Tabla de contenidos para December/January 2024 en Golf Digest

VERTICAL INTEGRATION ISN’T a term you hear much in the golf-instruction business, but Martin Chuck has nearly every step of the process covered. The Golf Digest 50 Best Teacher (see page 30) manages golf schools that are sold out months in advance at the Tour Striker Golf Academy at Raven Golf Club in Phoenix. Those students are the test subjects for the popular array of Tour Striker teaching aids that Chuck has been inventing and selling for more than a decade. Even if you don’t know Chuck’s training aids by name, you’ve probably seen one if you’ve been to a PGA Tour driving range. Chuck’s Smart Ball—a squishy, plush grapefruit-sized ball attached to a strap that goes around your neck—went viral in 2017 when Justin Rose and more recently Rory…

▶ When hitting touch shots around the greens—chips, pitches, etc.—pressure-plate technology has shown that better players have virtually no weight shift while they swing. Depending on the type of shot, the weight distribution between the feet can be anything from 50-50 to 70-30 (favoring the lead leg), but we don’t see a big shift to the trail side. When you shift into your trail leg going back, you put yourself in position to either strike the ground before the ball and blade the shot over the green or hit it fat and short. I’ve got a low-tech way to take this pressure-plate data about weight shift and incorporate it into your finesse-wedge game. Grab two wedges, one you’re going to hit a shot with and another that you’ll step on…

EDITOR’S NOTE: Professional golf finds itself in more uncharted ethical terrain. Never has a player of supreme accomplishment been associated with such abhorrent activity. Over the past three years, the downfall of Angel Cabrera has been hard to follow—extradited, tried and sentenced in Argentina on domestic-abuse charges. His release in August, after serving 30 months in prison, raises more questions, namely, should the administrators of elite tournaments let him play while his competitive window still has daylight? The 2007 U.S. Open and 2009 Masters champion, now age 54, says that is his wish. Do we, the fans, offer our second chance? Boxing has a history of stars who successfully resumed careers after incarceration for violent crimes against women, and football and basketball have had their felons, but golf’s arena has…

LIKE MANY GOLFERS, I HAVE a tendency to lift my arms too much during the backswing. This forces my arm plane to get too high and steep, often causing me to swing down with the club outside my target line. That’s how you turn a baby cut into a high, weak slice. To plug this major power leak, I’ll often start my range sessions by hitting balls with a golf glove tucked under my trail armpit (right). This helps exaggerate the feel for the backswing I want, which is one in which my arms stay connected to my body and the shoulders move more level to the ground. It’s the only way you can swing the club to the top and keep the glove in place. If the arms get…

Editor’s note: Starting in 2001, Butch Harmon was voted by his peers No. 1 on Golf Digest’s 50 Best Teachers in America for more than two decades. In a sport obsessed with records, it’s hard to imagine that one ever being broken. Harmon’s historic run as a coach, from Greg Norman and Seve Ballesteros to Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson to Dustin Johnson and Rickie Fowler, proves his enduring influence. Now, we’ve created a new recognition—The Legends of Golf Instruction—to honor Harmon and 20 other leading teachers who have been fixtures on our national instructor ranking since its inception in 2000. Harmon tops the list and is joined by David Leadbetter, Jim McLean, Bob Toski, Hank Haney and Dave Pelz, to name several. See the full list on the next page.…

▶ Thanks to advances in electroencepha-logram (EEG) technology, we know that athletes perform their best when there is low alpha-brainwave activity. It’s known as the “flow state,” and it greatly helps subdue the parts of your mind that interfere with performance. It accentuates your ability to focus on a specific task, such as splitting a fairway or holing a putt. Flow-state training is part of what I work on with Collin Morikawa and other skilled golfers. The good news is, you can train this way, too—and you don’t need to hook any devices to your head to learn how. One of the best ways to lower your brainwave activity is called “expanded awareness.” To tap into it, the next time you’re on the range or out on the golf course,…

▶ One thing we’ve learned from being able to accurately model putts and breaks over the past 20 years is that overreading a break results in a lot closer miss than if you underread it. For amateurs, this finding is especially important when trying to avoid the dreaded three-putt. The math tells us that when you underestimate the break, the error is roughly tripled. That means, if you underread your putt by a foot, your ball will miss three feet low—and that’s if your speed was good. If you overread a putt, the miss at the hole is halved. So an overread of one foot will end up only six inches above the hole (above). Hopefully, the message is clear: When you practice lag putts, keep playing an increasing amount…

Great golf courses are often the passion projects of single-minded individuals. A pair of under-40 entrepreneurs, Nick Schreiber and PGA Tour player Zac Blair, are the visionaries behind two of the country’s most intriguing new courses—Old Barnwell and The Tree Farm—just 25 miles apart outside Aiken, S.C. Perhaps because of the relative youth and inexperience of these innovators—and their counterintuitive choice of designers—the ideology and architecture propelling both properties feel uniquely fresh and more purposeful. Opening simultaneously in the fall of 2023, the clubs embody an emerging ethos in the golf zeitgeist, namely to break convention and embrace the game in more free and culturally meaningful ways. At The Tree Farm, Blair has attracted a kindred young-in-spirit if not exclusively young-in-age national membership that mirrors his infectious passion for walking,…

My six siblings and I took up most of the LPGA Tour’s daycare room in the 1990s. My mom, Laura Baugh, would pile my siblings and me into a van, and we’d go from LPGA tournament to LPGA tournament all summer. My dad, Bobby Cole, was a pro golfer, too. All of us kids learned to play golf, but I had the most passion for it. I played a lot of golf with my mom as a kid because we hit it about the same distance. Mom was the LPGA Rookie of the Year in 1973 and played the tour for 25 years. The best thing she taught me was to work hard when you’re at the course and leave it there. If you only think about golf, you’ll get…

This ranking is different. Now that Butch Harmon and 20 of his fellow trailblazers have been promoted to our first-ever roll of the Legends of Golf Instruction, it means there’s a new No. 1, and many new faces on Golf Digest’s biennial ranking of the 50 Best Teachers in America. The largest voting population in the history of our survey—more than 3,000 teachers nationwide—picked Alabama-based Mark Blackburn as the top instructor in a close race with fellow tour coach Chris Como. Sean Foley, Cameron McCormick, Claude Harmon III, James Sieckmann, Martin Chuck, Michael Jacobs, Dana Dahlquist and Michael Breed round out the top 10. Among the notable teachers who are new to the list are Joseph Mayo, who helped Viktor Hovland to a recordbreaking season; Justin Parsons, who coaches Open…

▶ Now that we can measure impact conditions with launch monitors, we’re able to clearly see the difference between the strike of a pro versus that of a typical amateur. One thing that jumps off the screen is the difference in dynamic loft. Think of it as “delivered loft,” meaning the orientation of the clubface as it meets the ball. For full iron shots including distance wedges, technology confirms that most amateurs deliver the club with too much loft into impact when compared to skilled players. Many amateurs attempt to scoop the ball off the turf and leave the face open, which leads to poor contact. To hit your iron shots more like a pro—lowering your dynamic loft—close the clubface earlier in your down-swing and have the shaft leaning toward…

▶ I like to say “success leaves clues.” Using the Gears motion-tracking system and studying what the best players do, we’ve found a commonality in most pros’ backswings that might seem contradictory to what you’ve been told to do, but it’s key to sequencing, timing and power generation. High-level players start their swings with a lot of speed early off the ball and then slow down as the club approaches the top. Amateurs, often under the direction of taking the club back “low and slow,” do the opposite. Their takeaway is too deliberate and their transition is too quick. The result is they often lose control of the swing during the change-of-direction phase. To make your backswing more effective, try this drill: Grab your driver and mimic a follow-through position…

Golf and private aviation have grown up together. As early as the 1950s, West Virginia businessman and legendary amateur Bill Campbell piloted his Cessna “taildragger” to tournaments with Sam Snead as a regular passenger. When Arnold Palmer hung up his wings after a final flight from Palm Springs, Calif., to Orlando in 2011, at age 81, air-traffic controllers along the way radioed in to pay tribute. They also cleared the airspace, allowing tail number N1AP (November One Alpha Papa) to set a speed record. ▶ Today most of the top-50 pros are regularly skipping the regular terminal. With oil barrels of money transforming the professional game, even caddies are hitching rides. Just be careful about posting photos of any mile-high high jinks on the ’gram, Four Aces Golf Club, because…

AGE 31 LIVES Fulton, Miss. STORY Three-time LPGA Tour winner and three-time member of USA’s Solheim Cup team. KEEP AN OPEN MIND When testing, I wait a few days to make a decision. I take the club from the range to the course and have my swing coach join me. He watches my swing and makes sure I’m not changing anything to make a certain club work. The club should be working for you and not the other way around. CLUB YARDS* DRIVER 235 3-WOOD 218 HYBRID 198 4-IRON 185 5-IRON 175 6-IRON 162 7-IRON 150 8-IRON 140  9-IRON 128 PW 115 50˚WEDGE 108 54˚WEDGE 95 58˚WEDGE 75 * CARRY DISTANCE DRIVER SPECS Ping G430 LST, 10.5 degrees, 45½ inches, Ping Tour 2.0 Black 65 S, tipped ½ inch, D-1 swingweight Before the 2023…