The ensuing days and weeks are the most frustrating of the year. Surely there must be a reason why our golf course superintendents wait until the greens are in good shape to aerate, right?
Against the backdrop of potentially the most surreal opening two days in major championship history, club professional Jeremy Wells had an uneventful first two rounds at the 2024 PGA Championship. But look a little closer, and Wells’ 69-71 to make his first major championship cut was chaotic. After opening in two under and birdieing his Read more…
There is a popular misconception that if are you taking free relief from a sprinkler head (see Rule 16.1), then you must stay in the same “cut of grass” that you were in. That is not the case.
These benchmarks are for the best players in the world. For the rest of us, however, they seem encouraging, considering many of these goals feel attainable.
In the next decade, the PGA will continue to return to familiar host sites – notably Quail Hollow in 2025, Baltusrol in 2029 and Kiawah Island’s Ocean course in 2031 – but also will visit courses last seen on the men’s side when they hosted the US Open, including San Francisco’s Olympic Club and Congressional, located just outside Washington, DC.
Whether you call it a reverse bounce-back or a more vulgar option, we’ve all done it: We have a great hole or stretch of holes, and we immediately blow up, giving all the shots back. The issue is we’re uncomfortable with going low. That’s the mental hurdle that three-time major champion Padraig Harrington solves by Read more…
How many times have you finished a round and said, “I should have shot lower today”? As a mini-tour player, Scott Fawcett was tired of making strategic mistakes, so when Columbia Business School professor Mark Broadie helped develop the PGA Tour’s Strokes Gained statistics in 2011, Fawcett created a quantifiable course-management system called DECADE Golf. Read more…
The marketing claims around the first Grass League event held last week at the Phoenix-area night golf course, Glass Clippings Rolling Hills, were bold. It was to be high stakes par-3 golf under the lights, where amateurs would compete for a $100,000 purse (yes, amateurs. More on that later). The tournament’s organizers, who leased and Read more…
We often focus on the shots that we don’t have on a given day and not the ones we do. It’s a concept that sports psychologist Dr Bhrett McCabe calls capability versus capacity, and it is key difference between us and the pros.
Each year, we undertake a months-long process of research and testing to release the Golf Digest Hot List, the industry’s most comprehensive reviews of the latest equipment. We commit the time and effort to create the Hot List because we understand that if you’re going to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on golf clubs, Read more…
There were plenty of good signs for Tiger Woods fans on Thursday, as Woods completed 13 holes on a weather-delayed day in one under par. He was moving well, holing a few putts and hitting quality iron shots on a very windy day. Yet perhaps the best sign that Woods can play his way into Read more…
We’re revisiting this range session to uncover what we can learn from how Scheffler practises. We can study his golf swing all we want, but that swing was created here, on the range, with hours of practice alongside swing coach Randy Smith.
After a delayed start due to weather, the Masters got underway this morning with the ceremonial first tee shots hit by Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson and Gary Player. But the annual unofficial start to the Masters occurred a few minutes earlier on the range, when Player issued his latest flaming hot take (see previous: the Read more…
If Augusta National invited you to join its club, how much would you be willing to pay? This might seem like a fun, cheap thought exercise to us today, but back in the early 1930s, when the club was created, thousands around the country were offered that chance. MORE: Power rankings for the entire field Read more…
For the most part, I don’t bet on golf. The thought of me losing money because someone can’t make a five-footer when it matters doesn’t sit well with me. What’s more, knowing who is going to play well on any given week in professional golf, in my non-gambler opinion, is laughable. I know you have Read more…
Most golfers will never get to experience the numerous traditions that make the Masters so special, like the Champions Dinner, the Par-3 Contestoor, heck, Tiger Woods and Fred Couples playing a practice round together (like they did again on Tuesday at the 2024 Masters). One that they can try to replicate, however, is the practice-round Read more…
The prevailing narrative of Bobby Jones is that following his historic 1930 Grand Slam, winning all four of golf’s then-major championships, he retired from competitive golf and preserved his status as a lifelong amateur. However, that is a myth, says David Owen, Augusta National’s leading historian, who notes that not only did Bobby Jones compete Read more…
When Augusta National Golf Club calls and makes you an offer, what do you request in return? That is what longtime New Yorker and Golf Digest writer David Owen was faced with in the late-1990s when the club’s chairman, Jack Stephens, asked Owen to write a comprehensive history of the club, the Masters tournament and Read more…
By nearly every measure, the Masters has the greatest spectator experience of any sporting event. Affordable concessions, a sprawling merchandise building and Green Jackets abound to help guide you around the property. The Augusta National-mandated term “patrons” is not purely semantics—it reflects co-founder Clifford Roberts’ belief that the spectators are helping the club by attending Read more…
Australian Golf Digest
