Innehållsförteckning för May 2023 från Golf Digest

ONE OF GOLF’S so-called dirty secrets is that nobody gets better. The initial descent in scoring is thrilling, but the bottom is long and flat. Any tiny dips we tend to misidentify as progress, and the tiny bumps, particularly for golfers of a certain vintage, often mean you’re getting worse. Luckily, most of us share something like the same evolutionary quirk that prompted the first ostrich to bury its head in the sand. Blind optimism keeps the game fun. Next hole, next round, next season: That’s when we’re really going to put it all together. When I was a teenager, I spent some time in a shop with a head pro who, if we were alone, would gaze out the window toward the first tee and provide commentary in…

I HEARD A LOUD CRUNCH as plaster rained on my head, covering the floor with white powder. The friend I was showing my swing to on Face-Time burst out laughing as I stood frozen, club in hand, staring up at where I had just made a Callaway Jaws-sized imprint into the ceiling. My tiny dorm room is not a good place to practice chipping, but you make do with what you have. My combination of yoga mat, plastic wife ball and repositioned furniture yielded enough room to practice quarter swings but not an unintentional half swing. Once the shame subsided—and the fear my RA would come barging in to see what the commotion was—I got back into it like nothing happened. I had gotten into golf only a few months earlier…

+ AT SOME POINT OVER THE course of 18 holes, you’re very likely to lose your good swing. It happens to even the best players. You miss a few fairways, and before you know it, that smooth, rhythmic swing you brought to the first six holes is suddenly gone. Here’s the good news: No one ever loses their swing. It’s still there, you just have to learn how to recognize when it goes bad and get out of your own way. Try our three strategies to help you find it again as fast as possible. 1 Ride your go-to shot for as long as necessary • Obsessing about your swing when it goes awry is only going to make things worse. If you know you’re going to lose it, have…

WITH ALL THE CASH splashing around the top level of professional golf, it’s easy to forget that for most players even getting a shot at the big leagues is a long, expensive grind. Many high-quality players give up because they run out of cash before they find out if they have enough game. That’s the problem Donnie Dotson wants to help solve with Carry, his new company built to help aspiring pros crowdfund a run at the professional tours—but with a twist. “You’ve heard the stories about players sleeping on the floor and working second jobs while running up a bunch of credit-card debt or taking sketchy loans that don’t have a lot of specifics,” Dotson says. “What if there was a way to open that process up to golf…

What does it mean for a golf course to have “character”? Can character be quantified, or is it more like “charisma,” something that’s easy to spot in a personality but difficult to explain? Most of us agree that some golf courses have character and others don’t, but how does one define what creates that character, or calculate how much a course has? This is a question—admittedly a tough one—we ask our course-ranking panelists to consider as they submit the tens of thousands of evaluations that make up the Golf Digest biennial ranking of America’s 100 Greatest Golf Courses and Second 100 Greatest Golf Courses. (To see the full Second 100 ranking, visit golfdigest.com). The five other categories we use to identify greatness can be more empirically assessed. Shot Options asks…

The PGA CHAMPIONSHIP WILL BE PLAYED AT OAK HILL IN Rochester, N.Y., in May for the fourth time, placing it second only to last year’s host, Southern Hills. This might be misleading because no PGA Championship or any other major championship has been contested on the course the players will see this year. That course is gone. In 2019, the club orchestrated a near total remodel of the East Course by architect Andrew Green, 45, who in a short period has become one of the most consequential designers in the business. Through seven decades hosting various national championships, the Donald Ross-designed East Course has been an archetype of American parkland golf, a showcase of fairways threaded through robust corridors of hardwoods and deep rough, with sloping greens rising from nests…

George Thurner remembers the phone call. The handicap chair of a prominent golf club reached out to him after the same player won all three of the major handicap events for two straight years. The club couldn’t figure out how this accountant in his mid-50s was gaming the system. He was turning in all his scores, and the handicap committee checked with those he played with to make sure those scores were accurate. Still, he kept winning. Although the club’s handicap committee could not solve the issue, Thurner’s “Cap Patrol” algorithm figured it out quickly. Comparing the scores revealed that others in his group always posted scores from the back tees, but the player in question always posted from the most forward tees—a 3.2-shot difference. “The club banned him from…

WORKING IN SPORTS IS different from most jobs, but it’s still a job. I’m sure some of you get chewed out by your bosses, but I doubt they talk to you the way some players talk to us. If you have played sports, you know heated exchanges among teammates and competitors are fairly common. I’m not condoning the language, but how many people really think twice about it? That doesn’t make what gets said easier to hear. Curse words, putdowns and questions that are not so much questions as they are criticisms come with the job. Golf is an emotional game, and the lines between great and good and between good and losing your card are so thin that every shot feels like it has greater meaning than it should.…

I’VE TRIED EVERYTHING to hit the ball farther. I’ve taken lessons from Butch Harmon, David Leadbetter, Hank Haney, Bob Toski, Jim Flick, Sam Snead, Paul Runyan, Shelby Futch—well, it would be easier to list the pros I haven’t taken a lesson from. Harvey Penick showed me his little red book. I spent a week with Jimmy Ballard. Ben Hogan offered to give me his secret (then didn’t). I’ve tried the pink shaft in my driver. I subscribe to Golf Digest Schools. I’ve gone to clubfitters, nutritionists and personal trainers and joined a couple of those upscale Manhattan gyms. I’ve done Pilates and yoga. I got tips from Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, Arnold Palmer and Annika Sorenstam. I’ve even played in a member-guest with the renowned sport psychologist Dr. Bob Rotella—sufce…

Every bomber seems to have a signature move. For Rory, it’s fast hips. For D.J., it’s the bowed left wrist. For Rahm, it’s the short backswing. What’s Cam Young’s thing? You might say it’s the pause before he starts his downswing. That’s tough to ignore. However, the more you see his swing, the more your attention goes to its explosiveness. Young swings like he’s trying to turn the ball into dust. “He did everything hard growing up—threw hard, hit baseballs hard, his hockey slapshot was hard, and so is his golf swing,” says Cam’s father, David Young, the recently retired head golf professional at Sleepy Hollow Country Club in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y. David also is Cam’s coach. “It wasn’t something we worked on. He just naturally knew how to use…

My idea of the perfect golf trip is unoriginal and goes something like this: four or eight buddies travel to the famous links of somewhere—Scotland, Ireland, maybe Oregon—pack full rain gear hoping not to use it, play 36 every day, then every night recharge with a substantive and sedative blend of beef and alcohol. Repeat. The style and comfort of any accommodation or transit is immaterial. It’s all about how much great golf can we cram in before returning home to our spouses, children and freshly depleted accounts of domestic credits. With this prejudice I received a novel invitation to go on a “golf cruise.” Costa, the Italian cruising company whose ships run occupancies as large as 6,500, was launching a new package to coincide with Rome hosting its first…

+ THERE ARE A NUMBER OF players with unorthodox back-swings—Jim Furyk, Matthew Wolff, John Daly, just to name a few—but certainly no one has a slower back-swing than Sungjae Im. The first half of Im’s backswing is so deliberate, it almost looks like it’s in slow motion. Unhappy with his ball-striking while on the Japan Tour in 2016, Im decided one day in practice to slow down his takeaway. What started as a drill has now evolved into the South Korean’s signature move. “I started to see more consistency in my tempo and ball flight when I took it away slower,” says the 25-year-old Im, the PGA Tour’s Rookie of the Year in 2018-’19. “So I just continued to do it.” One of the more accurate drivers on the PGA…