Golf Digest

I DECIDED IT WAS A GOOD IDEA TO enter my son in his first 18-hole event. He’s 4.▸Now, Bo reliably advances the ball 30 to 60 yards on most swings. He hits his driver an identical distance to his iron only because the shaft is too stiff. The reason is that I chop-sawed a junior driver in half and slapped on a grip, which might sound like derelict parenting to technicians, but at the time he was still in diapers, and custom-fitting lefty clubs for a toddler felt unnecessary. (Would this strange predilection even last?) As for his third club, a putter, he doesn’t yet understand the concept and hockey dribbles the ball into the cup only with voluble coaching. No disrespect to past champions, but the Malbon x Chido Invitational…

Drinking cost me my job on the PGA Tour. How did it happen? It’s like that Hemingway line: “Gradually, then suddenly.” I always thought I had a safe relationship with alcohol. My first beer was in college, and it’s not like I was vertical on a keg every weekend. I might have a six-pack every Friday and Saturday night. I know that qualifies as binge drinking now, but back then, and compared to a lot of other college students, that was considered moderate. After graduation, one of my high school buddies tried to chase his dream on the mini-tours. I didn’t have a job yet, so I figured I’d caddie for him and delay adulting as long as I could. He didn’t last a year before quitting, realizing his game was nowhere…

DRIVING BACK TO MICHIGAN STATE AFTER missing cuts at the Masters and RBC, I was bummed. Then my phone rang. My agent was calling with an offer from LIV Golf. My dad is a good player. He took me to a range when I was little. I knew immediately this is what I wanted to do. My older brother, Glenn, and I spent all of our time at Fox Hills golf course in Plymouth, Mich. A bunch of us would bet every day for golf balls, $5, a hot dog. I was the youngest, so I played with a chip on my shoulder. They stopped including putts inside 10 feet in putting contests because I made them all. I love chasing perfection in golf even though it’s impossible. I played college golf at…

Walk around Five Iron Golf’s 25,000-square-foot indoor golf center-slash-cocktail lounge in midtown Manhattan, and it’s almost impossible to imagine that a few years ago, it was just a single netted bay with a mini-refrigerator hidden in the back of a suit shop. Mike Doyle almost can’t believe it himself. In 2016, Doyle was doing a kind of reverse commute for a New York City golf instructor. Instead of looking to migrate to one of the potentially lucrative teaching jobs at a private club in suburban Westchester, Connecticut or Long Island, he was interested in teaching that same clientele in Manhattan in an indoor setting. So Doyle went to work in the back of the aforementioned shop, tailoring his schedule to the peculiarities of his students’ availability. “I’d get guys who were traders…

I ONCE WROTE A BOOK WITH SAM Snead, and the most remarkable thing about it was the title: Pigeons, Marks, Hustlers and Other Golf Bettors You Can Beat. The cover showed Sam holding two pigeons. He had an instinctive way with all critters and was a natural wonder himself. Nothing could be more indelible than watching Sam kick the top of a door jamb from a standing start to win a bet, which he could do well into his 80s. He had good genes—his great grandmother lived till 106. Fred Couples may be breaking his age and Bernhard Langer may be the oldest winner on the Champions Tour, but Sam grew old the most gracefully. When I asked him the secret to longevity and good golf, Snead gave me his stock…

Statistical analytics play an increasingly vital role in sports. Take golf—the PGA Tour tracks hundreds of stats across all areas of the game, from strokes gained/off the tee to three putt avoidance to everything in between. For the players, it’s another metric—along with video, launch monitors, force plates, etc.—to help identify weaknesses, sharpen skills and optimize efforts to improve. Using the tour’s massive stockpile of performance-related player data, Golf Digest has done an analysis to identify the very best this past season in the game’s most critical areas—from driving to putting. As a longtime golf instructor, I’ve been enlisted to share what you can learn from these “stat champs.” I’ll explain what makes Rory McIlroy such a magnificent driver of the ball and how Justin Thomas is able to stop his…