Indholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2024 i Golf Digest

THIRTY-SIX HOURS AFTER Bryson DeChambeau left Kentucky, drained from a thrilling Sunday 65 and runner-up finish to Xander Schauffele at the PGA Championship, he welcomed a Golf Digest production crew into his under-construction Dallas home with enthusiasm. He loves the camera, and these days more than ever, the camera loves him right back. This is curious because not many eyeballs are seeing LIV. Even the majors and the PGA Tour, from which DeChambeau was an early defector, are wrestling with down ratings this year. The TV executives have plausible excuses—incomplete accounting for streaming, fluky weather, an early string of no-name winners—but the direction the grass blades are fluttering is clear. All the fighting among wealthy tour pros has grown tiresome, and much of the pandemic boom of new golfers and…

I APPRECIATE LANDSCAPING AND golf-course design the way many people appreciate art. That’s why I’ve spent nearly two years developing my second golf-course replica hole. Now that it is completed, I confess I enjoy staring at it as much as I do playing it. Whether it’s during the day or lighted at night, I look out at it with satisfaction and appreciation for its aesthetics and the little challenges it presents. Several years ago, the grind of traveling from Pebble Beach to my CBS assignments and other business ventures was amounting to more than 500 hours a year in the air. We were in serious need of a geographic alternative that would mean less travel and more time at home with the family. Fortunately, we found the perfect proximity fix…

Royal Troon Golf Club in Scotland, host of the 152nd Open Championship, is exactly what we envision links golf to be, an out-and-back stroll across a sublime crescent of tousled nature, one dune in from the sea, the rumpled turf dogtrotting through buckshot patterns of stern and sod-faced pot bunkers. It’s also not quite what we envision, a droll march over bland and barren regions of flattish fairway, a dead-end turn at a holiday park (what in the United States we call a trailer park) and airplanes strafing play from nearby runways. When Open Championships are played at Troon, which has happened nine previous times since 1923, the links can extract the best from titans like Bobby Locke, Arnold Palmer and Tom Watson. Troon is also capable of producing clunkers…

YOU MIGHT BE wondering why a person who makes a living teaching golf would want to show you how to play better without needing one of my lessons. Good question. Ideally you would come visit me or one of my academy instructors when problems arise, but I know a lot of times that’s not practical. So in a bit of the paying-it-forward spirit, I wrote a book that addresses 72 of golf’s most menacing issues from tee to green and explains how to fix them without me—or any other teacher for that matter. My new book—Fix It Yourself—is very much a self-help troubleshooting guide. In this article, I’m going to give you a sample of some of the common issues addressed in the book and teach you how to teach yourself.…

For Golf Digest+ members, lower scores start with asking the right questions WE CAN LEARN to think like the best players in the world, but as sport psychologist Dr. Bhrett McCabe explains, there are numerous landmines, or mental mistakes, that we commonly make on the course that cause our scores to sufer. McCabe joined us for the Golf Digest Happy Hour, our live webinar series with golf experts, offered exclusively for Golf Digest+ members. This Q&A, selected from the one-hour interview, has been edited for clarity and concision. Many of us get frustrated when we can’t take our range game to the course. How do we fix that? One of the biggest concepts I teach is called capability and capacity. We are all capable of something. Scottie Scheffler and players…

THE FIRST TIME the term might have been used was at Royal St. George’s in 1999 when golf’s boulevardier Jimmy Dunne was playing a casual match with his friend Frank Brennan while attending Wimbledon. On the long par-3 11th hole, Brennan hit a slight hook into the right side of the green and appeared satisfied with the result as he turned to put away his club. “Hey, Frankie, take a look at this,” chirped Jimmy, as the ball slowly slid off the left edge of the green into a sod-faced bunker that Dunne described to me recently as resembling a World War I foxhole. “I hate this golf course,” Brennan said. “You didn’t hit the green in regulation,” exulted Dunne. “You visited the green in regulation.” Pete Sampras won Wimbledon…

ON RANDY SMITH Few coaches have worked with players from elementary school through winning major championships. Randy Smith has done it twice—first with Justin Leonard and now as Scottie Scheffler’s coach of more than 20 years. They started together when Scheffler’s parents moved to Dallas and joined Royal Oaks Country Club, Smith’s home base since 1977. The precocious 6-year-old arrived to the Royal Oaks range in 2002 and grew in what was an almost perfect setting for a student with an insatiable appetite for improvement and competition. Here Smith, a Golf Digest Teaching Professional for more than 25 years and a member of the inaugural class of our Legends of Golf Instruction, as well as the winner of more national awards from the PGA of America than anyone in history—18…

ONE THING I SEE WITH MOST amateurs, especially slicers, is that they don’t know how to take the club back the correct way, a key to accuracy and solid ball-striking. Whereas the best players lift the club up using their shoulders to start the backswing, the average golfer takes the club away very low to the ground and to the inside, behind the body. As a result, they have to make all sorts of in-swing compensations to get the club and body back in position to finish the swing. Watching 3-D motion-capture video of the pros, it’s evident there’s some early lifting of the club from underneath the shaft during the initial stages of the backswing. There’s no twisting or sideways pressure on the grip that pulls the club to…

WHICH IMPROVEMENT WOULD BENEFIT YOUR GAME MOST? We asked Golf Digest readers the above question for our March 2008 issue. Sixteen years later, we posed the question again to Golf Digest+ members. Lou Stagner, the data insights lead at Arccos, says that members’ inclinations are backed by statistics: “Ball-striking is king,” he says. Our members are looking for more consistency, which Stagner emphasizes is less about hitting great shots and more about limiting big misses. “I’ve compared average players’ driving statistics in their best rounds to their worst rounds and found that there isn’t a big difference in fairways hit, but when you look at how many penalty shots were in each, there is a huge discrepancy.”…

FOR MOST GOLFERS, pandemic work from home meant getting in a few more rounds. For Marc Hanson, it meant getting into the golf business. Hanson had moved into customer management for a global healthcare company after retiring from the Navy as a lieutenant commander in 2014. The pandemic both packed his clients’ calendars and freed up his with travel restricted. “I had time on my hands that I wasn’t using, and I was trying to think of something to get my brother for Christmas,” Hanson says. He decided to try to make a barrel-type headcover in the style of makers like Seamus out of a keepsake pin flag his brother had given him years ago from an outing at Newport Country Club. After a month of trying—and destroying an antique…

THE MOST IMPORTANT DEVELOPMENT IN golf-course architecture during the past 20 years is the elevation of sand-based sites. Encouraged by the success of destinations like Bandon Dunes, developers have spent this time scouring the globe for sandy, dunes-like properties on which to construct new courses and lure golfers, several of which make their debut on the Golf Digest 2024-2025 World’s 100 Greatest Courses, our ranking of courses outside the United States. This is nothing new. The first golf courses—the links of Scotland, England, Ireland and Wales—were born from sand. Early golfers forged their way through the gorsed and grassy landscapes of dunes, kettles, eskers and seaside plains, chasing their balls while developing holes, which over time became fully realized courses. Advancements in construction methods throughout the 20th century enabled courses…

THE PGA TOUR DOESN’T HAVE weight classes, but if it did, Min Woo Lee would be near the top of its pound-for-pound rankings. Lee, 25, weighs 155 pounds, yet consistently ranks among the leaders in driving distance. Last year, as a PGA Tour rookie, he averaged 316.5 yards. Through 10 tournaments this season, he was averaging 311.8 yards and an incredible 188 miles per hour in ball speed. At slightly more than two yards per pound, few players squeeze more out of their lean frame. Yet golf wasn’t Lee’s first love. “I thought it was a boring old-men’s sport where you have to wear long pants,” he says. But that served as a blessing in disguise for his golf swing. Lee spent the early part of his youth playing soccer,…