Innehållsförteckning för September 2023 från Golf Digest

IN AN UNTIDY London dwelling, a 33-year-old considered the stumps that were his legs and poured himself another whiskey. He hadn’t been outside in days. Eleven years later, in May 2023, this same man was atop Mount Everest. If not for the treacherous weather on the way up, his plan was to hit a golf ball. How did Hari Budha Magar climb out of depression and to the top of the world? It sounds ridiculous to suggest golf had much to do with it—compared to mountaineering the stakes are so low that even referring to both as “sports” feels off—but Hari is unequivocal: “Absolutely golf gave me the confidence to start climbing.” Hari hit his first golf shots during a three-day class offered free to wounded veterans by the On…

TAYLORMADE SUPREME CART BAG $300 TaylorMade’s high-end cart bag has seven forward-facing pockets for organizational ease. The accessories pouch closes by magnet or zipper and provides quick access to frequently used items like golf balls, tees, and ball markers. The bag comes in 13 color combinations. SUNDAY RYDER $230 The Ryder is designed for golfers who ride in a cart as often as they walk. It weighs just 4.9 pounds but makes the most of it with seven pockets, including an insulated cooler pouch that can hold four canned beverages. A passthrough cart strap and flat base make the transition from walking to riding seamless. SUN MOUNTAIN C-130 $290 Sun Mountain’s segment-defining cart bag, available in six colors, features 13 forward-facing pockets for ample storage and easy access while the…

YOU MAY HAVE HEARD THE term “early extension” to describe a common downswing fault. It’s when your posture straightens prematurely before impact. It typically happens because inexperienced golfers try to rise up to help the ball in the air or add some extra power to the shot. Unfortunately, if you early extend, you’re altering your club’s path mid-swing, and that makes it really hard to find the sweet spot. If you video your swing and see your spine angle getting more vertical as you start down with the club, I’ve got a drill for you. Best of all, you can do it while waiting to hit your next shot. Part of its inspiration comes from six-time PGA Tour winner Tony Finau, whose toes are literally off the ground and weight…

PROFESSIONAL GOLF IS NO longer an individual sport. Go to the practice range at a PGA Tour event, and you’ll see players surrounded by their own pit crews. Often, the younger or more successful the player, the bigger the entourage. I’m pretty sure some guys can host their own five-on-five pick-up game. How important are all these people to a player’s performance? Some of those “team duties” range from redundant to irrelevant to odd, and the bigger the team, the more likely there are hangers-on who are trying to get a taste of tour life. At a recent dinner, I ranked the individuals in a player’s circle from least important to most important. As you will see, “important” has different connotations. Statisticians As caddies, the more information we have, the…

THERE ARE HUNDREDS OF examples of great leadership in golf, but one that I will long remember occurred leading up to the 2018 Ryder Cup, despite an American loss. It involved not a golfer, but the legendary Duke basketball coach, Mike Krzyzewski. “Coach K” was still coaching at the time and didn’t retire until 2022. He was invited to address the American team by its captain, Jim Furyk. With another Ryder Cup on the horizon at Marco Simone Golf and Country Club in Rome, Italy, the message he delivered is still pertinent and contains many takeaways that apply today. My favorite bit of minutiae about Coach K is that he was an Army captain who served as a field-artillery liaison in Korea in the early 1970s. More well-known is that…

THERE IS A SIMPLE EXPLANATION FOR WHY Wyndham Clark exploded into the elite echelon of professional golf in his fifth season on the PGA Tour. To understand how he won his first tour title and then the U.S. Open in a span of six weeks and needed only six months to move from outside the top 150 in the World Ranking to inside the top 10, recall the final 20 minutes of Clark’s third round at Los Angeles Country Club. One shot back of Rickie Fowler and playing his second shot at the 17th, Clark flared his approach right. It bounded into a penalty area, among rocks and fescue well below the putting surface. Instead of attempting the risky shot, he took a drop, chipped it to six feet and rolled…

During regular PGA Tour events and even major championships, players can console themselves with a variety of crutches: a fanbase, a fat paycheck, some sweet sponsorship deals. If nothing else, even during the dreadful weeks when players miss the cut, they can take some solace in letting only themselves down. They’ll find the answer on the range and go get ’em next week. The Ryder Cup is different. Players have teammates depending on them and a country to represent. Most players might hit only a handful of shots during the course of their career under the kind of intense pressure they will feel during one round at a Ryder Cup. Players talk of sleepless nights and their hands shaking so much that they can’t keep their golf ball on the…

KEN BAKST, THE FOUNDER AND developer of Friar’s Head on Long Island, crouches into the driver’s seat of a two-man Gator utility vehicle and cranks the engine. We’re off to explore what will become The Ranch, his soon-to-be 36-hole golf club in Martin County, Florida. We drive for half a mile across barren pastureland and through a series of steel gates that prevent the wanderlust of the roughly 800 head of cattle that call the property home. Eventually we come to a section of land that looks mostly like what we’ve passed: flat, grassy and intersected with drainage ditches. A few pockets of trees break the horizon, but the only other elevations are dozens of seven-foot-high white stakes that represent the tees, fairways and greens of what will become the…

UNLIKE TOUR PROS, WE DON’T have the benefit of knowing how many strokes we’re gaining or losing around the green compared to other golfers with similar handicaps. But here’s a good general rule: If you can consistently get down in three strokes inside 30 yards, you’re not going to lose ground on your competition. Chances are, you’ll probably pick up a few strokes. On the flip side, follow a decent approach shot with a flubbed chip or skulled bunker shot and make double bogey, and you’ll not only be giving strokes away, but you’re sure to be steamed. These big misses around the green have a way of staying with you and can erode your confidence. Around the greens, you need to find a way to get the ball on…

Growing up, I played basketball, baseball, soccer, hockey, football, you name it. Anything I did, the game was intuitive, and I picked it up quickly. I never got technical with those sports. I just played. Same with golf. Early on, it was fun. I just played. Then, obviously, I got to a point where I needed some instruction … but I overdid it. I became a technical golfer, and that just wasn’t in my DNA. Before I started working with John Ellis, my coach and caddie, I saw a handful of other teachers. They were all good swing coaches, but I was so conscious of my swing that I was thinking about positions and such during my tournament rounds, and that didn’t produce great results. My first few seasons on…

I recently had the opportunity to play the newly redesigned course where the 2023 Ryder Cup will be played—Marco Simone Golf & Country Club on the outskirts of Rome. Twenty-two years earlier almost to the day, I had enjoyed an older version of Marco Simone on an assignment to write about The Eternal City’s golf and eating options. That trip introduced me to golf Italian-style, and a dozen times over the past two decades I’ve made monthlong visits to the land of my father’s ancestors, playing courses from the sunny southern coast of Sicily to the Alpine hills on the Swiss border. In most ways, golf in Italy is like golf elsewhere, with certain delectable differences. I’ve played three rounds at an elegant course called Olgiata, 45 minutes north of…

GOLF HAS ALWAYS BEEN UP FOR a bit of folklore and storytelling. Whether it’s a leathery teaching pro passing on swing wisdom to an eager apprentice, a playing legend recounting exploits from decades gone by, or an architect creating a golf hole from divine inspiration, all of it adds to the game’s mystical appeal. It’s a common thread that goes back to the shepherds who first banged rocks across a damp Scottish moor. Of course, facts have usually never gotten in the way of a good story. Some of the most widespread “truths” in this game have turned out to be much more myth than reality—sticking around for decades thanks to the credentials, charisma and persuasiveness of the storytellers. Thanks to a more widespread grasp of physics—and less reliance on…

AT 6-FOOT-3, 235 POUNDS, Sepp Straka could easily be mistaken for a tight end and not an emerging PGA Tour star. The 30-year-old Georgia alum is definitely one of the more imposing figures in pro golf. Yet despite his tall, muscular physique, Straka’s driving game relies more on accuracy than power. Through mid-July, Straka ranked 20th on tour in driving accuracy (65 percent of fairways hit) and in the middle of the pack in driving distance (298.3 yards). He’d much rather hit the short grass than stretch the field. “I’m a pretty good driver of the ball for the most part,” says Straka, the first Austrian-born player to win on the PGA Tour—at the 2022 Honda Classic. “I by no means hit it far compared to a lot of guys…