Innehållsförteckning för September 2024 från Golf Digest

BEFORE WE TRY TO ANSWER the question, one thing to set straight: Any cultural rivalry between golf and tennis is like Australia versus New Zealand. Their proximity amid sequestration intensifies some ill feelings—I play golf where the tennis courts sit exposed to power hooks off the first tee, which draws disdainful comments from both sides of the fence—but to the rest of the world, the two seem essentially the same. They are the country club sports, the lifetime sports, their addicts unable to quit the high of making a ball fly just as intended, over and over. Collars preferred but not required. As for Best Overall Baller, or BOB, it’s hard not to start with Rafael Nadal. Tennis fans once panicked when a racehorse of the same name retired, but…

IF IT’S A DAY THAT ENDS IN THE letter “y,” there is a good chance The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is buzzing. Andrew Santino is part of many text chains, but this one holds a special place in the comedian’s heart—not just because of who is on it, but what the chatter entails. The group includes celebrities like Charlie Day, Rob McElhenney, Michael Pena and Scott Caan as well as several of Santino’s non-Hollywood buddies. The common link? They’re all avid golfers at the same L.A.-area club. “Well, Mac joined somewhere else, so we don’t see him anymore. He’s better than us,” Santino deadpans before breaking into a smile. “No, we still see him sometimes.” Santino spends a lot of time on the golf course these days despite a bustling…

WHEN THE PGA OF AMERICA chose Keegan Bradley as the 2025 U.S. Ryder Cup Captain, surprise reverberated through the golf community. No one saw it coming, not even Keegan. For days, the media tried to figure out how the decision was made. Why did they select the youngest American captain in 62 years, one who is still an active top-flight player? For insight into how decisions like this can come about, I take you back 25 years to another captain selection that was stunning and unprecedented. In early 1999, the U.S. Presidents Cup captaincy was undecided for the 2000 event at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Manassas, Va. Hale Irwin, Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus had led the American teams through the first three competitions, and anticipation for the…

WHETHER YOU’RE new to the game or have been playing for years, you’ve probably experienced the deflating feeling of hitting a great drive down the middle of the fairway that settles in a hole created by someone else’s shot. Or perhaps you missed the fairway and could have had a clean shot into the green if not for the fact there’s a sprinkler-control box a few yards in front of you. In both cases, you’re probably thinking you deserve a better fate. You’ll get no disagreement here—those are tough breaks. However, if you think the Rules of Golf should change to allow for free relief from divot holes or line-of-sight immovable obstructions such as sprinkler boxes, ball washers and benches, well, the USGA has a message for you: “It’s fundamental…

NOT LONG AGO THE BEST players in the world preferred the least-forgiving drivers with the lowest launch angle and the least amount of spin with no built-in draw bias. Then the two best players on the planet, Scottie Scheffler and Nelly Korda, showed that it is possible to play world-class golf using a driver designed for everyday players (Scheffler’s TaylorMade Qi10) with maximum forgiveness (Korda’s Qi10 Max). Fellow TaylorMade staffer Rory McIlroy, who leads the PGA Tour in Total Driving, also uses the standard Qi10 model as opposed to the compact, low-spinning Qi10 LS. Dig deeper into the driver usage on the professional tours and you find that models designed for maximum forgiveness are becoming increasingly popular. Akshay Bhatia and Alex Norén have used the Callaway Paradym Ai Smoke Max…

Architect Brian Schneider, a longtime associate of Tom Doak and partner at Renaissance Golf Design, has renovated clubs like Hollywood Golf Club in New Jersey (No. 170 on America’s Greatest Courses), Tamarack Country Club in Connecticut, Llanerch Country Club in Pennsylvania and is the co-designer of Old Barnwell in South Carolina. Golf Digest: Brian, golfers always want the greens on their course to be faster. The speed of greens can be a point of pride for many clubs and is often how people judge quality: The faster the greens, the better the course. Are ultrafast greens important to good architecture, or do they come with a cost? What do you say to clients, committees and club members who ask for fast greens? Schneider: For me a better question is, why…

THE NUMBERS GET YOU CLOSE TO A STORY BUT ARE TOO indifferent to describe a life. From 1997 to 2008, King Oehmig might have been the most successful high school golf coach in America. At his alma mater, Baylor School, a private boarding and day school in Chattanooga, Tenn., Oehmig’s teams won 21 state championships. This included five girls winning 11 individual state championships and three boys bringing home four individual titles. Four of the boys he coached—Luke List, Keith Mitchell, Harris English and Stephen Jaeger—have all won on the PGA Tour and one of the girls, Brooke Pancake Rende, won the girl’s state title four years in a row before attending Alabama and then playing on the LPGA Tour. In addition to coaching golf, Oehmig’s other calling was as…

When Callaway set out to reimagine the driver in the late 1980s, we knew we needed to create something radically new that would significantly improve average golfers’ chances of hitting a good shot with their generally not-too-good swing. We needed a club with a larger sweet spot that remained stable at impact (particularly for off-center hits), allowing the player to make more mistakes—a club that was forgiving. The problem was fundamentally one of physics: We needed to make our existing driver-clubhead design 25 percent bigger but not heavier (otherwise it would be too cumbersome to swing and more likely to break). We were willing to gamble that if we did that, we’d have a more satisfying club that would sell at a profit. We did not originate the oversized clubhead.…

Connecting Golf Digest+ members with the best in golf helps us all play a little better WITHOUT UNDERSTANDing why we’re missing putts, we often misdiagnose our putting struggles as technical ones when the issue might be that we don’t read the greens well enough. Ralph Bauer, a Canada-based putting coach who works with multiple PGA Tour players, has long studied the art and science of green reading. We chatted with him about how we can read greens better and make more putts during a Golf Digest Happy Hour, our live webinar series offered exclusively for Golf Digest+ members. The following Q&A selected from the Happy Hour has been lightly edited for clarity and concision. When you’re walking up to the green and approaching a putt, what is a good routine…

LAST YEAR, I WAS COACHING a 13-year-old girl who is one of the top juniors in the country for her age. During one tournament, she didn’t play well, and as I was walking to my car, I spotted the mom grabbing the young girl by the shoulder and scolding her. Then, slap, right across the face, she unloaded into her daughter with great force. I immediately interjected, “Is everything OK over here, guys?” The mother turned red, clearly embarrassed that I had caught her. I know it’s not my place to parent other people’s kids, but this was over the line. I wish I could say it was the first time I had seen something like this in my career. When I got into coaching 30 years ago, I wanted…

MATTHIEU PAVON IS USED to playing a lot of curve, especially with the driver. The 31-year-old Frenchman and PGA Tour rookie hits his patented left-to-right fade about 95 percent of the time off the tee, says his swing coach, Jamie Gough. “Moving the ball left to right is really big for me,” Pavon says, “because I want to take away the left side of the course.” It wasn’t until last fall, however, that Pavon had the fade consistently dialed in, the result of several years of hard work with Gough. The payoff has been significant. In addition to winning on the DP World Tour for the first time last October, he captured his first PGA Tour title at the Farmers Insurance Open in January, one of three top-10 finishes in…

PHIL MICKELSON IS known for his incredible wedge game, and back in 2005, it seemed like he was getting up and down from everywhere. Mickelson tied a career-high with four wins on the PGA Tour that year, including his second major, the PGA Championship at Baltusrol Golf Club. While he is renowned for using his 60-degree wedge to hit flop shots, Mickelson was pretty darn good from the sand, too, ranking 15th on the PGA Tour in bunker saves that season. Golf Digest was lucky enough to spend a lot of time with Mickelson on the lesson tee during his prime, and one such visit netted some great greenside bunker advice, starting with how to set up: “I can’t emphasize enough that your weight has to stay forward on bunker…

A STUDY BY THE FRENCH Institute of Health and Research explored how cognitive thinking is impacted when your brain has been sufficiently taxed. Its testing revealed that an overworked brain is no different than cramping leg muscles in the final miles of a marathon—the simplest tasks become arduous. “The cerebral gears start slipping and impulsiveness kicks in,” a summary of the study said. If you play a lot of golf, this should come as no surprise. Floundering on the back nine is a tale often told over beers at the 19th hole. It happens to the pros, too. Rory McIlroy’s putting mishaps on Sunday at the U.S. Open could be chalked up to brain fog. Prior to the first of two misses inside of four feet in the closing holes,…

SOME OF THE BEST TOUR players have started switching to game-improvement irons, and at retail they outsell players irons 5-to-1, based on Golf Datatech numbers. It’s probably even greater when you go down the range at any club or course in the country and look in people’s bags. Game-improvement irons just make the game easier. What do our Hot List testing numbers say? Using a Rapsodo MLM2 Pro launch monitor, which tracked every shot during testing for the 2024 Hot List, we compared 7-iron shots made by low-handicappers with middle-handicappers who hit both players irons and game-improvement irons. Results show that game-improvement-iron shots carried 6.1 yards farther, with some players seeing a 16-yard edge. Game-improvement irons for the win, right? Not so fast. The average loft of a game-improvement 7-iron…

Medinah (Ill.) Country Club’s No. 3 Course, site of U.S. Opens, PGA Championships and a Ryder Cup, has been remodeled before but not like this. The Australian design firm OCM (Geoff Ogilvy, Mike Cocking and Ashley Mead) has revamped the course in the spirit of its prairie-style 1920s roots by clearing trees, planting fescue and reintroducing the original mode of rugged bunkering. Major sections of the course have been rerouted with new holes, including the short, cape-style par-4 16th with a bite-off-what-you-dare tee shot across water and the revamped par-3 17th (pictured). When No. 3 hosts the 2026 Presidents Cup, it will look nothing like you remember.…

THIS SEPTEMBER WHEN the Presidents Cup returns to Canada for just the second time, the International team will be looking to put up a better fight than the 14½ to 19½ loss to the United States the last time the event was played at The Royal Montreal Golf Club’s Blue Course, in 2007. The Blue won’t offer many different opportunities for improvement: It remains a tight, stringent, shotmaker’s design with treelined fairways, thick rough and small elevated greens. Though founded in 1873 and purported to be the oldest in North America, the club has only been playing its current courses, the Blue and Red, since 1959 when it moved from a location in historic Montreal to Ile Bizard four miles west. Dick Wilson built both courses on what was mostly…

COMPETITION, CAMARADERIE and the opportunity to play at one of America’s greatest golf destinations were all reasons why women from across the country signed up for the 2024 Golf Digest Woman Classic, played May 19-22 at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort. Popular Peloton instructor Selena Samuela (above, second from the left), signed up for these reasons, but once she arrived in Oregon, the appeal became even more clear. “The vibes were awesome. There was such a good energy out there,” says Samuela, who attributes the fun atmosphere to her playing partners and caddie, Rack, who is regarded as a “total legend at Bandon Dunes,” she says. Golf Digest and Bandon Dunes teamed up to create the event in 2023 to build community among women golfers and show that popular resorts like…

REGARDLESS OF HOW MANY Canucks make the International team, the Presidents Cup’s return to The Royal Montreal Golf Club Sept. 26-29 coincides with Canadian golf having a moment. This season Nick Taylor won the WM Phoenix Open and Taylor Pendrith the CJ Cup Byron Nelson. As of this writing, Mackenzie Hughes has three top-10s and Corey Conners two, including a T-9 at the U.S. Open. Throw in Adam Hadwin and Adam Svensson, and that’s six Canadians in the top 100 of the World Golf Ranking. On the women’s side, we have 13-time LPGA Tour winner Brooke Henderson. Beauty, eh? For a country of just 39 million (the population of California) with a short golf season, Canada is punching above its weight. Our pandemic bump is real. Canadians played 74 million…

MOST AMATEURS STRUGGLE with dogleg holes because they try to do something they’re not capable of doing. If the hole bends to the left, they think, I need to hook or draw it around the corner, even if their natural ball flight is a fade. That strategy has double bogey written all over it. Remember, the second half of every dogleg is the shortest part of the hole, so if you can reach the corner and keep the ball in play, you’ve got a chance to score. Here are some other things to consider when you step on the tee of a hole that bends left or right. 1. Pinpoint the zone Before you choose a club, take the usual steps: Consider the shape of the hole, the wind and…

WHEN YOU’RE INSIDE 100 yards with a good lie, it’s pretty deflating not to hit the green with your next shot. There are more than a few reasons it could happen, but a poor shot from this distance is often the result of being a little careless with your approach. When you’re in the “red zone,” try this game plan instead. First, don’t try to max out distance with the club you choose. You’ll end up overswinging and likely produce poor contact. You have to hit these shots solid, so go with a club where you can make a smooth, three-quarter swing. Next, play for the center of the green and/or away from “no-go zones,” such as water, bunkers, deep rough. There’s nothing bad about a two-putt par, but you…

WHAT DO PRO GOLFERS think about when standing over a putt? Well, frankly, it depends on the putt. Just like the bull’seye illustration above, you can expect their mind-set and approach to be determined by what ring their ball is in. I call them “putting zones,” and one of pro golf’s most respected putting coaches, Stephen Sweeney, will explain how to adjust your goal depending on what sector you’re in. OUTERMOST SCORING CIRCLE “Tour players are more likely to three-putt than one-putt around the 30-to-35 foot mark, so speed control out here is the top priority,” says Sweeney, who works with many tour players including Collin Morikawa and Shane Lowry. “Err on the side of overreading putts. It will leave you closer to the hole than underreading because the slope…

ARCHITECTURE PURISTS will argue that the most important factor in evaluating the quality of a golf course is the physical arrangement of features and the types of shots and situations encountered while playing them, but most admit that the environment in which the course is played greatly influences the golfer’s feelings about the course. Mike Keiser, developer of destinations like Bandon Dunes in Oregon, Sand Valley in Wisconsin and Barnbougle Dunes in Tasmania, understands the importance of aesthetics. He devotes a chapter of his book, The Nature of the Game, to beauty and has purposely sought out venues that possess raw emotional power. Golf Digest’s course-ranking panelists are asked to assess each course’s beauty and visceral impact in the Aesthetics category. Not surprisingly the highest scores go to courses that…

When Jon Rahm signed with LIV Golf for an estimated half a billion dollars last December, he made the smart play. Rahm became the second highest-paid athlete in the world (behind soccer’s Cristiano Ronaldo) with enough money to take care of future generations of his growing family. It also appeared as if he would soon regain the opportunity he had sacrificed by defecting to LIV—regularly competing against the best fields in golf. Rahm’s soulful drive to be the best is what had made the 29-year-old Spaniard a commanding and compelling figure. However, smart alone can be soulless, which is why the move rang off key. Rahm had built his reputation on the historical continuum provided by the PGA Tour, to which he had emphatically declared fealty. He had rhetorically asked,…

68% A 15-HANDICAPPER MAKING A THREE-FOOT PUTT (68% of the time) is like Rickie Fowler hitting a drive in the fairway (66%), which is about the same probability as Miami Dolphins wide receiver Tyreek Hill scoring a touchdown in a regular season game (61%). 48% A golfer who shoots 85 taking less than 34 putts in a round (48%) is like Justin Rose taking less than 29 putts in a round (51%) and Wimbledon champ Carlos Alcaraz winning the next tennis major (50%). 45% A 5-HANDICAPPER MAKING A PAR (45%) is like Rory McIlroy hitting a drive longer than 320 yards (47%), which is like Tampa Bay Lightning goaltender Andrei Vasilevskiy giving up one or two goals in a game (49%). 45% An 80s-shooter making a par (45%) is like…