Indholdsfortegnelse for January - February 2024 i Golf Magazine

Paradym Ai Smoke Max 9.5˚, 10.5˚, 12˚ / $600 INTUITIVE FACE TECHNOLOGY FOR GAME-CHANGING ACCURACY Recreational golfers are accustomed to seeing it every January: equipment manufacturers touting new drivers as noticeably better than their predecessors—with internal testing (i.e., by them) to prove it. This year, one clubmaker, Callaway, invited us to see for ourselves. So we dialed up Golf Laboratories’ swing robot and our own player testing to take a hard look at the proposed performance traits of all four new Paradym Ai Smoke drivers. Based on our nine-point face-mapping test, the micro deflections dotting Callaway’s Ai Smart Face (the ones you see on the previous page) impacted performance in a meaningful way, particularly on mishits. The carry distance on Triple Diamond toe strikes improved by more than 11 yards…

Clubhouse GOLF.COM / SMART GOLF STARTS HERE / JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2024 ALBANY, BAHAMAS, IN BETWEEN SHOTS DURING A PRACTICE ROUND AT THE ’23 HERO WORLD CHALLENGE Dylan Dethier: From the outside it seems like 2023 was a killer year for you. You won a PGA Tour event at Pebble Beach, had an awesome Ryder Cup in Rome, had some real moments of a renaissance. Did it feel just that satisfying to you? Justin Rose: Yeah, for sure. It was a year to get back into events that really matter, know what I mean? I’d been on a little downward spiral for a couple seasons. There’s a lot that goes into why that is, but getting out of it is hard. I feel motivated and I feel hungry. And look, before any good…

Scan here to visit Fairway Jockey, discover more about the Player+ and purchase one for yourself. WITH A WIDE RANGE of distance measuring devices in its product line, Blue Tees has you (and your hazards) covered, but the Player+ GPS speaker just might be the slickest unit in the shop. With a premium-quality Bluetooth speaker and multifunction touchscreen, the Player+ ($249) shuffles through your favorite tunes while taking time to shout out yardages and club selection. If you’d rather just read your distances and listen to music, you can do that too. The Blue Tees Game App includes more than 40,000 courses and keeps track of your swing data and scorecard history. Enjoy an elevated level of accuracy and awesome all-day audio.…

FINDING THE RIGHT GRIND and bounce angle makes it much easier to hit those lower-flying, higher-spinning wedge shots you see on the pro Tours. I’ve done blind spec tests with clients over the years, and it’s been fascinating to see, at times, a lifelong low-bounce player suddenly start throwing darts with a high-bounce wedge. It speaks to the importance of wedge fitting. My advice: Find the nearest Titleist Vokey fitting center near you (vokey.com) and spend an hour or two hitting different wedges from different lies. As it does in all fittings, one set of grinds and bounces will outperform the rest. To really fine-tune your ability to wedge it higher or lower, get your new fitted Vokeys stamped with your “Flight Lines.” These small hosel markings help you set…

Discover tons of comprehensive coverage on all things equipment when you head to GOLF.com/gear THERE ARE A LOT of ways to customize your golf clubs to show off your personality, and one of the easiest ways to do so on almost any club is by changing the paint fill of numbers, words and other markings.…

IN 2019, Odyssey started taking a closer look at ways to improve distance control on the greens with the help of Artificial Intelligence. Similar to how A.I. learning has helped retain ball speed on Callaway’s metal woods and irons, Odyssey started to notice how machine learning could improve ball speed off the putterface as well. The end result is two different inserts: Ai-ONE and Ai-ONE Milled. The Ai-ONE is a co-molded insert featuring a grooved urethane layer and aluminum backer that’s designed to produce a softer feel. The Ai-ONE Milled, on the other hand, is made from titanium and designed to deliver a more crisp feedback at impact. Each putter is equipped with Odyssey’s newest Stroke Lab shaft to help better distribute mass through the whole club and promote a…

WHAT’S IN A YEAR? A whole lot. The PGA Tour enters its first full season in the Signature Events model. Eight big-money, limitedfield tourneys now dot the calendar. LIV counters with its second 14-event season but with a shifting cast of host courses, while the LPGA and Champions Tour hold to their tried-and-true ways. In 2024, the golf calendar appears to be taking its final form after years of innovation. But appears is the operative word. Change has been relentless in pro golf, but we guarantee that these highlights of the new year are a lock. FEBRUARY 1-4 AT&T PEBBLE BEACH PRO-AM The Signature Events series heads to Pebble, appropriately turning this into a premier stop on the new PGA Tour calendar. FEBRUARY 8-11 WM PHOENIX OPEN The greatest show…

Ask Jon Rahm to pick out the seminal shot from his triumphant week at the 2023 Ryder Cup and he doesn’t hesitate: “The putt on 18.” That would be the 90-footer on Sunday during his singles match against Scottie Scheffler. Needing at least birdie to secure an allimportant half point for the Europeans, Rahm sized up the cross-country putt and gave it a rap. The ball hugged every contour of the putting surface before finishing mere inches from the cup. When Scheffler failed to get up-and-down, Rahm wrested away a share of the spoils. “I actually heeled it pretty good,” he said of the putt. Rahm’s admission offers an exciting peek into what’s in the gear space pipeline in 2024. For the past decade, driver and iron technology has dominated…

40 Typical weight, in pounds, of a Tour pro’s staff bag. 55 Approximate weight, in pounds, of Bryson DeChambeau’s bag in 2021, according to his thencaddie Brian Zeigler. 40 Typical distance, in miles, walked by a professional caddie in one tournament week. 10.4 Total distance, in miles, run by Emmitt Smith, the NFL’s all-time rushing leader (18,355 yards) in his 15-year career. 129 Members inducted into the Caddie Hall of Fame. 20 Approximate number of them with oddball nicknames, like “Cricket,” “Squeaky,” “Gado,” “Gorgus,” “Rabbit,” “Cotton” and “Creamy.” 8 (or 9) Height disparity, in inches, between Tommy Fleetwood and his towering bagman Ian Finnis. 14 Most major wins by a caddie. Steve Williams’ stunning major run with Tiger Woods (13, plus another major win with Adam Scott) more than doubles…

COURSE MANAGEMENT 1. CYPRESS POINT “Perfection. My favorite course to play by a mile.” 2. ST. ANDREWS “How about a Ryder Cup?” 3. SHINNECOCK “The best test for top players (not me) in the U.S.” 4. ROYAL DORNOCH “Northern Scotland has some fantastic courses.” 5. AUGUSTA NATIONAL “On a late-Sunday afternoon in April, a truly amazing place to be.” 6. NATIONAL GOLF LINKS “Golf’s version of Wrigley Field. Oldschool beauty.” 7. SEMINOLE “Donald Ross gem. The best locker room in the business. And you can wear shorts, just for starters.” 8. CHICAGO GC “Classic course with a classic caddie program.” 9. NORTH BERWICK “Great course. Great town.” 10. NEW SMYRNA BEACH GC “Thank you so much for giving a kid a chance to fall in love with the great game.”…

THINK / PLAY / LIVE: THE ENLIGHTENED GAME Lessons FIX YOUR STANCE ISSUES Positioning your feet correctly at setup goes a long way in determining the success of your shortgame shots. Let this magazine be your guide. Literally. Place the issue on the ground, set the ball off the center, then step on both sides toward the bottom of the cover, front foot slightly flared. This gives you the perfect stance width to 1) keep the ball slightly in front of your nose (for consistent contact); 2) rotate freely while keeping your lower body stable—a key to catching the sweet spot; and 3) create a steeper swing both going back and through for extra crispy impact. LIKE YOU, I can’t wait to get my copy of GOLF magazine. I love seeing…

Calling attention to a potential rules infraction by a playing partner doesn’t have to be presented as a flagrant accusation. It can be handled diplomatically, along the lines of, say, “I’m not 100 percent certain, but it looked to me as if you…” How the player responds is beyond your control. But you’ll know you have done your best to help. And, hey, you can always let a rules official take things from there. If it’s match play and protecting the field is not an issue, you may decide not to pursue the matter further. If it’s a recreational match, how you handle the situation should hinge on three considerations: the importance of the competition, the seriousness of the infraction and the value you place on the relationship. It may…

At a recent coaches camp hosted by GOLF Top 100 Teacher Andrew Rice, sports biomechanics professor Sasho MacKenzie, Ph.D., made a presentation on what causes missed putts. And while stroke path and speed have some impact on the way the ball rolls, the biggest factor in missing straight putts is improper face angle. According to Dr. MacKenzie’s research, golfers have only a 0.7-degree margin of error with their face angle when it comes to a straight 12-footer. If your putterface is open or closed by more than 0.7 degrees, it will result in a miss. At the same time, stroke path has a surprisingly minuscule impact on whether or not you make the same 12-footer. For you to miss the putt, your stroke path has to be off by more…

THERE ARE MANY WAYS to rob your swing of power. A particularly lethal one is committing early extension, where you start your downswing using mostly your arms, then, by default, “extend” your hips toward the ball as you approach impact. Looks bad, feels worse. Luckily, I have an easy fix. Get into your driver address posture. Place the shaft against your upper thighs where your hips hinge. (Use the crease in your hips as you bend forward at setup.) Make sure the clubhead is on the trail side of your hips and the grip is on the target side (1). Next, shift pressure with your feet into your target side and maneuver your front hip up (2). This “shift and up” move gets your downswing started in the proper sequence.…

From the Editor If, like me, you’ve been lucky enough over the years to now and then have a caddie do the heavy lifting for you, you’ll have definitely encountered some of the game’s greatest characters. I’m thinking, for example, of a bagman I heard about at Bandon whose rugged cowboy look was straight out of Deadwood but whose bonkers on-course pop-culture references leaned heavily on hip-hop (“Two-putt Shakur!”), yacht rock (“Aim at that log, Loggins and Messina!”) and, in really treacherous wind conditions, David Bowie (“Major Tom to ground control…”). For years, the luckiest visitors to Pinehurst ended up in the hands of an unforgettable philosopher-looper named Eddie MacKenzie. E-Mac mixed Latin, lofty literary references and deep cuts about religion and life to make each round on the No.…

467 467: Number of rounds in 2023 that an LPGA Tour player hit every fairway. PGA Tour players accomplished this feat just 176 times. (SOURCE: JUSTIN RAY) 9 Statistical categories in which Scottie Scheffler ranked first in 2023. 50 DAYS IN 2023 IT TOOK JON RAHM TO WIN THREE EVENTS ON TOUR. THAT’S THE FASTEST SINCE JOHNNY MILLER WON THREE IN JUST 40 DAYS IN 1975 . (SOURCE: JUSTIN RAY) Fast Climber LUDVIG ABERG TOOK 37 WEEKS IN 2023 TO CLIMB FROM OUTSIDE THE OWGR TOP 1,000 TO INSIDE THE TOP 50, THE SIXTH FASTEST OF ALL TIME . (SOURCE: @VC606 ON X)…

GEAR GOLF.COM / THE BEST STUFF IN THE GAME GEAR 8 PING Hoofer models still going strong 4 Easy steps to painting your own clubs 7 A.I.-inspired putters from Odyssey 1 Confidenceboosting Hy-Wood from Cleveland Scan the code above to grab the latest—and legendary—PING Hoofer bag and make any round a walking breeze. KARSTEN MANUFACTURING Company, aka PING, didn’t invent the stand bag. That honor goes to an innovative Brit back in the 1890s. But the resulting carriers were Frankenstein-like: clunky strap-on stands made of monstrously heavy steel bolted to no less hefty bags—at least until the coupling came loose. Almost a century later, the stand bag’s fan base remained mostly old codgers. Then, in the late 1980s, PING’s John A. Solheim decided to tackle the category. Working with Greg…

KAREEM ABDUL-JABBAR The sky-hooking center won four of his six NBA titles with the Los Angeles Lakers after his 35th birthday. TOM BRADY The last of Brady’s seven Super Bowl titles (and fifth Super Bowl MVP award) came in 2021, at age 43. JIMMY CONNORS The combative Connors, still the ATP’s all-time record holder with 109 career titles, called his crowd-pleasing run to the 1991 U.S. Open semifinals at age 39 “the best 11 days of my tennis career.” BERNARD HOPKINS “The Executioner,” later to be called “The Alien,” had 20 successful title defenses as boxing’s middleweight champion— then captured lightheavyweight titles at 41, 46, 48 and 49 years old. MARTINA NAVRATILOVA The 18-time Grand Slam singles champion came out of retirement at age 43, largely to compete in doubles,…

Coaches know the sweet science of the swing perhaps better than the pros themselves. Then there are the physios and the mental-game gurus, each with their own thoughts about how to rip it between the ropes. Caddies, by virtue of their 24-7 proximity to the best players in the world, are repositories of all of this know-how. They’ve shouldered their share of pro-am rounds, too, where they’ve witnessed the ups, downs and I-don’t-know-hows of golfers like… the rest of us. Here’s what they’d tell you if they were on your bag. (1) Be a Better Bunker Player BY SCOTT TWAY, BRIAN HARMAN’S CADDIE Amateurs tend to be terrible out of the sand. They set up with the clubface square because they want to dig the ball out. They don’t understand…

1. MAKE THE MOST OF YOUR AEROBED By Nate Blasko, Hannah Green’s caddie Out here on tour, it’s not unusual for a caddie to sleep on an air mattress, but you’ve got to know how to make them comfortable. Always make sure they’re inflated to the max. There’s a good chance it’ll be deflated by the time you wake up, but you’ve got to keep it inflated as long as you can. Oh, and bringing a pillow you like is another good bet. 2. LONGING FOR LEGROOM? GO SOUTHWEST. By Rich Mayo, Ernie Els’ caddie I fly Southwest a lot. I know some people might not like that. But I’m pretty tall—sixfive—so if I’m not flying first class it’s Southwest, because all their seats are the same. You don’t need…

Legs: Goblet squats Doing these squats with a kettlebell or a dumbbell not only builds muscle but also the endurance for long rounds day after day. Shoulders: Standing bicep curl to shoulder press Lifting a bag time and again taxes the shoulders and biceps. This double-whammy exercise makes the movement much easier. Core: Anti-rotation with cable Hoofing that staff bag will stress your posture. This exercise mimics that stress and works the entire core. Conditioning: Treadmill with weighted vest This mimics the job to a tee. Set the treadmill to a good pace and, if desired, change the incline to simulate walking a course as hilly as Augusta National. Last thing, looper wannabes: Take care of your body with ice baths, use a foam roller for your legs (especially those…

THERE ARE MILLIONS OF REC PLAYERS who never really learn the feeling of solid impact. Don’t be one of them. Here’s an easy drill that will set you apart from the pack and help you hit your best irons ever. The key is to teach yourself what solid impact looks and feels like. It’s easy. Take your normal address position with an alignment stick placed straight up just behind the ball (below left). Now, do the following three things: 1) rotate your hips open to the target, 2) push off the ground with your back foot and 3) lean the shaft toward the target while keeping the face square (below right). These are the core elements of solid impact. Hold this position for five seconds to get a feel for…

8AM Offers We’ve said it before: The GolfLogix app simply does it all, and in a very elegant and intuitive way. At its core, it’s a game-management app, tracking your swings, scores, stats, etc. It can suggest clubs in real time based on past performance and your distance to the green. Its course and green-mapping visuals are second to none. It can show you the “make” line for any putt imaginable in its library of 30,000-plus courses. For some users, it can also deliver a USGA-approved index. Like we said, it does it all, with most annual subscriptions costing less than a few dozen new golf balls (which you won’t need once GolfLogix starts working its stroke-saving magic). If there was ever a knock on the GolfLogix app (most scoring…

In Case You Missed It… Entering the inaugural Grant Thornton Invitational—the first time in nearly a quarter century when PGA and LPGA pros would be paired in a Tour-sanctioned mixed teams event—Lydia Ko joked that the best club in her bag would be her playing partner, Jason Day. The prolific winners were neighbors of sorts—she originally from New Zealand, he from Australia—but until Tuesday of tournament week they’d never played a round together. That must have been the case for most of the event’s 15 other star pairings—Nelly Korda and Tony Finau, Rose Zhang and Sahith Theegala, Leona Maguire and Lucas Glover, among them—who had to quickly learn to dance an impromptu but visibly fun-filled tango of power and precision. “Mesmerizing” is how Ko described Day’s piercing drives. Rickie Fowler…

ODYSSEY ROSSIE PUTTERS Introduced: 1991 Major moment: Nick Faldo’s 1996 Masters win kicked it all off. Fun fact: Jon Rahm has won both his majors with Rossie shapes and now uses the new Ai-ONE model (p. 55). TITLEIST PRO V1 BALL Introduced: 2000 Major moments: The Pro V1 has been the choice of 45 men’s major champions and captured all four majors in three years: 2004, 2018 and 2022. Fun fact: The ’23 Pro V1 marked its 13th generation, with a new iteration generally coming every two years. TRUE TEMPER DYNAMIC GOLD STEEL SHAFTS Introduced: 1980 Major moments: Dynamic Golds have been used in more than 100 major wins since their debut, including by Tiger, Seve and Jack. Fun fact: True Temper has sold about 25 million DG shafts, not…

GEAR Get your gaps right at the high end of your bag— and bring any green into range—with a new Hy-Wood, available at FairwayJockey.com. IT’S HALF HYBRID, HALF FAIRWAY WOOD and all power. It’s the all-new Cleveland Halo XL Hy-Wood ($220; clevelandgolf.com), and it’s designed to combine the playability and control of a hybrid with the power and forgiveness of a larger fairway-wood-style head to help you better gap the hard-to-fit area between your fairway wood and longest iron. Unlike a traditional hybrid, the Cleveland Hy-Woods use a lightweight shaft that is longer than a hybrid but still shorter than a standard fairway wood to help golfers hit down into the ball. As the name suggests, the head size fits between a gameimprovement hybrid and an oversize fairway wood, inspiring…

YOUR PUTTER HAS MISBEHAVED for the last time and you’re ready to have the “It’s not you, it’s me” talk. It’s time to cut bait and move on. But where do you start? If you’ve been playing a traditional Anser-style blade and haven’t considered the idea of trying out a mallet, now might be as good a time as any to make the jump. For a large swath of golfers, inconsistent impact can be improved through a larger mallet profile, which can greatly reduce the amount of head twisting you might see with a blade. As much as golfers don’t want to admit it, they don’t hit the center of the putterface nearly as often as they might think. Adding stability to the head ensures that even a putt that…

’24 Heroes, defectors, international intrigue, double crosses. Who’d have guessed we were talking about professional golf and not the old pulse-jolting Jack Bauer series, 24? Well, there have been similarities these past few seasons. And in 2024? We’ll just have to tune in again to see how the drama plays out. But the turn of the year promises all kinds of other golf excitement: new clubs, new faces, new courses (especially stateside). It’s winter, and that means turning up the heat. Here’s a sneak peek. '25 GOLF Jan.-Feb. 2024 Page 63 The Year To Come Will Be A Thriller [By the staff of GOLF] In early winter, the sun slices easily through the towering oaks of New York’s Bethpage State Park. The leaves are gone, no longer defending against the…

A new year means new faces for golf fans to get familiar with. No doubt Rory, Rahm and Nelly will still run up your screentime usage, but they’ll be joined by a fleet of compelling up-and-comers in 2024. Here are a few of the names you’ll want to remember. And, yes, they already know how to win. 1. Ludvig Aberg If you decided to sleep in during last year’s Ryder Cup, heads up: No prospect in recent memory has lived up to the hype quite like Aberg. After graduating from Texas Tech in May, the 24-yearold Swede bounced back and forth between the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour. He missed just one cut, nabbed a victory in Switzerland, shined in Rome at the Ryder Cup, then won the…

CADDYING 101 Undoubtedly, it demands a strong back. And it helps to have a way with a towel, a rake and a rowdy gallery. But few golf fans know what it really takes to do the heavy lifting on Tour. Let’s detail the caddie basics. IT’S 1997, AND A HOTSHOT has landed on the PGA Tour. His last name? Woods. A story we all know well. At that same time, just down the driving range, another young buck has arrived. The name is similar—Wood—but the job is different: caddie for Kevin Sutherland. “Since we came out at the exact same time,” John Wood says, “I joke with Tiger that it’s questionable who really made the purses go up.” We all know who wins that debate, but few people on earth…

1. DIAL IN YOUR DISTANCE By Billy Lewis, Steve Flesch’s caddie We’re all going to misread putts from time to time. For me, the most important thing is speed—especially when you get outside of, say, 15 feet. A drill I use—actually, it’s more like a game—is to place an alignment stick two feet behind the hole, then set up putts from 15, 20 and 30 feet. The drill is all about getting the ball to the hole, but not so far past it that it hits the stick. Sinking a putt earns you three points. Rolling it past the hole but short of the stick earns you one point. Leaving it short of the hole loses you a point, and hitting the stick loses you two. Play to 21 with…

“Alright, guys, it’s Sunday Sermon time at the Players Championship. Do you wanna have a good day? Well, I know the secret…. Number one, don’t be offendable. If no one can offend you, it’s pretty hard to have a bad day. Number two, be unembarrassable. If you can’t be embarrassed, you’re also probably gonna have a pretty good day. One of my favorite sayings is, ‘What other people think of me is none of my business’…. Who cares what people think, man? Be unembarrassable, unoffendable…. Enjoy this beautiful day.” —March 12, 2023 “What’s up, guys? Today I want to talk to you about a quote I heard recently that really has stuck with me, and that is ‘Discipline creates desire.’ Something I’ve struggled with in my life is self-control…. [But]…

LOOPER LORE I’ll never forget the excitement. It was at Belfry in 2002: David Toms’ first Ryder Cup, and mine. For the Friday morning four-ball, he’s playing with Phil Mickelson. I think it was Colin Montgomerie and Bernhard Langer—but definitely two wellknown Ryder Cuppers— for the European team. David gets up on the tee box, looks at me and goes, “Scotty, I don’t know what to do. I’m so nervous.” And I look at him and his hands are shaking. Now I have to come up with something to say to try to relax him, so I tell him, “Hey, just keep your head down. Don’t be looking at all the distractions around you. Just go through your routine and take a deep breath.” Phil’s over there. He’s done a…

THINK / PLAY / LIVE Situation: sticky. Your approach came up short, leaving you with as much grass between you and the edge of the green as there is between the edge and the pin. Do you fly it all the way to the hole or just to the apron? It’s a tough shot either way. My typical advice on any short-game shot is to favor roll over flight when you don’t have an obstacle looming in front of you. Here, since you’ve got a good chunk of grass to deal with, your roll’s going to need some extra oomph. Enter the wood chip. Using a fairway wood (or even a hybrid) to hit short-game shots is widely undervalued. The larger, smoother sole of a wood means the club isn’t…

RANGEFINDER TECH is great for getting info quickly and efficiently, but you still need to be diligent about how you use it. “What you’ve got to understand about these things is you don’t just want the yardage to the pin,” Top 100 Teacher Jonathan Yarwood says. “You want the yardage long. You want the yardage short, too, and the yardage to the pin as well. You want to know where to hit it and where not to hit it.” Just shooting the number to the pin is tempting, but it’s not going to be the best strategic use of the rangefinder. You also need to know some key numbers that will keep you out of trouble. This typically means getting the yardage to the front, the back and the number…

THINK / PLAY / LIVE THANKS TO ADVANCED MEASURING TOOLS, there are very few mysteries to the swing anymore. Case in point: Big drives result from hitting up on the ball, not down. One way to get the right feel is to focus on your finish—a bit of reverse engineering for extra carry. Make a swing, telling yourself, even before you start, to follow the ball with your eyes till it reaches its apex (above). Once the ball reaches its max height, relax and let the club fall down in front of you. For even more help, feel like you’re “sinking” (1) into your front side (2) as you approach impact, then squeeze your glutes (3) as you strike the ball, pushing up. Hold the squeeze as you track the…

G: Hey Michael, how often do you play golf these days? MP: I have a club in my hand every single day. It doesn’t mean I’m hitting a ball, but I have a gym in my house, so all my workouts are based around golf mobility, movement, power. I’d like to get down to a scratch. I’m a seven right now. G: What’s something nonphysical you learned from swimming that’s helped you on the course? MP: Confidence. I was always confident in the swimming pool, which meant I got the results I wanted most of the time. Preparation is something that’s always important to0. G: You play a lot of golf with your Arizona neighbor Jon Rahm. What does he pick your brain about? MP: I love Rahmbo. He just…