Indholdsfortegnelse for June 2023 i Golf Digest

WELCOME TO JUNE, the most perfect golf weather of the year for the widest swath of the country. It’s when the USGA conducts the U.S. Open because it can comfortably rotate among sites from California to Massachusetts to Wisconsin to North Carolina to Washington and beyond. We also have a new federal holiday, Juneteenth, which received official designation in 2021. So far 21 states have made it a permanent paid day off. The name, of course, derives from the contraction of June 19th, a date many communities have recognized since 1865 when Union Army General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, to inform people the Civil War had ended and their liberation had begun. If our other federal holidays are an indication, Americans will use any day off to do…

PLAY THE FISHERS ISLAND CLUB and you will wish you could take a bit of the panoramic water views and beachside classic Seth Raynor vibe from this ultra-exclusive island tucked between New York and Connecticut with you when you leave. You can’t, but Bronya Shillo figures she can offer the next best thing. Shillo’s family bought the island’s only publicly accessible restaurant-bar, The Pequot Inn, back in the 1990s, and Shillo spent her summers off from playing college basketball at nearby Salve Regina University in Newport, R.I., slinging drinks for the 200-some residents who stay on the island full-time and the more than 2,000 who retreat to their “cottages” there in the summer. The most popular drink on the cock-tail menu is the “FIL,” a concoction of vodka, whiskey, lemonade…

For 10-time Grammy-nominated producer, modern-day philosopher and unwavering beacon of positivity DJ Khaled, life boils down to four things: family, music, God and golf—not necessarily in that order. Khaled, who was raised in New Orleans and Orlando before moving to Miami, tried golf in his teens. His best friend lived next to Bay Hill Club. “We was crazy,” he says. “We would try to jump golf carts over bunkers.” Now 47, Khaled only recently has become captivated by the game. Now the music industry’s busiest man is up to his eyeballs in golf and loving every second of it. He just got fitted for a new set of PXGs, each club custom stamped with everything from the title of his 2007 album “We the Best” on the face of his…

On the 18th hole at Pebble Beach Golf Links, with seals barking in the background and the sun peeking in and out from behind the clouds, a group of teenage golfers stood in disbelief. Were they really going to get a chance to play this legendary course? Out of roughly three million participants in The First Tee program, which was created 26 years ago to introduce children of all economic levels to the game of golf, these 78 kids were invited to compete alongside senior-tour professionals in the PGA Tour Champions PURE Insurance Championship in September 2022. With pro golf returning to Pebble Beach in July for the U.S. Women’s Open, it seems a fitting time to have some of these young competitors share their success stories and impart a…

My home country, Australia, produces a lot of great putters. My theory is that the greens back home are not as manicured and smooth as they are in the United States, so we have to get very good at rolling the ball on less-than-perfect surfaces. When we come here, it’s like putting in a video game. Since the strokes gained/putting stat was introduced in 2011, four Aussies—Greg Chalmers, Aaron Baddeley, Jason Day and yours truly—have ranked No. 1 on the PGA Tour in that category. Chalmers did it twice. Another, Cam Smith, was top 10 twice. You can learn quite a bit from our methods—like how Badds is all wrapped up in the putt, not his stroke. I also like how Jason is so deliberate in his process. Me? I’m…

DESPITE BREAKING HIS RIGHT arm last season, Pierceson Coody still managed to lead the University of Texas to a national title, then turn professional and win his third start on the Korn Ferry Tour. He was on the cusp of earning his PGA Tour card when he broke the hamate bone in his left hand, but a hot start to 2023—including a second Korn Ferry win in Panama in February—has him closer to living out his PGA Tour dream in 2024. Coody has already shown he has the mettle and length to compete on the PGA Tour, turning four sponsor exemptions into three made cuts, including a T-14 at the Arnold Palmer Invitational in March. Despite his smallish stature (5-foot-9, 175 pounds), the 23-year-old can crush it. In seven Korn…

ONE OF THE DUMBEST knocks we hear on a recurring basis is, “You know what makes a great caddie? A great player.” Well, that’s nonsense. There are a ton of caddies who have taken their players to another level as well as ones who have weighed their players down. I realize a list of bad caddies might be juicer (I need a few beers in me to get those names out), but let’s stick with the good ones. I’m going to fill you in on a “greatest caddies” ranking that a friend and I were putting together recently. These are guys currently looping on the PGA Tour, so we don’t discuss the likes of Peter Coleman (Bern-hard Langer), Fanny Sunesson (Nick Faldo), Herman Mitchell (Lee Trevino) and Andy Martinez (Johnny…

WHEN I CALL MY 90-year-old father at his assisted-living complex in Peter-borough, N.H., he greets me with his usual refrain. “I’m alive,” he cracks, his favorite one liner ever since his wife, Jonna, called in 2017, urging me to get to New Hampshire quickly. “Come now—it might be the last time you speak to him while he still remembers who you are.” My father suffers from vascular dementia, brain damage caused by a loss of blood flow to the brain that impairs a person’s memory and ability to think and reason. He has lost all short-term recall but has some familiar and motor memories more reliant on the brain’s cortex and deeper structures, which survive longer. My father cannot remember my name or that he fathered six children and later…

MY OLD BOSS NICK SEITZ used to tell the story of going to lunch with Ben Hogan at Shady Oaks Country Club in Fort Worth. When the club manager came over to their table, Hogan introduced him to Nick. “This guy has 15 kids,” Hogan said. Inscrutably, he added, “Effed himself right out of a seat in the station wagon.” I always liked that story. It said so much about Hogan and his saltiness. There’s a similar one about Bobby Jones, who was negotiating a book deal with his publisher, which had offered him an insulting advance fee. “Ahhh wouldn’t walk across the effn’ street for faaahv thousand dollaaahs,” Jones famously said in his languorous Georgia drawl. Of course, neither man actually used the euphemism. They said the word and…

THE LAST TIME THE U.S. OPEN TEED OFF IN Los Angeles, Harry Truman was president, Stalin still controlled the Soviet Union, interstate highways didn’t exist and “The Ed Sullivan Show” was 10 days from its debut. Ben Hogan had yet to win an Open, but that would change that week in 1948 with his two-shot victory over Jimmy Demaret at Riviera Country Club, Hogan’s third win at the course in 16 months, including two Los Angeles Opens. L.A. had worked its magic and found a star. It center-staged arguably the generation’s greatest player and set in motion one of sport’s most mythic comeback stories. Then, remarkably for a city so enamored with sequels, nothing else happened. For reasons to do with the small number of clubs with the status, space…

How far away are you from playing better? The answer is probably in a different form—and easier to accomplish—than you think. Instead of using superficial metrics such as the figure on your handicap card, the number of lessons you take, the amount of practice you put in, or the months on the calendar, consider your improvement plan the way tour pros think about getting better. That means making the results of the shots you hit move closer to the average performance of players who are a little better than you. What does that look like? Instead of thinking about everything you have to do to break 100, 90 or 80—which can be daunting—split it into manageable, measurable parts. This might sound strange at first, but all you need to do…