Matthieu Pavon made history at Pinehurst during Thursday’s first round of the U.S. Open, when he became the first player ever to make two eagles in a U.S. Open round at Pinehurst No. 2, which fueled his round of three-under 67 to get in early contention. But it was how the Frenchman made the eagles—by Read more…
Why are the players so worried about Pinehurst’s greens? It’s a combination of severe slopes and the USGA’s willingness to place hole locations on the edges of those slopes.
I was sick. I had just gotten a lesson. I was busy with college final exams. My girlfriend was caddieing for me. These were just some of the lame excuses that came to mind six years ago when I received a letter from the USGA informing me that because of my poor performance in U.S. Read more…
It is a tired phrase bordering on cliché to reference competitive golf as the “ultimate meritocracy,” yet the USGA’s 15 national championships so thoroughly deliver on this ideal that its truth is inescapable. Lower your Handicap Index under the required threshold, sign up for a qualifier and be among the top finishers, and you’ll secure Read more…
One Golf Digest+ member who reluctantly moved up a tee box during a recent round was 84-year-old Curt McClure (above, second from the right), who typically plays from 6,000 yards but appeased his buddies and joined them at 5,200 yards at his home course of Lubbock Country Club in Texas. The move sparked a special Read more…
To help the rest of us determine what our target scores would be on various championship layouts, we’ve used the USGA’s new tool to plug in a variety of handicaps for the setups at the US Open, US Women’s Open and US Senior Open.
As golfers, we often let the colors we see on a course dictate whether we think it’s in good shape or not. Green, good. Brown, bad. It’s not that simple, though. Aside from a compelling argument that browner, firmer turf is ideal for playability, courses in certain climates may turn almost completely brown for several Read more…
At the intersection of the argument about the golf-ball rollback and the game’s slow-play epidemic is the debate over what course yardage we should play. Move up a set of tees and we might play faster and shoot lower scores, but at what point do we sacrifice the integrity and challenge of the game? To Read more…
You have a 10-foot putt. Sensing it will break a little right-to-left, you aim just outside the hole, and it misses on the right. Did you push it, misread it, or simply have too much speed? Or was it all three? Without understanding why we’re missing putts, we often misdiagnose our putting struggles as technical Read more…
Golf course superintendents have perhaps the most thankless job in golf. Early wake-up calls, 16-hour days and should their course not meet a high standard, they are Golf Club Enemy No. 1. The stressors of the job have become so intense that a few years ago, Golf Digest’s Ron Whitten wrote about the mental-health crisis Read more…
The ensuing days and weeks are the most frustrating of the year. Surely there must be a reason why our golf course superintendents wait until the greens are in good shape to aerate, right?
Against the backdrop of potentially the most surreal opening two days in major championship history, club professional Jeremy Wells had an uneventful first two rounds at the 2024 PGA Championship. But look a little closer, and Wells’ 69-71 to make his first major championship cut was chaotic. After opening in two under and birdieing his Read more…
There is a popular misconception that if are you taking free relief from a sprinkler head (see Rule 16.1), then you must stay in the same “cut of grass” that you were in. That is not the case.
These benchmarks are for the best players in the world. For the rest of us, however, they seem encouraging, considering many of these goals feel attainable.
In the next decade, the PGA will continue to return to familiar host sites – notably Quail Hollow in 2025, Baltusrol in 2029 and Kiawah Island’s Ocean course in 2031 – but also will visit courses last seen on the men’s side when they hosted the US Open, including San Francisco’s Olympic Club and Congressional, located just outside Washington, DC.
Whether you call it a reverse bounce-back or a more vulgar option, we’ve all done it: We have a great hole or stretch of holes, and we immediately blow up, giving all the shots back. The issue is we’re uncomfortable with going low. That’s the mental hurdle that three-time major champion Padraig Harrington solves by Read more…
How many times have you finished a round and said, “I should have shot lower today”? As a mini-tour 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. Read more…
The marketing claims around the first Grass League event held last week at the Phoenix-area night golf course, Glass Clippings Rolling Hills, were bold. It was to be high stakes par-3 golf under the lights, where amateurs would compete for a $100,000 purse (yes, amateurs. More on that later). The tournament’s organizers, who leased and Read more…
Australian Golf Digest
