Innehållsförteckning för February 2024 från Golf Digest

THE ONLY THING BETTER than building your own golf course is building one with your best friend. Better still is when money isn’t really a concern because you’ve both won low-net and gross in the game of life. Irving Azoff dropped out of the University of Illinois in 1970 because it would’ve been financially reckless not to transfer his robust booking business of fraternity bands (among them REO Speedwagon) to Los Angeles. He would run Ticketmaster and later be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Eddy Cue, a first-generation Cuban-American from Miami whose father was a stagehand and mother a butcher, studied computer science at Duke and has worked at Apple since 1989. Today, they count nearly two dozen memberships between them, mostly the same clubs, and…

THE GREATEST GOLFERS HAVE ALWAYS GIVEN BACK. Automatically through the permanence of their records. Proactively by sharing their stories and accumulated wisdom. Munificently through philanthropy that leaves the game and the world better. Historically, no group in golf has had more to give, or given more, than the players in its pantheon, from Harry Vardon to Tiger Woods. The current professional game, however, seems preoccupied with taking, leaving its precariously perched administrators nothing but headaches. Will playing records lose all context? Will golf’s top names stop replacing their metaphorical divots? Will the pantheon close? Sorry, doom-loop moment. Actually, professional golf remains full of givers; they’ve just been drowned out by all the hammering on the framework agreement. But the most generous among them has risen above the noise: Rory McIlroy. The…

Bob Walls is not your average centenarian. He spends his time volunteering at Steve Hogan Golf Course in Omaha, arriving at 9 a.m., shoveling sand into five gallon buckets, mixing it with fertilizer and filling divots on the tee boxes at the par-3 course. He helps weed, repair the greens and picks up trash. When he’s not working, he plays golf. Walls finishes his day at 5 p.m., and the World War II veteran does it again the next day. “Everyone knows Mr. Walls,” says Mike Rice, who manages the course for the city of Omaha. “Whatever needs to be done, he does.” “I started working at the course because it was looking raggedy,” says Walls, who was close friends with former course manager Steve Hogan, the first Black PGA…

We will all leave things behind when we go. Bill Gilman, an avid golfer who was still shooting his age at 77 in 2019 when he died of cancer, left behind a few dozen Pro V1s with his initials on them. His son, Brett, kept them. On Father’s Day 2023, Brett joined his brother-in-law and nephew at his father’s old hang, Missoula Country Club in Montana. Brett had moved to Missoula in May 2018 to be closer to his family, and he got to play a lot of golf with his dad before he passed away. For that round on Father’s Day, Brett put a sleeve of those ProV1s in play. Brett, a former superintendent who doesn’t get to the course much anymore, wasn’t playing to his 12-handicap and hadn’t…

Schlepping oversized plastic clubs and tennis balls, Doug Hodges and his team of coaches go into public elementary schools in Durham, N.C., and set up golf clinics in gymnasiums. For a few weeks, the students learn the basics of golf and have the option to do on-course clinics after school. Hodges provides everything: transportation, gear and coaching. The program is called SwingPals, and Hodges has been doing this for over a decade. He started with elementary schools that have the most students on free or reduced lunch and is working with more than 1,200 students. Hodges, now 64, left a career as a trader in New York City at age 40 to devote his life to serving others. Though just a casual golfer, Hodges knew the game could teach young…

As the owner of a pharmacy in Mandan, N.D., Bob Gustafson has enjoyed leeway when it comes to setting his schedule. “I would work odd hours in the back office so that I had time to golf,” says Gustafson, who estimates he has played at least 400 rounds a year for more than a decade. “Golf kind of takes over your life. You’re always trying to figure out your next round.” Figuring out when to play became much easier midway through 2023 when Gustafson sold the store and retired at age 60. That, along with a second home in Phoenix, put him close to 650 full rounds this year—all of which he dutifully entered for his USGA Handicap Index that fluctuates between 7 and 10. Gustafson played about a quarter…

AGE 25 LIVES Los Angeles STORY Won her first LPGA Tour event in 2023. Has played three Solheim Cups for Team USA. THE RIGHT CLUB CAN COME FROM ANYWHERE I’ve been fortunate enough to be offered a few equipment deals, but they have never been lucrative enough for me to give up playing what I’m most comfortable with. I’m really picky about the clubs I play. I like to be able to test everything and play anything. CLUB YARDS* DRIVER 250 3-WOOD 220 HYBRID 205 4-IRON 195 5-IRON 180 6-IRON 170 7-IRON 160 8-IRON 150 9-IRON 140 PW 125 50˚WEDGE 115 56˚WEDGE 105 60˚WEDGE 85 * CARRY DISTANCE DRIVER SPECS Ping G430 LST, 7°, Fujikura Ventus Blue 6X shaft, 45.25 inches. I’ve played a driver with really low loft ever since…

I was a tennis player before I was a golfer. My parents, Anna-Maria and Ray, were professional tennis players, and I was a top-ranked junior player in Australia when I was 12. I joined the National Academy for Tennis and started home-schooling. I didn’t have a social life at a time when kids should be around their peers. During a training session when I was 14, I realized I didn’t want to be there. No one believed that I actually wanted to quit, but I knew I was done. Though I was done with tennis, I still needed something to compete in. I get that from my parents. They showed me that excellence comes from putting focused effort into a goal every day. I love that lifestyle. My brother, Ryan, was…

GOLFERS OFTEN TALK ABOUT that one good shot that keeps them coming back, and a similar mentality exists for actors. A single line can steal a scene and make a career. Domenick Lombardozzi, 47, has been acting since age 16 when Robert De Niro cast him in “A Bronx Tale,” a movie set in the Arthur Avenue neighborhood where Lombardozzi grew up. His character, Nicky Zero, spent about one minute on screen, but it wound up being a big break in a career that’s thriving three decades later. Having earned a SAG card before his driver’s license, Lombardozzi was hooked on acting, but the roles didn’t come right away. While going to auditions, he juggled various jobs from construction to waiting tables to selling cars. The first-generation American credits his…

AN EMPTY NESTER FINDS JOY AND PURPOSE IN MENTORING YOUNG KIDS When staff at The First Tee Lake Erie chapter in Toledo, Ohio, pulled Bob Sobecki into the office this past summer, he was stunned to learn he was receiving The First Tee’s George H.W. Bush Volunteer of the Year Award (Golf Digest is a trustee of The First Tee and gave $100,000 to the chapters represented by the winners in this story). In a video from the day, the 73-year-old retiree talked about how much teaching kids to play has meant to him and then quipped, “I skipped a volunteer opportunity for this!” Everybody laughed because that was classic Bob. A decade ago, Sobecki was a golfer at Crosswinds Golf Club in Perrysburg, Ohio, when head pro Dave Sanford…

It happened during the opening round at the Omega European Masters in August, on the 292-yard seventh hole at Switzerland’s spectacular Golf Club Crans-sur-Sierre. Trying to ride a wind off the right, French professional Victor Perez instead flared his 3-wood tee shot 30 yards right of a boundary fence and into an adjacent field. “[Going out-of-bounds] was literally the only thing I could do to mess up a pretty simple hole. Now I’m thinking, Hitting 3, don’t make a 6.” Perez, 31, who lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, promptly re-teed and smoked the next one, with the original intended high draw, the ball landing on the front of the green and feeding toward the cup—same guy, same club. “Like they say, second team All-American on my second ball,” Perez quips. He…

Addison Tessin, 10, of Tennessee, was headed home with her mom when she noticed something outside the window. “We saw trash on the side of the road, and it was like piles and piles of trash,” Tessin says. “I wanted to help the Earth and clean up that trash.” Within a matter of weeks, Tessin was in front of the mayor giving a speech about the amount of trash along the roadways and how rain causes the trash to flow into the rivers. Because of her, biannual cleanup days have been put in place to remove the trash in her town. Tessin isn’t just an environmental advocate; she’s a golfer. She has been playing since she was 4 and attends monthly LPGA*USGA Girls Golf clinics. What Tessin did is what…

Any golfer concerned about how getting married might affect his golf game can find inspiration in James Kinsey III, a 33-year-old wealth manager from Columbia, S.C. After tying the knot in 2022, Kinsey had an incredible golf season in 2023, dropping from an 18-handicap to as low as a 6.6 Index. Kinsey credits the swing tips of his regular golf buddy, Tyler Forbes, a former assistant pro, and a golf-focused physical assessment under the watch of former Georgia Tech men’s golf coach Puggy Blackmon. Blackmon showed the 6-foot-4, 200-pound Kinsey that he wasn’t using the ground enough to maximize power. “That was sort of the mental kickstart I needed,” says the former high school baseball player. “That showed me my potential.” It was about this time that Kinsey started using…

PUTTING UNDER PRESSURE can be a grind mentally. Like most golfers, I find that the more I focus on what the putt means for my score, the harder it becomes. That’s why I like to set my attention on something small, like the first six to eight inches of the putt. Generally, every putt is a straight putt within the first foot. Instead of trying to focus all my energy on holing an eight-footer to win my match, I make it my job to hit a straight putt for those first six to eight inches. This way, the ball starts on my intended line and rolls true. Provided I read the putt correctly and hit the ball with the proper speed, it should take the break and find the bottom…

YOU MIGHT SAY IT STARTED when W.P. Kinsella wrote a baseball novel in 1982 called “Shoeless Joe” that used the haunting refrain, “If you build it, he will come.” The extraterrestrials of Stonehenge may have had the notion originally, but Kinsella’s mantra expressed perfectly that if you create something worthwhile, people will beat a path to your door. The book became a movie in 1989, and a solitary baseball diamond in an Iowa cornfield romanced a generation. Within a decade two visionary golfers built their “Field of Dreams,” and the Remote Architecture Movement was born. The first was in 1995 when Dick Youngscap hired Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore to design Sand Hills Golf Club on what was once the ocean floor in Nebraska, now ranked No. 8 on America’s…

When financial advisor Matt DeVito tapped in a six-inch putt on 16 at the National Golf Links of America in early September to keep the round of his life going, one of his playing partners asked, “Is that seven birdies?” Their caddie shot back: “Nope. Nine.” DeVito, a plus-2.5-handicap from Verona, N.J., didn’t play college golf but has notable competitive accomplishments, including making match play at the 2021 U.S. Mid-Amateur. On this day he was playing with his dad as guests of John O’Neill and his son, Blake. The group was mostly just enjoying the walk, but after DeVito’s kick-in at No. 16, things got real. Off to the side, Blake whispered to his father, “What’s the course record?” John knew: “It’s 62. Birdie-birdie to tie.” DeVito’s 12-footer on 17…

BRINGING INNER-CITY KIDS TO THE GOLF COURSE Often the hardest part of any golf outreach program is getting kids to facilities where they can swing a club or putt a ball. The First Tee Greater Trenton in New Jersey has reached kids in underprivileged areas through after-school programs, the YMCA and churches, and the results are impressive. More than 35 percent of Greater Trenton’s participants are on scholarship, and 47 percent are girls. For those successes, the chapter received The First Tee’s 2023 Barbara Douglas and Dr. William Powell Diversity Award. Credit the accomplishments to a staff and board that is 70 percent ethnically diverse. “It has to be intentional, and that’s where our board comes in,” says Ed Benson, the program’s executive director. “It’s challenging to get kids from…

Stephen Curry is the all-time NBA leader in three-point field goals, with more than 3,400 converted from behind the arc. Making 3s in golf? Curry will say that getting the ball in the cup is more challenging, but not being afraid of the big moment apparently transcends all arenas. At the 2023 American Century Championship at Edgewood Tahoe, Curry made an ace earlier in the week. When he arrived at the lakeside 18th green on Sunday before a huge and rowdy gallery, he needed to make his 18-foot eagle putt for six points to overtake tennis player Mardy Fish in the Stableford format. Setting the scene, on-course reporter Roger Maltbie observed, “Steph’s got a shot at a buzzer beater here. Time’s running off the clock. Time to put up a…

Tommy Kuhl’s dream of playing in a U.S. Open was starting to feel real. The fifth-year senior at the University of Illinois had just shot the round of his life—a course-record 62 at a U.S. Open local qualifier in May that would send him on to final sectional qualifying. Kuhl had gone low even though the greens at Illini Country Club in Springfield were recently aerated. Afterward, while following roommate Adrien Dumont de Chassart in a playoff for one of the final qualifying spots, Kuhl mentioned how large the aeration holes were to teammate Jackson Buchanan. “Yeah, it was difficult because you couldn’t fix them,” Buchanan said. Kuhl’s heart sank. “At that moment, I can’t even describe the feeling,” Kuhl says now. That’s because Kuhl had repeatedly repaired aeration holes…

A COUPLE’S PROMISE TO HELP MOLD YOUNG KIDS IS KEPT The first time Bill and Kim Allen hosted young golfers from The First Tee Delaware at their club in Wilmington, they saw there was work to be done. The invitation to Fieldstone Golf Club was coveted by the students, but when they showed up with their parents, many were dressed like they were headed for a country picnic. “From that day,” Bill Allen says, “we committed to do three things: teach them how to dress and use proper etiquette for a meal; know the values to use on the golf course; and see people play golf who looked like them.” As Black leaders in business and education, the Allens had the resources to make this happen. For 20 years, they…

DRIVERS HYBRIDS WEDGES WOODS IRONS PUTTERS GET READY FOR MORE HOT LIST Our annual guide to the best clubs is the most comprehensive yet Welcome to the 21st edition of the Golf Digest Hot List, the game’s most trustworthy equipment review. As the Hot List enters its third decade, one crucial fact has not changed: Golfers need help making sense of the dizzying choices facing them. Your best resource is always going to be an expert clubfitter you trust. However, to get the conversation started, you need a base-line of knowledge about what clubs should be on your short list. This is the mission of the Hot List, and the 2024 collection of Gold and Silver medal winners in drivers, woods, hybrids, irons, wedges and putters promises to be the most…