Articles by Sam Weinman

The sneaky upside to playing your worst

With any luck, the July 4 weekend will be the low point of my golf season, because I was awful. Every day, my scores got worse. I pulled my irons, got easily frustrated and wondered if I was wasting my time. I’m already at the point where I’m glad it happened. Whether out of delusion Read more…

How golf training is catching up with other sports

At some point, thinking about golf practice brought me back to my earliest days on skates. Some background here would help: When I grew up playing hockey, most of the drills in practice emphasized isolated skills. The coach would line us up at one end of the rink and blow a whistle, and then we Read more…

We’ve been practicing all wrong

The most common affliction in golf is not the slice but the driving range swing that has mysteriously vanished. For many players the typical practice session involves a bucket of balls, a series of swings and the occasional sense that a problem has been solved. If it rarely works out, it’s because this way of Read more…

The 18-hole hazard: The US Open rough makes Oakmont both impossible and simple

If Oakmont Country Club represents one of the most difficult tests in professional golf, in at least one sense it will be starkly simple: a shot from the fairway means a player can think about how he wants to play the shot to the green, whereas a ball in the rough will suggest he shouldn’t even bother.

In the U.S. Open, the angry golfer is beaten

There are no official stats for this sort of thing, but it’s safe to assume the U.S. Open exceeds other major championships in its number of angry participants. Other tournaments dole out ample disappointment and heartbreak, both of which present opportunities for a player to look in the mirror. When a golfer is angry, that’s Read more…

A crash course on golf course design

Like an abstract painting splattered on a canvas, the skill of golf course design is easy to dismiss. A tee box, a green, a fairway and some bunkers in between. The whole time you think, Hell, I could do that. Then you dive deeper, and you realize it’s not so simple. Whenever Golf Digest publishes Read more…

In our company Match Play tournament, the shortest shots can be the messiest

A match-play tournament is incomplete without a flare-up or two around gimmes. Our Golf Digest Match Play has been no exception. Some staffers are stingy with concessions, others are generous, and some are generous until they realize they shouldn’t be. In one match recently, a player stewed when her opponent rolled a putt for practice after Read more…

5 extremely boring things tour players do that you can do, too

On major championship weeks, my Instagram feed is filled with golf things that I either can’t do, I shouldn’t do, or at least need to do much differently. Rory McIlroy launching high draws. Justin Thomas hitting spinny pitches. Bryson DeChambeau dialing in yardages down to the decimal point. If there is aspirational value in regular Read more…

Good golf is about learning to love your misses

Golf compliments don’t come around often for a player of my level, but last week at my home course, I got one after sending my drive to a perfect angle into the 12th green. “Smart play,” a playing partner said. But it wasn’t. I caught the ball on the heel, which produced a low, weak Read more…

You should practice being annoyed

On the short list of things I don’t want to hear on the golf course, someone else’s phone call ranks pretty high. It’s an intrusion I resent when I’m trying to practice, which is different than saying it’s an intrusion I don’t need. Think about how often you play golf and something sets you off. Read more…

Masters 2025: How to care just enough

Golf is not a game for fiery locker-room speeches, but imagine what it would look like if it was. Player gets riled up in the clubhouse, storms past the green jackets on his way to the first tee and then … what exactly? Lag putts the Masters field into submission? Motivation in golf is tricky. Read more…

So you messed up. Don’t make it worse

The hardest shot in golf, it’s been said, is the shot right after a shank. Because now you’re rattled, the thinking goes, and the memory is still fresh. The more golf you play, the more bad memories you risk accumulating. This is one of the downsides of experience. At my home course, I could provide Read more…

But what was the point of the pool noodles?

The pool noodle never made sense. Of all the odd concoctions in those frantic early days, that’s where they lost me. Golfer knocks a putt into the hole, fishes ball out of the bottom, but … don’t worry! This styrofoam pool noodle will keep illness at bay. The rest I got. No hand-shakes, no pulling Read more…