Indholdsfortegnelse for August 2018 i Golf Digest

Troy Mullins has worked with several golf instructors, but when the long-drive champion thinks about how she developed her swing, she says intuition deserves most of the credit. “Learning the driver was difficult for me at first, because I only swung irons for the first few years when I began playing,” Mullins says. “But I pick up things quickly, and coming from a track background [she competed in the heptathlon at Cornell University], I started doing what felt right for my body to do when I was throwing the shot put. It was similar.” Specifically, she discovered that generating power with a driver comes from a blend of lateral, rotational and vertical forces—just like it does when throwing an eight-pound shot. "You can tell that she understands how the body…

When you’re done cycling through the typical phases of a golfer’s mental state after hitting one in deeper rough—from disappointment to anger to anguish to finally, resignation—give yourself a healthy slap in the face (glove hand, preferred) and cue the internal “Raiders of the Lost Ark” theme song. You’ve got this. Not only are you going to put the ball back in play, you’re going to give yourself a decent chance of hitting the green. It helps to have the right attitude, but what really matters are the adjustments you make to your club selection, setup and swing. They’re not that complicated, and remembering to do even a few of them can help keep you from playing your next shot a couple of steps in front of where you are…

As technology improved in drivers, heads got bigger. More volume meant more technology to help you hit it farther and straighter. But with today’s irons, it’s sort of the opposite. The goal is to fit springlike face technology into a smaller, more attractive package. “The smaller you get, the more difficult it is,” says Paul Wood, Ping’s vice president of engineering. “There’s less room to pack the benefits of a larger shape.” The goal, he says, is simple: “Make an iron that looks like a muscle-back and flies like a game-improvement iron.” The result is a new category of “players distance” irons that have compact shapes and thin faces that produce faster ball speeds. Another benefit of thin faces? They flex in a way that launches shots higher than traditional…

“My mom and dad cut grass to help pay my entry fees.” In college they called me Roadrunner. My freshman year, I weighed 115 pounds, but I hit these low bullets off the tee that ran out 280 yards. Not exactly Golden Bear, Tiger or Great White Shark, but better to have a nickname than nothing. I WAS A COCKY LITTLE S___. My older brother and our friends learned golf at a Groves, Tex., muny known as The Pea Patch. It had no bunkers, dry water hazards, internal out-of-bounds whose only function was adding interest to the treeless, flat ground—it was about the worst golf course you could imagine. Except the tiny, raised greens taught you to scramble. I’M NOT THE FIRST PGA TOUR WINNER RAISED AT THE PEA PATCH. Chris…

So this sportswriter walks into a press room… ► That sounds like the start of a joke, right? But it isn’t. At this writing, it has been my job to spend one year and four months of my life in Augusta, Ga., covering the Masters for 68 consecutive years. ► That’s a Masters record for journalists that stretches from the Augusta National veranda to a public course in Istanbul. Each day I go to the mailbox to see if the prize money has arrived yet. No luck so far. But it’s been a great gig. I started in the old press tent in 1951. It overflowed with grown men in fedoras bumping into each other, or their folding chairs and Smith-Coronas. A few 40-watt bulbs dangled from the ceiling. There…

I’ve always been interested in the how and why of the golf swing. I want to understand my motion and what I need to do to make adjustments when necessary. I studied physics at SMU, but you don’t need a science degree to grasp that mastering one swing is easier than mastering a variety of them. So with the help of my coach, Mike Schy, I set out to build a single swing that would work no matter what club I was using. I try to make every swing on the same plane, and I have my irons set up so that they’re all the same length, lie angle and swingweight, with the lofts stepped in 4-degree increments. With two wins in less than two seasons on the PGA Tour,…

Entranced by the delicious mingled aroma of pecans on the ground and beetle larvae (grubs) beneath it, and sensing no danger from their chief predator (men with guns), a score or so of feral hogs trotted on comically short legs out of the Trinity River bottom and onto lush, delicious Waterchase Golf Club in Fort Worth. The hungry porkers plunged their spade-like snouts into the soft turf; they can go three feet deep if the digging is good. Within moments, a swath of green had been ripped to pieces, as if by a drunk with a rototiller. When the pigs wallow, it’s even worse. ► Waterchase superintendent Hud Haas, a frequent victim of the nocturnal army, struck back. He filled a five-gallon plastic bucket almost to the brim with corn,…

IT’S NOT EASY BEING NAKED. It’s also not easy acting like it’s easy being naked. That, nonetheless, is rule No. 1 of good locker-room etiquette. Rule No. 2 is, act like it’s no big deal to see other guys being naked. NUDITY, of course, is just one element of locker-room etiquette, but while we’re on it, most of us would prefer to see you nude as little as possible. It’s not that we can’t handle it. But must we? We won’t take you for a prude if you wrap a towel around your waist while you shave or check out “SportsCenter.” We kind of understand why you’d want to remove it on the scales, though. Every ounce counts. BRING A TOWEL to stand on if you worry about germs. Those…

If you asked a lot of golfers how to teach the putting stroke, they might say that when holding the club, the arms and shoulders create a triangle shape that points down at the ball. The goal is keeping that triangle shape intact during the stroke. I get the visual, but I think it’s upside down. The best putters make a stroke where the putterhead creates the triangle’s base and the grip end is the point. Can you picture that? This principle is why anchoring a putter against your chest is now against the rules. It makes putting way easier. Fortunately, you can use my triangle visual without anchoring. It will make your stroke so good, it will seem like cheating. But it isn’t. “Most golfers use way too much…

“I like watching the ball go up in the air, seeing the ball fly.” There’s a laid-back quality to Red Gerard. He’s thoughtful and funny, never rushing. It suggests an unforced confidence, the kind of self-assuredness most teens would love to have. ► But then, Gerard is far from a normal teen. He won the first gold medal for Team USA in the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics. The event was Slopestyle, where snowboarders fly down the course, riding on rails and hitting jumps, hurling their bodies through the air. At 17, he was the youngest U.S. snowboarding gold medalist ever. Gerard and two of his brothers recently moved from Colorado to Carlsbad, Calif. While there, he’s been playing a lot of golf—a game his dad, Conrad, introduced him to as a…

Watching the video of golfer Tony Finau partially dislocating a left-ankle bone—and then reorienting it—while playing in the Masters Par-3 Contest might be as fascinating as it is macabre. Especially knowing what we know now. It was one thing for Finau (above) to stand up and hobble off the course after hurting himself celebrating a hole-in-one; it was a whole other thing to come back the next day and shoot a four-under-par 68 in the first round of the tournament. Finau returned for the final three rounds, too, and somehow finished tied for 10th on an ankle that looked like it was hobbled by Kathy Bates in “Misery.” “Honestly, I don’t know how I did it. It was a miracle,” Finau says. “Three weeks after the Masters, I was still…

“People play for the first time and can’t wait to try again.” Golf instructor Hank Haney is a “fanatic” about it. “Seriously,” he says. “I’m so into it.” Former USGA executive director David Fay calls it “terrific,” adding, “I took one lesson and feel like I got it.” What are they so excited about? A simple racket sport, known as pickleball, that’s finding its way into golf clubs nationwide. ► “It’s a crazy phenomenon,” says Marcin Rozpedski, the 2016 pickleball national champion and sports director at the Lakes Country Club in Palm Desert, Calif. “It’s been out since the ’60s, but in the past two years, it’s grown so quickly.” ► If you’re not one of the reported 2.8 million pickleball players in the United States, here are the basics:…

IT HAPPENED IN AN INSTANT. When I made a swing on the range at Colonial in May 2013, it felt like a knife had been stuck in my back. Completely out of nowhere. I hadn’t known pain like that before, not even when I broke my wrist in eighth grade. This was a stress fracture in my spine, and the only cure was a whole lot of rest. I had no idea one moment could have such a lasting effect. Until then, my life—and especially my golf life—had been pretty charmed. Maybe “charmed” isn’t really the right word, because I had worked really hard to put myself in that perfect position. Everything was playing out just about as it should have. I’m not that cocky. I just expected it to…

EDDIE PEPPERELL will let you know what he’s thinking. Whether taking on life’s amusements and challenges on his provocative Twitter account or posting alternately funny and brooding items to his blog, the 27-year-old pro from England chronicles the roller coaster of a career that experienced an uptick in February with his first European Tour victory. ▶ “I didn’t think winning a tournament would give me as much satisfaction as it has,” he wrote after the Qatar Masters. “It’s made me realize my apathy and lack of interest is mostly a deception I’ve just played on myself.” But, he added, “If I ever get above my station, my sister will put me right. She has a knack for four-letter curses and pinpoint truth-telling.” ▶ Pepperell has endured plenty of humbling moments,…

Whether you find your ball in a difficult lie or you’re playing a hole with a design feature that makes you anxious, these are the moments in any given round that often determine if you stroll or trudge back to the parking lot. To avoid taking big numbers, go with the play that has a higher chance of success—like finding the quickest route back into the fairway from the trees (above). To punch out, play the ball back in your stance and make an easy swing with your 7-iron, focusing on solid contact. Here are four other typically nerve-wracking situations and how to deal with them. MATT WILSON, a Golf Digest Best Young Teacher, is based at Golf Canada in Oakville, Ontario. “PHIL MIGHT GO FOR BROKE, BUT NOT ALL…

“I PLAY GOLF WITH FRIENDS SOMETIMES, BUT THERE ARE NEVER FRIENDLY GAMES.”—BEN HOGAN 4 SIGNS YOU’RE TAKING THE CLUB CHAMPIONSHIP WAY TOO SERIOUSLY ► Unveiling your tournament scripting on Facebook. ► Answering a question from your wife by saying you’ll talk after the round. ► Scheduling two-a-days with your mental coach. ► Renting a car for the week so you can act like it’s a courtesy car. SHIRTS VS. SKINS Want to beat the summer heat? The good and bad of going shirtless, according to Cody Shining, director of golf at Baker’s Bay Golf & Ocean Club in Abaco, Bahamas (where it’s allowed). RELOAD Is your group’s on-course dialogue getting a little tired? We’ve got some suggested alternatives: RECALIBRATING YOUR GOLF-SEASON GOALS 5 THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT GOLF IN…

ARIYA JUTANUGARN was on her way to the worst collapse in major-championship history, blowing a seven-shot lead on the back nine of the final round of the U.S. Women’s Open in June. She needed something good to happen to hold off Hyo-Joo Kim in a playoff—and she got it, ironically, by relying on a part of her game she had just been focusing on prior to the event. She saved par twice from greenside bunkers—the first to extend the two-hole playoff (left) and the second to win it two holes later. Her final bunker shot nearly went in the hole, but she settled for a tap-in par to win her second major. “After the work I had been doing in the bunker, I felt comfortable in that playoff,” she says.…

► The PGA has been played in every month but January, March and April, but when the 100th championship is played Aug. 9-12 at Bellerive Country Club in St. Louis, it will end the traditional late-summer finish to the major-championship season. Golf returning to the Olympics kick-started a shake-up in the sport’s calendar—the 2016 Rio Games moved the PGA out of August for the first time in almost half a century—and prompted the PGA’s long-term move to May beginning next year at Bethpage. ► It has been 26 years since Nick Price won in the PGA’s last visit to Bellerive, born as The Field Club nine-holer in 1897. Just five years after a Robert Trent Jones 18 was opened in 1960, Gary Player completed his career Grand Slam by winning…

WHAT makes a great golf locker room? Is it a storied history, modern luxury or simply an unassuming place to change your shoes? For our latest ranking of America’s 50 Greatest Golf Locker Rooms, we put this question to Golf Digest’s 1,500 course-ranking panelists. The answer, we found, is that no one style of a quality locker room appeals to all, although ones oozing character seem to resonate more. The locker room at Seminole Golf Club, the 1929 Donald Ross design in Juno Beach, Fla., tops our list—just as it did on our 2007 inaugural ranking in Golf Digest Index magazine. “It’s so authentic and unchanged, you could picture Ben Hogan changing his shoes with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth,” says one panelist. Other historic clubs making our…