Indholdsfortegnelse for December/January 2020 i Golf Digest

Editor-in-Chief “Gently nudging us toward our better selves.” A frenchman once observed that a happy marriage is a long conversation which always seems too short. It applies to so many cherished things in life, including a round of golf. But the heart of Golf Digest is especially heavy this month because it applies to our long/short friendship with Kathy Kelly Stachura, the magazine’s chief fact-checker and the person most responsible for the trust you put in practically everything you’ve read in Golf Digest. She walked out of Fairfield University and into our lives almost 35 years ago as my first executive assistant and turned in her last assignment—vetting the honorees for The Arnie Awards in this issue—a day before a heart attack at age 56 took her from us and…

IT’S ONE THING to be representing your country in a Presidents Cup, says Australian tour player Cameron Smith, but it’s far more special when that competition is in your home country. When the matches between the United States and a roster of international players begin, Dec. 12-15 at the Royal Melbourne Golf Club, Smith knows he’ll be feeling extra pressure to perform well for the home crowd. “But I love pressure,” he says. One thing that will aid in his goal to function under duress is the simplicity of his swing, says coach Grant Field. The two began working together when Smith was 10. “He’s very much an on-plane swinger,” Field says. “There’s not much that can go wrong. It’s a simple, connected, repeatable golf swing.” That word connected is…

ATER VISITING WINGED FOOT GOLF CLUB in preparation for the 2006 U.S. Open, Phil Mickelson asked Callaway club designer Roger Cleveland to make him a 64-degree wedge with a lot less bounce than normal. Phil wanted help playing out of Winged Foot’s deep bunkers and getting the ball to stop quicker on its undulating greens. Although Lefty came up short of the title that week, he used that club to great effect, noting it saved him one or two shots a round, possibly more. His use stirred interest in the concept with a lot of everyday golfers, and equipment companies began making such clubs available in their wedge lines. It’s a practice that continues. Unfortunately, everyday players are not enjoying Mickelson’s success with the 64-degree wedge. Data from Cobra Golf…

THE COMMON MISTAKE when putting up or down a slope is to adjust the force applied in the stroke. In other words, giving the ball a whack when you need to get it up on another tier, or gently tapping it when it’s all downhill to the hole. If you’re adjusting how hard you hit the ball from putt to putt, you’ll lose your rhythm, and getting the speed right becomes a matter of luck, not skill. Here’s a way to take control of these uphill and downhill putts so that even when you do miss, the next one is a tap-in. Let’s start with the downhill one I’m hitting here. When you’re in a similar situation, before you take the club back, imagine the hole is closer to you…

TIGER WOODS is one of the most exacting players on tour at testing golf equipment. That’s especially true for balls, where his process is lengthy, his feedback specific and his wants on performance clearly communicated. Woods will begin playing Bridgestone’s 2020 Tour B XS ball at the Hero World Challenge in December, and when he tees it up, it will mark the culmination of nearly two years of testing. I was fortunate enough to have exclusive access to one of the earliest sessions, in February 2019, at Woods’ home course at Medalist Golf Club in Hobe Sound, Fla. Having attended a similar testing session with Woods and Nike in 2003, I was eager to see if his approach had changed. As it turned out, it had remained pretty much intact,…

Q How do you tell good friends they’re taking way too much time? They’re fabulous people, but it’s becoming very difficult to continue playing with them. We’ve tried pointing out that we’re two holes behind the group in front of us and that we’re holding up the group behind us. Nothing helps. —CINDY WILSON, LAS VEGAS A Those “fabulous people” are golf’s equivalent of folks who drive 55 miles per hour in the left lane of the freeway. Though many don’t realize they’re disrupting traffic, there are some who slow down even more if you call attention to their slowness by flashing your brights. It’s a ticklish case, one usually addressed with gentle criticism and “while we’re young” gibes. Here’s another solution: Grab your phone, make a video of the…

ALABAMA 1 MARK BLACKBURN (17) Blackburn Golf Academy at Greystone G. & C.C., Birmingham 2 TONY RUGGIERO (43) C.C. of Mobile 3 WAYNE FLINT Highland Park G. Cse., Birmingham 4 ERIC ESHLEMAN C.C. of Birmingham 5 JACKSON KOERT Lakewood G.C., Point Clear 6 MORGAN HALE C.C. of Mobile 7 BRIAN SPEAKMAN Blackburn Golf Academy at Greystone G. & C.C., Birmingham 8 WADE HAMILTON Montgomery C.C. 9 REA SCHUESSLER Schuessler Golf, Gulf Shores G.C. 10 CRAIG BOCKING The Ledges of Huntsville 11 NEIL THOMPSON Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail at Oxmoor Valley, Birmingham 12 SHANE ALLEN Heron Lakes C.C., Mobile SET UP FOR AN ATHLETIC SWING It’s true that a good golf swing is a coordinated movement requiring an athletic setup. But I often see golfers try to get “athletic” by…

CAMERON SMITH says he has played at the Royal Melbourne Golf Club, site of the 2019 Presidents Cup (Dec. 12-15), at least 10 times. But when he’s asked to describe how its two courses play (they’ll be using 12 holes from the West Course and six from the East for the Cup), he goes silent for a bit. “That’s hard to say. Every time I’ve been down there, it wants something different from your game,” he says. “One thing is for sure about Royal Melbourne: You have to make adjustments to how you play.” Smith, a rookie on the international team and native of Brisbane about 1,000 miles to the north, says most of the courses in the Melbourne area have similar features including fairways that are firm and fast,…

MANY TIMES your standard chip shot just won’t do, like when you need a higher shot for a close pin or a lower shot to get to the other side of the green. To adjust trajectory, most golfers play the ball farther forward or back in their stance. But changing the ball’s position can throw off the start line of the shot and your contact. Instead, change how far you stand from the ball: farther away for a high shot (right), closer for a low shot (below). Notice the height of my hands is the same for both shots. To get in the closer stance, all I did was grip down a few inches. Why does your distance from the ball change its trajectory? It establishes the angle of the…

Shattering expectations after his first shot broke a neighbor’s window. THE PAR-5 eighth hole at famed Bel-Air Country Club in Los Angeles is the scene of some of the more bizarre, albeit trivial, moments in history. It was there that Howard Hughes, a 2-handicapper, landed his single-engine plane in the middle of the fairway, exited and joined the woman he hoped to court—Katharine Hepburn—for a few holes. Club officials, needless to say, were not amused. The eighth also is where Barron Hilton, playing with his friend Alex Spanos in 1981, mentioned on the tee that he was interested in selling the last portion of his professional football team, the San Diego Chargers. By the time they walked off the green 15 minutes later, the two had a handshake deal that…

THE COODY BROTHERS deprived the golf world of a potentially electrifying storyline when they committed to the University of Texas. Parker and Pierceson, twins from Plano, Texas, had narrowed their college choices to Texas and Oklahoma State. Their father, Kyle Coody, who played golf at Texas (their grandfather is 1971 Masters champion Charles Coody), encouraged the boys to go their own directions, even separately. After a long back-and-forth recruiting process, Kyle asked them to write their selected school on pieces of paper—neither knew who the other had chosen. Kyle turned the papers over: Texas. In an alternate future, Texas and Oklahoma State, a Coody on each team, might have faced each other in the NCAA finals—a strong possibility given the recent history and perennial prominence of each program. It would…

THE NEW AND IMPROVED Rules of Golf, which went into effect at the beginning of 2019, were supposed to make things simpler. Or so we thought. Four days into 2019, we already had our first rules issue of the year at the Sentry Tournament of Champions, when Dustin Johnson incurred a two-stroke penalty for playing the wrong ball. It wasn’t an infraction of a new rule, but it was a sign of things to come. Below we rank the 10 most notable rules incidents of 2019, from least crazy to absolutely bonkers. 10 HAROLD VARNER III THE PLAYERS CHAMPIONSHIP Varner cracked his driver just before the opening round and replaced it during his round, which is allowed. What’s not allowed is assembling the club on the course during play, which…

1 CALLAWAY EPIC FLASH A molded tungsten weight sits in the sole to fuel higher launch. Internal rods connect the crown and sole, focusing more flexing in the wraparound cupface. $300/CLUB 2 TITLEIST TS2/TS3 The TS2 is for sweepers, and the TS3 for those who hit down on the ball, but both have the thinnest face in company history for more ball speed. $280/CLUB 3 COBRA T-RAIL This set of hybrid-like irons, including a full hybrid 4-iron, uses hollow shapes and turf-riding rails on the sole to move weight low for a higher launch. $900/SET 4 CLEVELAND LAUNCHER HALO The high-strength steel face insert provides the distance, and the sole rails solve problems, smoothly moving the head through all sorts of lies. $200/CLUB IF YOU THINK BUYING a set of…

ONE LOOK at the fall foliage embracing Sugarloaf Golf Club in the mountains of western Maine, with shades of burgundy, burnt orange and saffron dominating the landscape, and we’re reminded that one of the best aspects of golf is the wide variety of courses available for play. Sugarloaf, sitting at the base of a ski mountain of the same name, was carved from dense trees, mostly silver birch but also firs and spruce, in the early 1980s by architect Robert Trent Jones Jr. and his then-associate, Kyle Phillips. It hasn’t changed much since except for the rebuilding of the 14th and 15th greens, swept away by floods caused by Hurricane Bob in 1991, and for the filling in of some bunkers a decade ago to remove a few duffer headaches.…

WHEN THE USGA AND R&A modernized the Rules of Golf in 2019—the most comprehensive update in decades—the governing bodies challenged the stereotype that they’re resistant to change. They’re set to do that again with the launch of the World Handicap System, which starting in 2020 will consolidate the half-dozen handicap calculations previously used around the world into a single, portable Index. U.S. golfers might be relieved to learn the new WHS closely resembles the former USGA system. The formula to calculate a Handicap Index remains average-based. Steve Edmondson, USGA director of handicap and course rating, says the difference between a player’s WHS Index and USGA Index will be typically within one- or two-tenths of a point. But there are distinctions with the WHS golfers should understand when the system goes…

BUTCH HARMON has given a gazillion golf lessons. This time, he took one. Harmon had been watching from afar the way George Gankas operates: the improp-tu videos on social, his star student Matthew Wolff’s loop-de-loop swing, the lessons in Gucci slides and a flat brim. Butch liked that Gankas was pushing golf’s traditions, and he saw in him the unapologetic self-belief for which Harmon is known. Butch wanted to meet the guy, and what better way than stand on his lesson tee? “People said to me, ‘He’s wacky, why do you want to do that?’ ” says Harmon, who this month retains his ranking as the No. 1 teacher in America, as voted by his peers, for the 19th straight year (see page 67). “I like people who are different.…

HERE’S WHY I DON’T GAMBLE. Last winter, after I compiled the list of nominees for Golf Digest’s 2019 Best New Courses survey, I privately handicapped the chances of each course, just for my amusement. I gave long odds to Gil Hanse’s entry in the private category, Ohoopee Match Club, an exclusive course in rural Georgia designed to cater to match play, with a total of 22 holes in two routings. Though it sounded like a fascinating concept, I figured that because our evaluation criteria seems tailored toward stroke-play competition, panelists would struggle to fit our square pegs into Ohoopee’s offbeat golf holes. Especially because panelists would be judging courses in 2019 (and thereafter) using a newly revised set of evaluation categories. Shot Values has become Shot Options, the simplified definition…

THE PROJECT is called Lift Orlando, a revitalization initiative west of downtown in a neighborhood of communities known as West Lakes. Begun in 2012 and supported by dozens of the city’s business and civic leaders, it’s the kind of effort that the late Arnold and Winnie Palmer would have embraced. “Everyone knows about our association with the hospital here in Orlando,” says Amy Saunders, the Palmers’ younger daughter, chair of the Arnold & Winnie Palmer Foundation and Arnold Palmer Enterprises. “When we looked at the opportunity to do something else in our community beyond our commitment to the Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children and the Winnie Palmer Hospital for Women & Babies, Lift Orlando really spoke to us for what it means to people here and how it corresponds to…