. McCormack Medal (in 2021 and 2022), and won the Japan Tour’s 2021 Panasonic Open while still an amateur.
He turned professional in late 2022, finished in a share of 12th at the PGA Tour’s Zozo Championship on debut and was a three-time winner in Japan last year. Those successes helped him win the Order of Merit and with it a DP World Tour card.
He opened the 2024 campaign with a top-five finish in January’s Ras Al Khaimah Championship before completing the wire-to-wire victory Sunday at DLF G&CC in India’s capital. Tied for the lead after an opening round of 7-under-par 65, he went two clear after repeating the score before the cut. A third-round 68 doubled his advantage, and he was fully nine strokes clear as he made the turn on Sunday.
On the notoriously tricky Gary Player Course, there would have been many opportunities for Tommy Nakajima to run up big numbers. Keita Nakajima did make a double bogey at the par-4 14th (a hole that he played in 5-over for the week) and closed with three bogeys in a row, but he was smart enough to avoid catastrophic errors.
“It feels amazing,” he said. “I feel like this is the first win of a new professional career. I’m very proud to have won on the DP World Tour and very honored to be playing here. I want to try and finish in the top 10 on this tour and then go to the PGA Tour in 2025.”
Nakajima is the fifth Japanese winner on the DP World Tour, the third in the past six months and second of the season. Ryo Hisatsune won the Open de France in September and Rikuya Hoshino claimed the Qatar Masters in February.
Matt Cooper