Innehållsförteckning för December/January 2021 från Golf Digest

“You know how to swing to hit solid shots. But that’s not golf.”—Patrick Cantlay When patrick cantlay stands over a shot like the one you see here, his thought process might be very different than yours if you were faced with the same lie. But if your swing mechanics are fairly sound, adopting his approach might help you achieve better results on the course. For four straight seasons from 2017-’20, Cantlay finished in the top 20 on the PGA Tour in total strokes gained on the field each round, which is a testament to his ball-striking. “A lot of times I’m just picturing what window I want the ball to come out of, and then getting my body to produce that shot,” Cantlay says. “It’s more like I’m playing a…

AGE 27 LIVES San Diego STORY Winner of four PGA Tour events, including the 2017 Tour Championship. TRYING TIMES California was one of the first states to go into lockdown mode in the spring. I’ve always wanted time off during or after a season, but not in this style. When things got bad, the gym in my condo complex shut down. After that, it was a challenge to stay motivated. When golf courses opened up, I practiced for about a month before we started playing the tour again. I was fired up about that. CLUB YARDS* DRIVER 290 3-WOOD 265 5-WOOD 250 4-IRON 220 5-IRON 205 6-IRON 193 7-IRON 182 8-IRON 168 9-IRON 155 PW 140 53*WEDGE 127 57*WEDGE 110 61*WEDGE 90 * CARRY DISTANCE DRIVER SPECS Callaway Mavrik Sub Zero, 8.3°, Graphite Design Tour AD BB 7x shaft, 45.43 inches. ▶ This…

FROM A DISTANCE, Jessica (left) and Nelly Korda can be tough to tell apart on the golf course. The sisters stand nearly six feet tall and have similarly picturesque swings. When they played together in the 2019 Solheim Cup at Gleneagles, their matching uniforms made it even harder to spot who was who. Though Team USA lost the cup, the Korda sisters, when paired together, didn’t have a match go beyond the 14th hole. Their performance felt like a glimpse into dominance to come. ▶ Jess, 27, and Nelly, 22, are comfortable around each other—they did this interview sharing a chair—and they’re part of perhaps the most athletic family in America. Both parents, Petr and Regina, played professional tennis, Petr winning one Grand Slam title, the Australian Open in 1998,…

Susan McGahan’s idea was simple. She would buy $500 worth of sandwiches from her golf club’s kitchen and donate them to the local hospital staff, which was then in the throes of the coronavirus outbreak. I can’t sew, I can’t make masks, but I’m going to get emergency workers some food, she recalls thinking. ▶ McGahan, an AT&T lawyer in New Jersey, quickly learned you can’t just roll up to an emergency room during a pandemic and leave a bunch of sandwiches, hoping they’ll get eaten. So she used her connections to find a hospital staffer who could help coordinate the effort, then started delivering the food each morning in her family’s SUV. ▶ The deliveries were a hit with the hungry, weary emergency workers. To keep them coming, McGahan…

Bubba Watson has made a PGA Tour career out of improvising, his creative shotmaking having won him 12 tour titles. It was natural, then, for the twotime Masters champ to think differently when seeing a void shortly after the tour’s return to golf from the three-month COVID-19 hiatus. With health/safety concerns forcing tournaments to go on without fans and Wednesday pro-ams being too risky, Watson pitched tour commissioner Jay Monahan and other officials the idea of an exhibition match among tour pros as an alternative to raise charity dollars. At the Rocket Mortgage Classic in July, Watson teamed with Harold Varner III in a friendly-but-spirited competition against Jason Day and Wesley Bryan. “It was a dream come true that they let me do it,” Watson said, helping bring in more…

Getting clubs in the hands of kids at a young age is important, but it’s equally important to keep them engaged through their teens. That can be a difficult task. Arthur Blank, co-founder of Home Depot and owner of the Atlanta Falcons, created a $9.5 million grant with PGA Tour Superstore to help expand and improve The First Tee’s offerings for teenage golfers. The investment isn’t just in The First Tee’s teen curriculum, it will also fund an annual summit in which 40 teens selected from The First Tee’s 150 chapters will meet in Montana for a week to develop leadership skills. For those not selected for the summit, there will be local leadership programs offered at PGA Tour Superstore locations. A total of 1,300 First Tee teens will get…

A DUKE ISN’T a member of the royal family. The real Duke predates the aristocracy. A Duke is a thank you for good service and for future service. Those who consider a Duke a bribe might ask themselves, Am I really that cheap? And if you need to ask, the answer is: Take the fish hooks out of your pockets. Or open your cash app. With COVID-19 affecting bartenders, waiters, caddies, locker-room attendants, valets and all such service jobs that contribute to the joyful bustle of life, we need to make up for a year of lost Dukes. Duking will never go away. Even with the nature of transactions changing, the customer will always like being made to feel special, and the good ones like showing their appreciation with, you…

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INSTRUCTION Golf Digest Schools We now offer remote, one-onone lessons from Golf Digest-ranked teachers. Browse the Coach Connect database, purchase a lesson, share swing videos and talk virtually with your instructor. ’TIS THE SEASON Holiday Gift Guide Looking for the perfect holiday gift for the golfer in your life? Starting in November, we’ll be featuring our choices for the best gifts for every type of golfer regardless of your budget. LOCAL KNOWLEDGE The End of the True Amateur As the NCAA prepares to let student-athletes profit from their name and image, the USGA has begun looking at its rules for amateur golfers. Our new podcast explores the future of amateur golf.…

People tend to think that the first thing to go when you get older is speed, and therefore how far you can hit the ball. But with the advances in training and nutrition, as well as the incredible equipment we have today, guys are still able to carry it 300-plus yards well into their 40s—and sometimes 50s. I’ve actually found that as the years pass, putting excellence might be one of the hardest things to maintain. It’s not a coincidence that you see so many guys on the Champions Tour switching to longer putters or different grips. They do it in the hopes of regaining some of the success they had as younger players. But it’s a real challenge. First, it’s harder to put in the hours of practice you…

THE MOVE EVERYONE ASKS ME ABOUT IS HOW I LAG THE CLUB. If you’re not sure, lag is a term to describe how much the clubhead trails the hands and arms as you swing down. Look below, you can see that my hands are getting close to the ball, but the clubhead still has a ways to go—that’s lag. For me, getting into this position is just natural. I don’t try to create lag. It’s just how I’ve always swung. But I will say this: Without good lag, I wouldn’t have averaged well over 300 yards in driving distance the past two seasons—I turned 40 in January—and ranked in the top three on tour in strokes gained off the tee. Think of it as storing up a lot of power,…

▶ CIRCA 1850 The Old Course at St. Andrews Allan Robertson mows and clears gorse to create the Old Course’s double-wide fairways. ▶ 1911 The National Golf Links of America C.B. Macdonald’s “ideal” holes explore a previously unseen scale of American golf. ▶ 1914 The Lido Golf Club (extinct) The National 2.0, this time on a flat, expansive shoreside site. ▶ 1926 Royal Melbourne Melbourne’s Sand Belt is the perfect medium for Alister MacKenzie’s exploration of width and strategy. ▶ 1926 Yale Golf Course A Leviathan golf site demands Leviathan architecture to match. ▶ 1933 Augusta National MacKenzie and Bobby Jones create one of the game’s greatest laboratories of width and contour. ▶ 1940-1990 The Age of Diminishing Fairways ▶ 1991 Kapalua (Plantation Course) A supersized property and holes to…

Jimmy Dunne’s parents always told him, “There’s a special place in hell for somebody who sits on a fence during a crisis,” as Dunne puts it. Dunne has never sat on a fence. After September 11, a day he lost 66 fellow Sandler O’Neill employees to terrorism, he rebuilt the company and started a college scholarship fund for children of the investment firm’s deceased partners and employees. ▶ Not surprisingly, he took action during a global pandemic, too. Dunne, president of the normally media-shy Seminole Golf Club, teamed up with Arnie’s longtime pal Tim Neher to lead the club in hosting the TaylorMade Driving Relief skins event in May. The event raised $5.5 million for COVID-19 relief, $1.1 million of which came from viewer donations. ▶ “Early on, I had…

Golf has a way of revealing character, and we like to think the game is reciprocally strengthened when attracting individuals of integrity and passion. Dr. Amber Hardeman didn’t immediately love golf at age 9, but it eventually won her over as she discovered, through The First Tee of Dallas, how the game promotes leadership, camaraderie and mentoring. ▶ Hardeman uses these attributes as a resident physician in Internal Medicine-Pediatrics at Tulane School of Medicine, working with patients in hospitals and intensive-care units throughout New Orleans, including those suffering from COVID-19. Hardeman, 29, hopes to make a difference combating tragic disparities in healthcare outcomes for people with income, cultural or educational disadvantages by developing more personal connections. It comes down to a willingness to learn, she says, “accepting people where they…

“Men who are 54 years old should not get into fist-fights and wrestling matches on airplanes,” Gene Parente says. But when a crazed passenger stormed the cockpit door on a Korea Airlines fight in late September, Parente, a leading independent equipment tester and designer of swing robots, sensed that just watching what happened next wasn’t an option. ▶ Parente freely admits he didn’t so much volunteer for the job as he was volunteered for it by a trio of terrified and undersize flight attendants. “When he’s yanking on the cockpit door, I’m thinking Uh oh, this is bad.” ▶ When all was said and done, and he was sitting on top of the subdued assailant, Parente realized that though his reaction might have been instinctive, no one else made a…

Even the most accurate guys on the PGA Tour are missing fairways on at least 25 percent of their tee shots. That means we all have to know how to hit good approach shots out of the rough. Part of it is recognizing how the ball is going to come out based on the lie. But it’s also making a few simple adjustments in your setup and swing to make sure you catch it flush—which is the only way you’re going to get it to the green from the high grass. Read on to find out how I play into the green from the rough. CHANGE YOUR BALL POSITION To set up in the rough, pick a club based on what you see. If there’s nothing in front of the…

“Yeah, you better believe we’re terrified of making mistakes.” I HAVE NIGHTMARES about it. The scenarios change—start of the tournament, an early Saturday tee time, as we’re walking down the 18th fairway with a fiveshot lead—but the story doesn’t: I find a 15th club in the bag. I consider myself a standup guy, but I never do the right thing in the dream. I keep the discovery to myself, tomahawk the club into the woods, once even snapped it in two and tried to flush it down a Porta-John. I wake up petrified and disappointed in myself, and the dream keeps happening. For the record, my guy has never had 15 clubs in his bag. So yeah, you better believe we’re terrified of making mistakes. They happen. Don’t care if…

ROB GOULET WAS housebound and unhappy. There is literally nothing I can do, thought Goulet, who manages Ernie Els’ business interests in the United States. This was back in mid-March. His kids were home from school, the PGA Tour was shutting down, the Els for Autism fundraiser had just been canceled. “I’m looking at 30 days or more of doing nothing.” Then Goulet happened to catch a morning news segment about a New Jersey golf club, Spring Brook Country Club, whose members were doing the opposite of nothing. They were hard at work delivering food and other supplies to health-care workers at the nearby Morristown Medical Center, which was overwhelmed with coronavirus patients. (See the story on Susan McGahan, above.) Click. A light bulb switched on. Goulet picked up his…

Lauryn Nguyen learned to be grateful at a young age. Born in Seattle, she heard the stories of her parents, who escaped Vietnam during the war. Her mother and grandmother were rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard from a fishing raft. Her father lived in a refugee camp in Indonesia for several months. “It’s just absolutely amazing to me,” Lauryn says. Anna Nguyen is now a civil engineer and husband Daniel is a manager at Microsoft. They have a comfortable life, and when COVID struck, Lauryn—a 17-year-old two-time Washington State Junior Girls champion—and her family were compelled to act. They enlisted Lauryn’s retired seamstress grandmother, Neo, to make masks, and at one point she was cranking out 100 a day. They raised more than $33,000 for 18 charities, including the…

During a week when the sports world stopped, the PGA Tour played on. The Milwaukee Bucks had protested a playoff game in the wake of a police shooting of a Black man in Kenosha, Wis., and the rest of the NBA followed, as did athletes from MLB, MLS, WNBA and WTA. Although the tour’s BMW Championship decided to forge ahead, Cam Champ, one of just four players with Black heritage, decided his voice needed to be heard. ▶ “It’s just spreading awareness and sticking by what I believe in and what I believe needs to be changed,” Champ says. “I’ve seen a bunch of other athletes speak out about it. It’s a situation where people don’t want to talk about it, which I get, but at the same time it’s…

Two of the most famous golfer-athletes, Peyton Manning and Steph Curry, have been two of the most active supporters of Historically Black Colleges and Universities lately. ▶ The Friday after Thanksgiving, they’ll compete in the next iteration of “The Match” on TNT, with Phil Mickelson and Charles Barkley. The event will promote equality and inclusion through donations to HBCUs. ▶ In September, Manning’s Peyback Foundation endowed six scholarships to four HBCUs in Tennessee and his home state of Louisiana. Last year, Curry announced a seven-figure donation to Howard University to fund the relaunch of its golf program, the first time in more than 40 years that the school will have a team. “This is going to go way beyond the game of golf, way beyond Howard,” Curry said. “No matter…

IN THE SPRING of 2019, 11 friends and I spent nine days playing 17 rounds on nine courses in northwestern England. As the trip wound down, we did what we always do on these things: debated where to go next. After much discussion and many pints, we settled on Wales, where none of us had played before, for the next May. By mid-March, I’d begun to worry. Augusta National had just postponed the Masters, and I knew someone who knew someone who probably had the virus. When I told the group that I was concerned, one of the guys asked, “Do you really think this won’t be gone by May?” I called our trip planner—Greg O’Mahony, of Celtic Golf—and asked whether we could possibly shift our itinerary one year into…