Tabla de contenidos para February 2025 en Golf Digest

MY FATHER HAD A subscription to Golf Digest. New issues floated around our kitchen table a few days, then ended up either in my bedroom or his bathroom. He liked the top writers, which reflected in his game. To him, golf was four hours of clever jokes and enjoying time together outside, always continued with a sturdy 19th hole session on our terrace. Back then, to me golf was all about score, so I’d turn straight to the pages of Breaking 100/90/80. A teen growing a touch stronger and more coordinated daily, I knew it wouldn’t be long before I would beat him and his friends legitimately. Same as every beginner ever, I couldn’t break 100, but still I read all three sections. The demonstrative photos and tight metaphors for…

WATCH PRO GOLF long enough and you’ll be amazed at some of the breaks players seem to get thanks to the construction of grandstands, hospitality tents, TV towers and more. In fact, it’s not all that unusual for tour pros to take temporary immovable obstructions (TIOs) into consideration when playing shots. One example came from Jordan Spieth at the Valero Texas Open last year. Trying to escape a dicey lie in a penalty area on the 18th hole at TPC San Antonio during the third round, Spieth purposely hit his third shot into the gutter of the clubhouse left of the green, knowing that the building was not out of bounds. He got the relief drop, which then put his ball behind a scoreboard on his line to the hole.…

At the Hot List Summit, our panel of intrepid testers—from 90-shooters to pros—analyzed, scrutinized and pulverized golf’s newest clubs. Let’s meet them. Gary Abbott, 37 Dundas, Ontario, Canada Solutions engineer / Handicap: 12 Driver: 265 yards / 7-iron: 170 yards "I minimize big mistakes by playing a fairly conservative game from tee to green so I chase par and bogey on most holes. I lack the higher gear to make a bunch of birdies in a round." Favorite Hot List driver: Callaway Elyte X Thomas B. Allen, 60 Middletown, Ohio Attorney / Handicap: 5 Driver: 250 yards / 7-iron: 153 yards "About once a week, I put in a practice session, mostly on my short game, so I excel with a wedge or putter in my hands. I fight a…

WINNER THE COVEY AT BIG EASY RANCH Columbus, Texas 7,511 yards, par 72 Architect: Chet Williams Great land isn’t necessary to create great golf, but it can certainly help get architects moving in the right direction. At The Covey (opening photo and this page), situated amid a 2,000-acre hunting preserve 75 miles west of Houston, designer Chet Williams draped holes across rustic backcountry slopes with 50- to 60-foot elevation changes, weaving them through groves of pine, brush, clusters of specimen post oak, water oak, ash and several dry creek beds. Williams, who also designed Whispering Pines, the state’s No. 1-ranked course, says the ridges, valleys and sidehills “always seemed to rise and fall in the right places.” The biggest construction challenge was the effort required to scrape away the bull…

WINNER MEDINAH (ILL.) COUNTRY CLUB (#3) 7,564 yards, par 72 Architects: Geoff Ogilvy, Mike Cocking, Ashley Mead Through the 1970s and 80s, few courses exemplified the ideal of the “championship course” more than Medinah #3. In an era when toughness correlated with greatness, Medinah looked the part, flexing its toughness in the form of tight, treelined fairways, thick rough and greens that played like marble staircases. By 2019, however, when the #3 course hosted the BMW Championship, time and maintenance technology had passed it by. Justin Thomas’ 25-under score officially killed any remaining intimidation factor, and a course once positioned inside the top 10 suddenly seemed out of date and in danger of slipping off the America’s 100 Greatest Courses ranking entirely (it was No. 93 in 2023-2024). Drastic times…

The setup is critical to allowing the club and body to move properly in the backswing. On tour, nearly every player starts with a soft trail arm. The right elbow for right-handers is slightly bent at address and when viewed from behind, looking down the target line, it sits below the left arm (above). This serves two crucial functions. First, it squares up your shoulders. Many average golfers who fight a slice tend to get their shoulders open in the setup. This often happens when the right arm is too internally rotated because it’s rigid, which shoves the shoulders open. With open shoulders, you’ll tend to take the club back too far outside, which leads to that dreaded out-to-in path coming down and a slice. A softer trail arm also…

From the top of the swing, the best players create space to swing the club down to the ball. Watch the first downswing move from elite ball-strikers—their butt stays back and their chest is down. It’s the opposite of early extension, where the pelvis moves toward the ball and the chest rises, a fault that plagues so many amateurs and causes all kinds of contact issues and inconsistency. Creating space in the downswing is crucial to hitting it flush, especially with irons and wedges. It keeps the clubface square and allows the shaft to return to a similar position that it was in at address. People who early extend and move their hips toward the ball are jammed and have no room to rotate through the shot, leading to erratic…

First Tee-Tampa Bay has the good fortune of having friends in influential places. Gary Koch, the former PGA Tour player and longtime broadcaster, is the chapter’s chairman of the board, and among the volunteers is Augusta National Chairman Fred Ridley. Jack Nicklaus and Annika Sorenstam have been speakers at chapter fundraisers that consistently raise $1 million each year. With that support, First Tee-Tampa Bay has grown “exponentially” over the last few years, according to Koch, who earned the First Tee’s Tim Finchem Leadership Award. The most impactful result is the funding and construction of a nine-hole par-3 course at the municipal Rogers Park Golf Course. Koch notes that in the time it’s been open, the short course has hosted more than 1,000 rounds and earned more than $100,000 in revenue.…

Editor’s note: In celebration of Golf Digest’s 75th Anniversary, each month Writer-At-Large Jaime Diaz will interview key figures in the game to explore what happened when they were at the height of their powers. In a period of 20 days in 1971, Lee Trevino won the national opens of the United States, Canada and Great Britain. The feat might fall just short of being included among the storied individual seasons of 1930, 1945, 1953 and 2000, but it endures as the most productive short burst in championship history. “A hat trick unparallelled in the annals of golf,” was broadcaster Henry Longhurst’s description after Trevino holed out at Royal Birkdale. The triple’s impact earned Trevino honors including Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year, AP Male Athlete of the Year, ABC Wide World…

YOU DON’T SEE MANY SKI resorts with great golf courses because managing prime turf after months of snow and ice is not an easy, or inexpensive, task. It’s not a surprise, then, that of the approximately 800 golf resorts in the U.S., only about five percent include skiing. Factoring in both the quality of the courses and the skiing, we offer a list of our favorite U.S. destinations open to the public that expertly manage this difficult combination of an exciting snowy season and a fun summer of golf. 1. RED SKY RANCH & G.C. Wolcott, Colo. Both courses are on our list of America’s 100 Greatest Public Golf Courses and boast epic views of the Rockies, with extreme elevation changes. Located in the Vail Valley, it’s just minutes from…

On the course and off, our members are bound by a shared passion ‘‘We’re going to Ireland!” said Marc Engellenner (second from left), turning to his girlfriend, Sophia, after he hit the clinching bunker shot in a playoff at the second annual Golf Digest Open, played at Streamsong Resort in Bowling Green, Fla., in November. Engellenner and his partner Drazen Trkulja (ter-kool-yuh, second from right), both former mini-tour pros from California, shot nine-under over 36 holes in the best-ball format to earn the playoff berth before winning the National Championship on the first extra hole. “On the way down, I’m like, Just hit it fat,” Engellenner said of his chunk-and-run bunker shot in the playoff. “I took a divot a foot long behind the ball just to get it out…

LONG BEFORE TIGER CAME along, the pals of my youth were Hoganophiles or infantrymen in Arnie’s Army. I was a Nicklaus guy; I studied all things Jack. My first act of civil disobedience as a teenager was getting a Philadelphia public-library card under false pretenses in the name of “Jack Nicklaus.” I used it to read all the books on the shelf about golf. Every year that Jack didn’t win the Masters was instantly ruined for me, because the Grand Slam—winning four majors in a single season—was out of reach. Bobby Jones won the first Grand Slam by carrying off the U.S. Open and Amateur and the British Open and Amateur in 1930. Amateurs were as good as pros in Jones’ time, and those four tournaments comprised the accepted “major…

WHEN DANIEL BERGER decided to shut things down following the 2022 U.S. Open, he and his team spent a lot of time looking at 3-D motion capture hoping to pinpoint what was leading to severe lower-back pain. It didn’t take long to find the answers. “Some things are very obvious when it comes to causing back pain in golf and he had three of them,” says his swing coach, Golf Digest Teaching Professional Mark Blackburn. “The combination was murder on his back.” His problems started at address. Instead of hinging from his pelvis, Berger would arch his lower back, which put undue stress on the facet joints in his lower lumbar spine. Then, because his shoulders turned too flat and he struggled to get his arms up on the backswing,…

The Hot List is a massive effort by the Golf Digest editorial team, but the voting is fueled by contributions from two groups that aren’t getting paid. Our team of scientists advises us on which technologies show the most promise, and our panel of 32 player-testers lets us know which clubs are working and how. Together, they make up the foundation for our three criteria: Performance, Innovation, Look/Sound/Feel. PERFORMANCE 50% Based on interviews with our testers, we assess the utility of each club. In other words, this is a grade of what happens to the ball when a player hits it. Rapsodo MLM2Pro launch monitors are used at every hitting station, and during testing this time we recorded nearly 27,000 shots. Fitters work with players on-site so that they are…

WINNER PINEHURST (N.C.) #10 7,020 yards, par 70 Architect: Tom Doak Tom Doak’s new course at Pinehurst possesses all the elements that define golf in the Carolina sand hills, but it’s arranged in ways that make #10 seem fresh and explorative. The essential components are familiar: deep sandy soils, rolling but not extreme elevation changes, pine forests and contrasting grasses and sedges for texture. From there, the architecture goes in its own direction. Built on a 900-acre property dubbed the Sandmines, which Pinehurst Resort acquired over a decade ago (and once the site of a golf course called The Pit), #10 feels large and unbound. Other than the new clubhouse and a few old buildings left over from the previous course, there’s no development around—just your group and the wilderness.…

NEARLY EVERY GOLFER understands it’s their responsibility to rake a bunker after they hit from it, but what should they do after that? Should they place the rake inside or outside the bunker? That’s the question we put to Shannon Wheeler, the director of agronomy at The Plantation at Ponte Vedra Beach. Wheeler has worked at The Plantation for about four years after serving as the superintendent at the nearby Dye’s Valley course at TPC Sawgrass. Golf Digest: Shannon, where should golfers place bunker rakes? Wheeler: The main thing is that the USGA recommends they go outside and out of the way. With a tour event, you’ve got a lot less rakes on the golf course and so generally they would not place them anywhere a shot could end up.…

Instructors have long preached the importance of a one-piece takeaway, where the club, hands, arms and shoulders start back together. That’s bad advice—the clubhead should start first. Some players might feel like they have a one-piece move off the ball, but feel and real aren’t always the same thing. Taking everything back together gets the club too far to the inside and starts a chain of events that produces a slice. When we look at the swings of the best players with 3-D technology, we see that the clubhead moves away from the ball first, followed by the arms, then the shoulders, then the torso and finally the hips. This is the proper kinematic sequence, which keeps the club tracking on a good path, so you can simply reverse the…

Tour pros are exceptional wedge players because they control their distance so well, but you don’t need to spend hours on the range to be pin-high more often—you just might need to adjust your technique. The best wedge players have a wide backswing with very minimal wrist set (above). Think of Steve Stricker’s motion, where he hardly hinges his wrists. The wedge swing should be controlled by the rotation of your core, not by your hands and arms. A wider backswing creates a shallower angle of attack and a lower, more consistent ball flight. Bad wedge players use a lot of hand action and slide their body toward the target in the downswing, which creates a steep angle and big divots. The best wedge players stay very centered throughout the…

The chip from a collection area right of the 18th green at PGA West’s Stadium Course was good, but on its own, not highlight-worthy. Ball back in his stance, club straight back and through, Nick Dunlap sent it skidding to six feet, leaving a putt PGA Tour players make 71 percent of the time. But Dunlap was not a PGA Tour player. He teed off in the final round of The American Express as a University of Alabama sophomore, but the closing par save and one-shot win over Christiaan Bezuidenhout changed everything. The 20-year-old earned a two-year exemption onto the PGA Tour and notably became the first amateur since Phil Mickelson in 1991 to win on that tour. Although he didn’t collect first-place prize money, he turned professional days later,…

Francesco Molinari acing his final hole Friday to make the cut at the U.S. Open on the number wasn’t quite the golf equivalent of a Hail Mary. After all, Molinari didn’t win the U.S. Open at North Carolina’s Pinehurst No. 2, but it certainly was Hail Mary adjacent. The 42-year-old Italian knew the only way he was going to play the weekend was if he found the cup with his 7-iron on the 194-yard par-3 ninth, his final hole of the second round. Not many had faith. “Molinari … going to miss the cut,” was NBC host Mike Tirico’s call just before the former Open champion, two off the cutline, brought the club back. Molinari didn’t ask for an apology. “It looked on a great line the whole way, but…

1 Most Majors Some say the count is 18, while others argue Jack Nicklaus’ two U.S. Amateurs make 20. Either way, the man who took up golf when he was 10 years old in 1950, the same year Golf Digest was founded, holds the game’s coolest record. Nicklaus also appeared on our cover 38 times, more than any other subject. 2. SIX STRAIGHT USGA TITLES Of all Tiger’s countless and sublime feats, it’s inconceivable his winning streak of three U.S. Junior Amateur titles followed by three U.S. Amateur titles will ever be matched. Achieved during ages 15-20, he became Golf Digest’s youngest playing editor at 22. 3. MOST CLUB CHAMPIONSHIPS As of this writing, Arlene McKitrick, 78, of Longboat Key Club in Florida, has won 116 club championship titles across…

I HAVE WORKED OVER 50 tour events as a locker room attendant. It’s a privilege to take care of the best golfers in the world. It’s usually a 100-hour week. My pre-tournament checklist runs several pages and includes much more than just shoe service and locker nametags. I’m organizing tables for massage therapists, Shotlink and autograph items; coordinating dry cleaning, mail, and FedEx shipments; keeping tabs on security and cleaning services; installing new mats on tiled floors so players with steel spikes don’t slip and fall, making sure there are enough towels when it rains, and on and on. I want to be respectful, grateful and not sound greedy, yet fair is fair. The PGA Tour has a mandatory $50 locker fee each week. Those that honor it usually pay…

THE MOST COMMON complaint I hear from golfers at my academy is, “I don’t make enough putts from eight to 20 feet.” I call these putts “difference makers,” because they really do impact your score. To have success with them, it’s all about matching the line of the putt with the proper speed. If you’re simply standing behind the ball and picking a start line for these putts, you’re going to miss a lot more than you make—reading them this way tells you nothing about the speed you need. Instead, use my pre-putt routine. 1. Find the entry point Stand on the opposite side of the cup from your putt and picture the entry point the ball should roll into the hole—I call it the front door. I put down…

THE LATE CALVIN PEETE was an amazing golfer with an amazing story, and it’s hard to overstate just how straight he hit the ball. Peete didn’t take up the game until he was in his 20s, yet he led the PGA Tour in driving accuracy from 1981 to 1990 (earning a spot on our list of the 75 Coolest Records, page 96) and was among the annual leaders in greens in regulation. He also won 12 times. What was the key to his accuracy? Some say it was because of the way he was forced to swing the club to accommodate a left-elbow fracture from his childhood that never completely healed. That explanation, however, diminishes his athletic skill. Golf Digest periodically checked in with the Peete to talk about his…

One of the rare quiet moments at the annual Hot List Summit comes when the range line reveals itself each morning, ready for players to begin testing. Thousands of clubs and 32 avid, real-world golfers went to work over three weeks last fall at the Reunion Resort in Orlando. That process—regimented, resolute, revealing—defines our mission: to find the clubs that matter most in 2025 and, specifically, to help you navigate which ones you should add to your bag.…

DRIVERS • CALLAWAY Elyte/Elyte Max Fast/Elyte X/ Elyte ◆◆◆ • COBRA DS-Adapt LS/ DS-Adapt Max-D/ DS-Adapt Max-K/ DS-Adapt X • PING G440 LST/ G440 Max/ G440 SFT • PXG 0311 Black Ops/ 0311 Black Ops Tour-1 • SRIXON ZXi/ZXi LS/ZXi Max • TAYLORMADE Qi35/Qi35 LS/Qi35 Max/Qi35 Max Lite • TITLEIST GT1/GT2/GT3/GT4 • CLEVELAND HiBore XL/HiBore XL Lite • MIZUNO ST-G/ST-Max 230/ST-X 230/ ST-Z 230 • TOUR EDGE Exotics C725/ Exotics E725 • WILSON Dynapower Carbon/ Dynapower LS/ Dynapower Max FAIRWAY WOODS • CALLAWAY Elyte/Elyte Max Fast/ Elyte X/Elyte ◆◆◆ • CALLAWAY Elyte Ti • COBRA DS-Adapt LS • COBRA DS-Adapt Max/ DS-Adapt X • PING G440 LST • PING G440 Max/ G440 SFT • TAYLORMADE Qi35/ Qi35 Max/ Qi35 Max Lite • TAYLORMADE Qi35 Tour • TITLEIST GT1/GT2/GT3 • MIZUNO…

IN 2024, HUNDREDS OF Golf Digest course-ranking panelists visited 59 new or remodeled courses that were candidates for our annual awards. The Best New Public and Private awards are given to the year’s most outstanding original courses, including those built over the bones of an older course. Traditional renovations and restorations, consisting of alterations and projects that return the design to some historically based version of its past, are combined in Best Renovation. Best Renovation winners are determined by surveys that measure the effectiveness of the work before and after construction. (Panelists must have played the course previously.) Best Transformation assesses major remodels that go beyond mere renovation to include a newly conceived architectural intent, new holes and possibly newly routed sections of the property—the name remains the same, but…

WINNER INTERLACHEN COUNTRY CLUB Edina, Minn. 7,201 yards, par 72 Architect: Andrew Green Architecturally, the work completed at Interlachen, a Donald Ross design outside Minneapolis, is a restoration-renovation hybrid. Designer Andrew Green used Ross’ hole-by-hole blueprints from 1919 to guide the comprehensive redesign that touched every aspect of the property, restoring bunkers and putting-surface dimensions as closely as possible to what was first drawn. The green perimeter and revived bunkers at the stunning par-3 fifth, for instance, are faithful to what Ross envisioned, and Green’s shaping of the swale and crest of the putting surface gives life to what is one of the most fascinating greens Ross designed. The team also used historical resources including photographs and old film to ascertain what was actually built that might not have not…

OF ALL THE THINGS THE BEST GOLFERS IN THE WORLD DO WELL, which moves should average players try to add to their games? I know what you’re thinking: There’s no way I can move like that. To some extent, I agree with you. I’ve been coaching on tour for 20 years, and players have never been more fit or had more immediate, accurate feedback on how they’re swinging. Most of them have been doing golf-specific exercises since college, and they track their technique every day, so they’re able to do things we can only dream of. However, not every tour-pro move is off limits—you might be surprised that there’s lots you can steal. You just need to know what to focus on. The good news is, you don’t have to…

Now let’s get you making a bigger turn for power—something the best players do so well by turning their ribcage to the top. The torso, or center of the chest, is the engine that drives the second half of the backswing, with the whole upper body moving away from the target (above). You hear a lot about “making a full turn” on the backswing, but many average golfers cheat by focusing on their shoulder movement instead of rotating their entire trunk. When you cheat, your shoulders appear to make a full turn, but if you look at the center of your chest at the top of the swing, it hasn’t moved much. It’s a fake turn, and you’ll struggle to produce much power if that’s all you do. Some golfers…

You might think that because chip and pitch shots are short swings, you don’t need much body movement. That’s not true. There should be way more dynamic motion on these shots. The best players clip the ball off the turf and create tons of spin by moving their body toward the target in the backswing, then standing up and rotating hard in the downswing. You heard me right: On chips and pitches, you should early extend and lift your head up slightly. This movement is called “pivot planing,” and it is something biomechanists Rob Neal and Layne Savoie, with whom I work closely, have identified using 3-D technology. The best chippers move their head down and toward the target as they swing back, and then stand up and rotate through…

Leslie Kleinman, winner of the George H. Bush Volunteer of the Year Award, believes that cooking and golf have a lot in common. “They both are fraught with failure,” she says, and resilience is the key to enjoying and excelling. Kleinman knows that from guiding the “Fit to a Tee” culinary program at First Tee-Cleveland the past 16 years. In the cold winter months, she puts kids into cooking groups, gives them a recipe and ingredients, and then coaches them to work together to get the job done. Estimating that she’s seen more than 1,000 kids go through her classes, Kleinman, 81, says, “I have a passion for this because I just love seeing kids do something for the first time that they never thought they could do.” A retired…

The 590-yard par-5 10th at Valhalla was one of the easiest holes for the field at this year’s PGA Championship. For a man who warmed up for his second round by stretching in a jail cell, however, a 4 was a hell of a score. Scottie Scheffler was arrested Friday morning in Louisville in Valhalla’s parking lot, near the spot where an hour earlier a pedestrian was hit and killed by a shuttle bus in a separate incident. The World No. 1 had opened with a 67 and had finished second or first in his five previous starts—including his second Masters win—but now appeared to be forced out of the championship. Yet, less than 30 minutes after a photo of Scheffler in an orange prison suit circulated the news, he…

It took three weeks for Rianne Malixi, 17, and Asterisk Talley, 15, to accomplish what the USGA had never seen in 129 years conducting national championships. While two players had faced each other more than once in the final of an individual USGA event over the years, never had a pair competed head-to-head in the final of two different championships, much less in the same year. In July at the U.S. Girls’ Junior Amateur, Malixi, a native of the Philippines, coasted against Talley, 8 and 7. Talley, from Chowchilla, Calif., hoped to flip the script in their unprecedented August rematch at the U.S. Women’s Amateur, but fell once more, 3 and 2. (Talley can take solace in having claimed a USGA title herself in May at the U.S. Women’s Amateur…