Tabla de contenidos para May 2024 en Golf Digest

THIS MAY I’M MISSING MY 20-year college reunion to play in a four-day event celebrating the 25th anniversary of Bandon Dunes, at Bandon Dunes. If only more of life’s decisions were this kind of hard. I equate it with choosing music or no music on the golf course. Either way I’m going to have a great time, though it’s possible my choice could disappoint or even offend a friend. In college, I took an art class, and there was a paint-splattered stereo at the back of the studio. With enthusiasm, I would bring CDs (yes, it’s a 20-year reunion) so that we could jam out while depicting our still lifes of onions, grapes, glass vases and even the occasional nude model of rural Rockbridge County, Virginia. Physics, history and economics…

IN MOST OF THE COUNTRY, golf courses fight an unrelenting battle against weather and daylight. How do you get enough rounds in to generate the revenue required to keep the doors open? One Phoenix-area operation is trying to change those terms of engagement with a modern marketing plan, banks of stadium lights and a whole lot of electricity. Jimmy and Jake Hoselton and their fellow millennial friends Pete Wilson and Connor Riley decided to expand their lifestyle and clothing brand Grass Clippings into the operations business. Their first deal was securing the venture capital backing to execute an audacious plan to resurrect a scruffy Tempe executive course by combining private-club-caliber conditioning with stadium lights and entertainment for both literal and figurative play deep into the night. Tempe leased its city-owned…

LEADING UP TO THE 1953 U.S. OPEN at Oakmont Country Club, the USGA and club officials clashed over Oakmont’s use of its heavy, wide-tined bunker rakes. The governing body, as well as many U.S. Open participants, complained that the deep furrows the rakes made were overly penal and inconsistent—one player’s ball, for example, might sit up on the berm between the grooves, presenting an attractive lie, and others settled at the bottom of the rut, requiring uncontrollable explosion shots. The club countered: That’s the way it has always been at Oakmont; deal with it. The implication of the USGA’s position, however, was that the U.S. Open might not return to Oakmont if modifications weren’t made. The sides reached a compromise—the furrowing rakes would be used in greenside bunkers only, but…

Valhalla Golf Club outside of Louisville, host of the 2024 PGA Championship, is a course defined by rich topographical variety and pointedly modernist architecture. Designed by Jack Nicklaus in the mid-1980s, the layout covers two distinct sections of land: a flood plain in the bend of a river known as Floyd’s Fork and hilly, upland terrain that plunges through hardwoods and former pastureland. The architecture is creative and stern, with defined targets and rewards for powerful driving. Artistic flourishes come in the form of fescue-carpeted mounding throughout the first nine and naturally occurring limestone used to bulwark greens, streams and water features. Previous PGA Championships at Valhalla—1996, 2000 and 2014—finished suspensefully on 18, a reachable par 5 with a split fairway second shot. Late-game theatrics are certain to be in…

TRICKY SPOT #1 If you aren’t yet familiar with the golf skills of rising LPGA Tour star Ruoning Yin, an introduction is in order. “Ronni,” as she’s called, went from missing the cut in more than half the events she played in her first LPGA Tour season in 2022 to winning a major (KPMG Women’s PGA Championship) and rising to No. 1 in the Rolex World Golf Ranking in 2023. She also won the DIO Implant LA Open and had eight other top-10 finishes last year. That’s a pretty big upward move in a short amount of time—and somewhat historic. Yin, 21, is only the second Chinese golfer to reach No. 1 in the Rolex ranking, joining Shanshan Feng. One of the reasons she improved so quickly is that she learned…

HOW MANY TIMES HAVE YOU finished a round and said, “I should have shot lower today”? As a minitour 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. Fawcett works with numerous PGA Tour players, and DECADE is used by more than 100 college golf programs. Fawcett joined us for the Golf Digest Happy Hour, our live webinar series with golf experts offered exclusively for Golf Digest+ members. This Q&A, selected from the one-hour interview, has been edited for clarity and concision. Michael: For someone new to the game, what are the takeaways from what you teach? Fawcett: The first selection off the…

ONE OF THE MARVELS of golf is the imprecision of the rules and, as a result, the frequent need for judgment calls. No other pursuit except perhaps marriage reveals character and sportsmanship so wantonly as golf. Two recent events have thrown the game’s top players into this cauldron of public discourse. Surprisingly, neither has anything to do with private equity or public investment funds. The first was the USGA’s decision to give Tiger Woods its highest honor, the Bob Jones Award for Sportsmanship. Woods has a playing record and popularity proportionate with Jones at his peak, but the announcement met with mixed reviews. The Bob Jones doesn’t necessarily go to the game’s greatest players—plenty have not measured up. Sam Snead, Billy Casper, Lee Trevino, Greg Norman, Seve Ballesteros and Nick…

Jimmie James could be the best hang in golf. The guy has played literally everywhere, teeing it at every one of Golf Digest’s America’s 100 Greatest Golf Courses in 2018, a completist feat maybe only a dozen people have accomplished in a lifetime, let alone a calendar year. He’s not obnoxious about it, though. The farthest thing from it. This self-made executive, born out of wedlock to parents neither of whom had graduated high school, has acquired extraordinary gratitude and perspective. He’s a man you want to have a beer with and talk golf and life. I once wrote about his journey after multiple interviews and a few rounds with him and thought I knew all about it, especially having once completed a similar cross-country golf odyssey myself. Wow, was…

IF THERE’S SUCH A THING as a modern throwback swing, Jake Knapp’s is it. The PGA Tour rookie’s long, syrupy backswing is of a bygone era but with the ball speed-boosting elements of today’s high-powered swings. The new-old combination helped the 29-year-old California native capture his first PGA Tour win—the Mexico Open at Vidanta—in just his ninth career start and has him ranked in the top 20 on tour in clubhead speed (122.9 miles per hour), ball speed (182.5 mph) and driving distance (305.1 yards). Yet there was a time when Knapp didn’t particularly like his swing. Only with the encouragement of his longtime swing coach, Golf Digest Best in State teacher John Ortega, did Knapp learn to love his own old-school move. “When he was younger, people would be…

A thousand years ago, in 2022, Tom Kim sat in the audience while Rory McIlroy held court with reporters before the CJ Cup in South Carolina. Kim raised his hand for the microphone and joined the ranks of the inquisitors. “What’s it like,” he said, “having so much success as a young player? How do you manage all that?” Kim was 20 years old at the time, and he had won his second PGA Tour event, the Shriners Children’s Open in Las Vegas, only two weeks before. He had started to feel the dizziness that comes with heights and needed someone to steady him. McIlroy smiled from the front of the room. “I didn’t have as much success as you’re having from such a young age,” he said. Kim laughed.…

BETWEEN 650 AND 750 COURSES IN AMERICA use caddies. Most run some sort of caddie tournament. Formats and eligibility vary widely. At River Forest Country Club in Chicago members loop for caddies in a qualifier to decide 12 spots for the Noonan Cup—inspired by caddie champion Danny Noonan of “Caddyshack” who famously bested Tony D’Annunzio in the 1980 film. However, today’s caddie tournaments bear little resemblance to that raucous depiction. They’re highly competitive, well-organized showcases for men and women who have devoted their lives to the game, played out behind the gates of exclusive clubs. These competitions possess a purity surpassing just about all else in golf. Pros play for money, members play as often as they want, but for caddies this is a once-a-year chance to invert their role…

THIS IS SI WOO KIM. A four-time PGA Tour winner, Kim is best known for capturing the 2017 Players Championship. What separates him from many golfers is that he’s able to swing aggressively through impact, letting the clubface close noticeably without fear of hooking the ball. He and his coach, Chris Como, will explain why. First, let’s talk about you. As golf season ramps up, you may find that you’ve developed a ball flight that curves sharply left of your target (for righties). Now you’re looking for a fast fix, and that’s where Kim and Como, No. 2 on Golf Digest’s list of the 50 Best Teachers in America, can assist. Kim plays with a “weak” grip, meaning his hands are more on top of the handle then off to…