Innehållsförteckning för Issue 5, 2021 från Golf Digest

If social distancing during the pandemic has revealed anything noteworthy about how PGA Tour pros go about their business, it might be just how much thought Jordan Spieth puts into every shot he hits. Without large galleries to muffle what is said inside tournament ropes, Spieth’s conversations with his caddie, Michael Greller, have been a fascinating peek inside the mind of one of the game’s most thoughtful and determined players. “He’s worked very hard over a long period to get his swing to where, when he takes the club back, he’s only got a picture in his mind about the ball flight he’s trying to create. That’s what he’s talking [to Michael] about,” says his longtime coach, Cameron McCormick. “His swing is now jelling with what he sees. There’s no…

Roger Steele knew his engineering job in Chicago was stifling his creative instincts, and he knew he wanted to do what creatives do: pack up his life and move to Los Angeles. But he had no friends there, no real plan. “All I had was my golf clubs,” Steele, 33, says. “Within a month I’m playing at the nicest clubs in the city. What other activity besides golf could have brought me that opportunity, that network, so quickly?” Now he rubs shoulders with professional athletes and SoCal CEOs at L.A.’s swankiest courses; back when he was a kid, it was munys near his home in Austin, a no-frills neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side. Steele’s father was a police officer, and he nudged his son toward golf because he didn’t trust…

They come from two different corners of the golf-course design world—Rob King from the architectural side, Tad Collins from the contracting side. As such, they had both witnessed the inefficiencies of having those two services offered by different companies, often with competing interests. King/Collins Golf Course Design, then, would do things differently. Formed in 2010, it would function as one group to take your project from the first sketch to Opening Day. Still, a design firm is only as good as its golf courses, and King/Collins had zero until they secured a unique debut project: reviving a decrepit, featureless nine-hole track on a flat floodplain in rural Tennessee. “As a sport, we are way too attached to the 18-hole model,” says King, 53. “The country club way of 5½-hour rounds…

The idea was simple enough: Talk about golf like normal people and turn it into a podcast. The underlying belief was a bit more profound. “Whether you’re at a private course or if you’re at a local muny, I think those conversations around the bar are pretty similar,” says Sam (Riggs) Bozoian, 34, the face of branding behemoth Barstool Golf. “They have the same opinions on players; they think the same things are funny.” Riggs expertly toes the line between country club and public golf, and his followers adore him for it. That, and his ability to make them belly laugh. A former Harvard hockey player and tech salesman, Riggs elbowed his way into writing about golf for the popular Barstool Sports site in 2016. A year later, he co-launched…

JAMES BOND STROLLS DOWN THE FIRST FAIRWAY AT ROYAL ST. GEORGE’S, RELISHING THE PROSPECT OF A HIGH-STAKES MATCH WITH HIS NEMESIS, AURIC GOLDFINGER“ON A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN MAY WITH THE LARKS SINGING OVER THE GREATEST SEASIDE COURSE IN THE WORLD.” The club was founded in 1887 and has hosted 13 Open Championships—the 14th is scheduled for July 15-18. Yet the most famous encounter on these hard, fast fairways is a work of fiction. The 1959 novel Goldfinger is the seventh in the series of 14 Bond books by English author Ian Fleming. Fifty pages are devoted to the epic battle between the two men, and the golf segment in the movie adaptation still stands out as one of the best cinematic celebrations of the game. Royal St. George’s, named for…

Other sports don’t allow slumpers to linger. WE HAVE WITNESSED tournaments without fans—which gave us, if nothing else, a break from screams of, “Get in the hole!” Perhaps in an act of karmic grace, we have witnessed what can best be described as “The Year of the Comeback.” They are familiar names to anyone who follows golf: Lydia Ko, Jordan Spieth, Stewart Cink, Sergio Garcia, Brooks Koepka, Rory McIlroy, Mike Weir, Hideki Matsuyama, Ariya Jutanugarn. All are major champions. All have endured droughts, some bad enough to draw whispers—loud ones in a few cases—that they might not win again. Cink’s last victory had been the 2009 Open Championship (which is best remembered for Tom Watson not winning at 59), and Weir, the 2003 Masters champion, had not won in 13…

PROFESSIONAL GOLFERS are meticulous about how they treat their bodies. That’s a good thing—being physically fit, eating right and staying hydrated are crucial if athletes are to perform at their peak. However, far too many golfers at every level essentially ignore the life force of humanity. We’re talking, of course, about breathing. ▶ Breathing is our best defense against the roller coaster of emotions this game wants to take you on. You don’t have to take my word for it. It is backed up by science. This isn’t about psychology; it’s about physiology. When you focus on your breathing—say, breathe in on a three-count, hold it for one, then breathe out for five—you saturate your red blood cells with oxygen. When this happens, the primal part of your hardware is…

Stephen Malbon would often ask his celebrity friends if they would want to join him for one of his favorite pastimes: golf. “It wouldn’t just be a no,” he says. “It’d be a f--- no! Like, why would I even consider doing that?” Malbon has been wrestling with the is-golf-cool-enough conundrum since he quit the game as a 16-year-old because, you guessed it, it was not cool enough. Sometime along his professional journey—which took him from the ad agency world in New York City to creating the Malbon Group, a parent company that housed a creative content agency and a lifestyle brand/magazine called Frank151—he rekindled his golf flame and vowed to bring some coolness along with him. So he and his wife, Erica, who co-founded a boutique-spa concept called The…

Pat Mayo, 35, is something of an OG in the ever-expanding golf-gambling and daily fantasy sports (DFS) universe. He began writing about fantasy golf in 2011, long before million-dollar DFS contests and the advanced statistics revolution that deepened our understanding of players’ games. Mayo has steadily grown his following and offerings since—his YouTube Channel, the Mayo Media Network, features gambling and DFS content on all sports. But most listeners consume his content through the Pat Mayo Experience podcast. He’s also a co-founder of Fantasy National, a website that allows users to dive into advanced golf statistics—a tool to figure out how a player scores in windy conditions or how he putts on Bermuda greens. He’s as bullish as they come on the future of golf gambling. “It’s the only sport…

As a “golf lifer,” she falls outside her own target demographic. Abby Liebenthal, 30, grew up playing the game and immediately plunged into the golf industry after college—first at the AJGA, then the Tiger Woods Foundation, then Titleist, then a pit stop at Northwestern for grad school, then back to golf. She now works for the most inside-golf organization there is, the USGA, where she’s the senior manager of U.S. Open fan experiences. Understandably, Liebenthal feels quite comfortable mingling around first tees and 19th holes. Her friends, however, have always been a bit more fish-out-of-water in golf circles. “None of my peers growing up or in college played golf at all,” she says. “As we started to get older, I would hear them say, ‘I want to play, but I have…

Golf biomechanist Sasho Mackenzie’s research with Ping reveals how a shaft bends during the swing and how that bending affects clubhead speed. In the illustration above, the yellow shaft represents the typical bending compared with the theoretical unbending blue shaft. During the downswing, the shaft bends back (called “lag”). Near impact, the shaft bends down (“droop”) and then toward the target (“lead”). Mackenzie’s research found that forward bend (called “kick velocity”) increased with more flexible shafts than with stiffer shafts but not for all players. And even though kick velocity might increase, the overall clubhead speed didn’t change because that forward-bending effect causes the hands to slow down. Says Mackenzie, “There’s not really a great way to be able to predict who is going to get that clubhead speed.”…

OUR LIST OF AMERICA’S 100 BEST CLUBFITTERS, which first debuted in 2011, considers all sorts of facilities that offer clubfitting access to the general public. Those include independent shops, practice ranges and full-service performance centers, large retail stores, resorts, golf courses and national chains. More than 800 facilities were reviewed, which included nomination forms that detailed each facility’s resources, tools, expertise and fitting methodology. We also conducted a poll of leading equipment-company experts and our nationwide panel of more than 2,000 Golf Digest Course Rating panelists. Those facilities earning the highest marks are highlighted here in two categories: The state-by-state heading lists 100 independent, local operations. Under the national chains, we selected the top-rated stores for each brand. ► What should you look for in a good clubfitting operation? First,…

AGE 24 LIVES Plano, Texas STORY Six top-10s on the PGA Tour through early May, including second place at the Masters. HOME IMPROVEMENT During the break caused by the pandemic last year, I was rooming with fellow Korn Ferry Tour player Davis Riley. We bought a hitting mat and a net and rearranged the living room in our apartment so that we could hit balls. We set up the TrackMan and often hit balls until midnight. It was a really good way to work on our games, and thankfully the neighbors never complained. —WITH E. MICHAEL JOHNSON * CARRY DISTANCE DRIVER SPECS Titleist TSi3, 9°, Fujikura Speeder 757 TR X shaft, 44.5 inches. I got this driver the week before last fall’s U.S. Open and immediately had success with it. Minimizing…

One of my first events 30 years ago was the PGA Tour’s old Tucson Open. I remember seeing caddies who looked beat up. They were not so much standing next to their bags as they were angled over them, their bodies overloaded by this invisible weight. I recall being sad and almost embarrassed for them. It just seemed like they had let themselves go. I called my dad and told him about it, promising that wouldn’t be me. ► What a stupid kid I was. Now I’m one of those guys bent over the bag who looks like a sparring partner for the heavyweight champ. ► We are by no means athletes, but our work is a workout. We were getting our steps in well before step-counting became a thing,…

One measure of architecture junkies is their familiarity with Golf Club Atlas, the online forum for purists to read about Golden Age designs and ruminate on differences in green surrounds. Andy Johnson read the site as he toiled in post-college jobs—first in freight logistics, then for two startups. It was just a hobby until TheFriedEgg.com was born in late 2015. Originally a bi-weekly email newsletter, Johnson’s website has evolved into an authoritative voice on course architecture. It highlights renovations, sends a thrice-weekly newsletter, produces high quality drone videos of courses, analyzes PGA Tour venues and more. People trust him to, in the simplest terms, tell them whether a course is good or not. When golfers start to appreciate golf-course architecture, “they get something other than a score to base their experience…

A former LPGA Tour player, Jeehae Lee has seen her share of swing coaches. However, she’s in the minority—just 13 percent of golfers take lessons even once a year. “The rest are just hacking it together on their own,” Lee, 37, says. “The biggest barrier to entry is price—people don’t want to spend $100 every week or even every month. We want to solve that problem for the other 87 percent. For those with access to instruction, this will unlock so much in your lessons.” This is SportsBox AI, an in-development software that seeks to democratize 3-D motion-capture technology and incorporate it into golf instruction. Lee is the CEO of the company, her latest venture in a long-term and somewhat turbulent relationship with golf. In addition to playing on tour,…

Someone was always going to emerge as the preeminent voice in the golf YouTube space, but few would expect the man who filled the void: not a PGA Tour player or an established top-100 teacher, but a driving-range pro with a nasal-y British accent. In 2012, Shiels’ YouTube videos were just a side hustle to draw attention and help fill his “teaching diary.” (That’s British for schedule.) It worked, and his teaching slate ultimately became so packed that he yearned for more time to devote to shooting and editing his videos. Today Shiels, 34, has five full-time employees working for him and no longer sees any students at all. That’s what happens when you have 1.4 million YouTube subscribers and average 40 million combined views on YouTube and Facebook each…