U.S. Open:Third Round Birdies and Bogeys
The "Is golf a sport?" debate is as old as the game itself, and nothing about Day's showing this week will help settle it. But if the question is whether golfers can be tough, Day provided a resounding answer. A day after collapsing on his last hole of the day due to a vertigo spell, the Aussie returned to Chambers Bay to continue his quest for a first major championship. Clearly wobbly at times, Day persisted and somehow played better than anyone with an afternoon tee time. With four birdies over the final seven holes, he shot 68 to earn a share of the lead in a tournament he wasn't even sure he could finish. -- Sam Weinman
http://www.golfdigest.com/golf-tours-news/us-open/2015-06/birdies-bogeys-round-3
Undercover Tour Pro: My Favorite Perk
Every time I board a plane, it's to go play a golf course that's going to be in the best condition its members see all year. The fairways and greens are guaranteed to be perfect, and the weather forecast is usually pretty good, too. Never mind that I made $2 million last year. It's for these reasons and more that I try never to complain about canceled flights, lost luggage or idiotic TSA workers. What's true for business travelers is especially true for PGA Tour players: No one cares what happened to you at the airport.
I don't make enough to fly privately. A few seasons ago I experimented with some jet shares, and it was like setting money on fire. With endorsements and prize money, I figure you need to be pulling in at least $5 million a year to justify the expense. I have enough points, so I almost always get bumped to the front of the bus, but the food and comfort of a first-class cabin don't compare to even a third-class home-cooked meal. There are only a handful of flights each year I enjoy: the charters certain tournaments organize for us.
Because they fall on the schedule the week before or after a major, tournaments like Hartford and Quad Cities will arrange a jet to entice marquee players to commit. This year even the New Orleans event got a plane to take guys to the Match Play in San Francisco. Though it's a regular commercial aircraft, the experience is private. You drive your courtesy car right to the tarmac, there are people who unload your luggage, and the security is minimal. I usually give my extra free ticket to my caddie, but if you have a wife and a bunch of kids you'll be accommodated. I've never heard of a player having to pay for extra seats.
What I love about these flights is the camaraderie. There are no assigned seats. Typically, players with families will migrate toward the back. Guys who want to drink and cut up will congregate toward the front. There can be some horseplay across the aisle. Most fans don't know their personalities because they're not always high on leader boards, but Tom Gillis, Carl Pettersson and Jason Bohn might be the funniest guys out here. Very sarcastic. There's another fella whose signature move on these flights, after a few drinks, is to challenge every player to punch him in the stomach. He's not exactly in great shape, but he's got a rock-hard gut.
A Tuesday practice round is a waste if you've got a hangover, so Sunday night is really our only chance to let loose. You get 30 or so alpha males together on a plane after the stress of four rounds of tournament golf, and sometimes it can get pretty wild. Often the plane lands and a group will head straight to a bar and keep it going.
I wish more tournaments would arrange these charters. I'd be happy to pay my fare just for the convenience. The fact that traveling together builds the brotherhood of our tour is the bonus. For me, it's the biggest thing a tournament can do to influence my decision to play.
Of course, I'm single. Talk to players with families, and they'll say daycare is most important. Certain tournaments will organize activities like trips to a local zoo, water park and art classes, and apparently some programs are better than others. I don't know much about it. All I hear is that for a lot of these guys, their wives pretty much tell them what events they're playing.
For example, at Charlotte, the tournament directors organized a private jet to take the wives to Charleston for a day of shopping. I'm sure the mimosas were flowing.
http://www.golfdigest.com/golf-tours-news/2015-07/undercover-tour-pro-my-favorite-perk
13 Revelations In New Book On The PGA Tour
"There are two Bubbas, and they exist side by side, engaged in an endless power struggle," Ryan writes. The first is a real life cartoon character -- fun-loving, God-fearing, with enough talent to capture his second Masters title with relative ease. The second can be petulant, defensive and not entirely beloved by his fellow tour players -- including former teammates at the University of Georgia. "Bubba's never been friendly with Georgia players, and none of us really have a good relationship with him," fellow Bulldog Brendon Todd tells Ryan.
http://www.golfdigest.com/golf-tours-news/2015-06/9-telling-revelations-photos
The Week In Style: 06.10.15
The folks at Vineyard Vines finally nailed the right tone for the Dufman. Saturday at the Memorial Tournament, we saw him in smart, casual clothes that looked like something he might actually wear. His teal polo with blue accents was bright but not too bold, and his white pants made the look feel fresh from head to toe. Best of all: his white belt was nowhere to be seen. This is the sharpest I've seen both Vineyard Vines and Dufner look all spring.
Vineyard Vines
House of Fleming
http://www.golfdigest.com/magazine/style/2015-06/week-in-style-15-06-10
Golf World: Royal Crush
Editor's Note: This story originally ran in the June 1, 2015 issue of Golf World.
An art form emanating from an increasingly bygone age rather than a modern-day science project, golf by the seaside has long provoked a range of emotion and conclusion. To those disinclined to the unexpected, the unpredictable or, heaven forbid, the "unfair"--aka a sizable percentage of 21st-century tour professionals--the idea of a lot of bounces good and bad is anathema.
But for the more romantic soul, the same scenario represents proper golf, fascinatingly multi-dimensional, the ball on the ground as much as in the air.
Given such divergence of opinion, Royal County Down--known as RCD to locals--has always had a polarizing effect within the unwinnable debate between prosaic and poetic. At the Irish Open, former British Open and U.S. Open champion Ernie Els called the design--originally conceived by Old Tom Morris and later altered by Harry Vardon and Harry S. Colt--"one of the top three links in the world."
Another leading professional deemed it "an unplayable nonsense." Then again, U.S. Open champion Martin Kaymer said RCD is "an outstanding course, where you have to expand your mind-set and be creative."
Perhaps the only common ground can be found in the unimpeachable view that this broad expanse of classic linksland in Newcastle, at the foot of Northern Ireland's spectacular Mourne Mountains, is one of the most beautiful golf locations on the planet.
"What I like most is that every hole has a story to tell," says former European Ryder Cup player Ken Brown. "You have to live each one, which is something of a throwback to what golf is really all about. It's getting from point A to point B using what is there. For me, a really great course works hand in hand with nature. Old Tom Morris was at Machrihanish when he said, 'The Almighty had golf in his eye when he created this place.' But he could have been talking about Royal County Down."
Across the floor from Els and Brown sit those unmoved by the humps and bumps and eccentricities of RCD. Standing outside the clubhouse before the start of the tournament, a group of grizzled but giggling European Tour caddies entertained themselves with the thought of just what their "by the numbers" employers would make of such an atypical tournament venue. With good reason.
"It's just not inspiring," said one veteran competitor. "Too many of the features are caricatures, exaggerations of what would be great golf. Plus, there are too many blind shots. Unlike Royal Portrush [Northern Ireland's other links classic], this isn't a course I'd like to play every day."
He won't have to, of course. Not on the European Tour, a place former
European Ryder Cup captain Paul McGinley labels as "sanitized."
Royal County Down ranks No. 1 for courses outside the U.S. (Stephen Szurlej)
"Today there is an obsession with courses being green and long," said the 48-year-old Irishman. "And as that has increased, the skill required to play the game well has diminished. Back in the day, professional golf wasn't just a test of strength. Today, the importance of power is disproportionate. We need to bring the skill back in, and one way to do that is to play courses like RCD.
"What we have here is so interesting. The course runs north to south. But the wind nearly always blows from the southwest. So you are constantly playing in a crosswind. Very rarely will you play a hole directly into or straight downwind. It will always be into or down off the left, or into or down off the right. That's what makes it so fascinating to play. If you look at the greens, they are shaped for that wind. They are also pinched in at just the right spots."
Not always bosom buddies, McGinley nevertheless has a philosophical ally in his successor as Ryder Cup skipper, Darren Clarke.
"With modern technology, the kids these days play the same way--bombing it through the air," says the 2011 British Open champion. "This course requires more guile and patience. And it's still a sensational test, regardless of how far technology has moved on. It's all about draws and fades, holding shots against the wind and using the ground."
The most notable--and controversial--example was the green on the 144-yard seventh, which caused much consternation over the two days it took to eliminate No. 1-ranked and tournament host Rory McIlroy and the four to identify Soren Kjeldsen as the new Irish Open champion. Played into a strong right-to-left breeze and to a green with a left half that slopes sharply in the same direction, the deep bunker left of the putting surface saw an inordinate amount of action.
"The obvious shot is a 'hold-up' fade into the wind," McGinley said. "So there is maybe a 10-yard-wide area to land the ball. And it has to land softly. The ability to hit that shot requires greater skill than does the guy who hits it 325 yards off the tee through the air. To me, that is the essence of golf. And we don't have enough courses where that sort of talent is needed or tested. It's a shame.
"You could tell--without seeing the ball flight--by how a ball reacts when it lands whether or not the player has hit the proper shot. If it lands and bounces straight left, you know he hasn't played the shot. I think we've lost that subtlety. And we've lost it because of a widespread obsession with courses that must be perfectly manicured."
http://www.golfdigest.com/golfworld/2015-06/gwar-bonus-royal-county-down-john-huggan-0601
The Week In Style: 06.10.15
The folks at Vineyard Vines finally nailed the right tone for the Dufman. Saturday at the Memorial Tournament, we saw him in smart, casual clothes that looked like something he might actually wear. His teal polo with blue accents was bright but not too bold, and his white pants made the look feel fresh from head to toe. Best of all: his white belt was nowhere to be seen. This is the sharpest I've seen both Vineyard Vines and Dufner look all spring.
Vineyard Vines
House of Fleming
http://www.golfdigest.com/magazine/style/2015-06/week-in-style-15-06-10
A History Of Swing Thoughts
Let me start by saying I'm a mediocre golfer. Not mediocre as in can't-get-the-ball-airborne mediocre. I mean, I'm competent. I can "get it around," as the euphemism goes. I just mean mediocre in the way most of us are mediocre, which is to say there's a healthy disconnect between what I think I should do with a golf ball and what I actually do.
The problem for players of my level is there's really no hope of your swing staying exactly the same. Circumstances change. Consider your best-ever hair day. It was probably a confluence of a number of events. The shampoo/conditioner ratio. Hair length, humidity level. For whatever the reason that day, it all just clicked. (Or so I'm imagining. I don't have much hair anymore.) The point is, as much as you would like to replicate your version of perfection, so much of it is fleeting, and impossible to reconstruct. That's the golf swing. You correct one thing, it invariably surfaces a flaw somewhere else.
Of course there are people who are able to overcome such constraints and make steady progress regardless. As a rule, these people are either A) physically gifted, or B) unemployed.
Otherwise, you have a pattern like mine, a seemingly endless cycle of pushing and pulling, compensating and overcompensating, progressing and regressing.
THE AUDACITY OF HOPE
Like a lot of golfers, my golf education began with KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE BALL. It was gym class in eighth grade, hitting plastic whiffle balls behind the football field. Mine was not much of a golf family. But I fancied myself an above-average athlete, with plenty of experience with stick-and-ball sports: hockey, baseball, tennis. The act of hitting a ball, at least a whiffle ball in the shadow of the stadium bleachers, came rather naturally, and I felt like I was a decent-enough mimic where I grasped the principles of the swing quite quickly.
I remember one time a few years later when I was working as a pizza-delivery boy, I took a golf club out of the trunk of my car in the pizza shop parking lot and took a couple of practice swings. The guy making pies that night was a short, excitable man named Frank, who immediately rushed out from behind the counter. "Hey," he yelled. "You've got a great swing!" For a moment, I disregarded all the mounting evidence to the contrary -- or that Frank probably wasn't the most discerning critic -- and allowed myself to marinate in the thought. "He's right. I DO have a great swing."
But I didn't. Not in any tangible golf way, at least. Because when the task was actually hitting a real golf ball on a real golf course, the realities of the game started to intercede. My long, loping swing, so fluid in gym class and in pizza shop parking lots, was ill-suited for actually making square contact. This was the early '90s, not quite the Tiger Woods era, but a time when upright, broad-shouldered golfers like Greg Norman and Davis Love III ruled the sport. From a body-type standpoint, this was a reasonable-enough model. I've never been broad, but I've always been on the tall side, with long arms that, in theory, should create width and speed. My thought became HIT DOWN ON THE BALL, just like Norman and Love. But I couldn't do it. It never really worked. Coming in steep required impeccable timing and precision, neither of which I could produce with any regularity. I hit balls fat, or thin, very rarely flush. Through much of high school and then college, when golf became something to do before the bars filled up, I grew accustomed to rounds when I scraped it around in all sorts of undignified ways and was thrilled to break 100.
WAIT, TRY THIS
A breakthrough came in 1997, inspired not by Tigermania, but rather, Justin Leonard. I know what you're thinking: Justin Leonard? But back then, Justin Leonard was a thing. He won the Open Championship at Troon and then had a chance to win the PGA Championship at Winged Foot. That PGA was the first major I covered as a newspaper reporter, and I remember at some point, hearing a comparison between Leonard's swing and the baseball swing of Mickey Mantle. For some reason, the image clicked. If the steep swing yielded such distressing results for me, then I needed to bring the club more across my body like Leonard -- to be flatter. And flatter I could do. Flatter was not only a baseball swing, but a forehand, or a slapshot.
As a young golfer, Justin Leonard's flat action was a helpful model.
So my directive became to COME AT IT FLATTER. Specifically I thought of reaching behind me as if to shake someone's hand, then following through to hit the back of the ball. And it worked. The game opened up to me. GOLF! Now it made sense. To that point, I think I was more intrigued by the idea of the game than the game itself -- the setting, the camaraderie, the cliched one shot a round that brings you back. But to hit the ball in the general vicinity of where I wanted it to go on a semi-regular basis, to be able to grind out a score that I'd actually be willing to say out loud, this was life-changing. That sounds dramatic, but it was true. I had bought a single membership to the course in town that enabled me to play unlimited rounds, and I took advantage to the extent that the starter began to look at me with disdain. Don't you have anything better to do?
Ask my boss or my girlfriend (now my wife) or my parents, and of course I did, but I was so clouded by my obsession with golf that it was difficult for me to think of anything else.
My biggest problem was that I just wasn't very long. In fact, I was a bunter, so haunted by the lingering memory of ripping up the sod with my earlier steep downswings that I was reluctant to pull the club back beyond my ears. I just wanted to hit the ball clean. I was six-feet tall, but I liked to crouch as if nature beckoned and I was without the luxury of a toilet. When I played with my brother, he loved to mock how I stuck my ass out with such purpose at address. It was comedy, but the alternative was much darker. I learned to live it.
Eventually came the conclusion that if I was insistent on this flat, abbreviated backswing, I should be sure to compensate the other way. My new mantra was to accentuate the follow-through, or more precisely, THROW YOUR BELT BUCKLE TO THE TARGET.
In theory, this was a positive revelation. On a good day I could get it out there within respectable proximity of my friends. Some days I'd even inch past them. The results were intoxicating. A 7-iron approach! Once in a while, a wedge! Just as I delighted in first learning to catch the ball cleanly, I was seduced by the idea of a second shot that did not involve a long, breathless walk to the green.
So things were moving in an encouraging direction, until suddenly, they were not. I say suddenly, and yet it was probably a gradual regression. Like gaining 20 pounds, or falling out of love. These things don't just happen. All I remember is at some point the ball was jumping off my club and heading . . . left. Adjustments were made -- alignment, tempo, ball position -- and then the ball went . . . even more left.
By this point I had become well-versed in the various ways one can mis-hit a golf ball, and yet this might have been the most demoralizing way of all. I'd call it a hook, but a hook suggests something more benign than what it was, because these balls would just dive left, very often disappearing into some decorative bush that really wasn't intended as part of the field of play.
"Where'd you go?" a playing partner might ask if he looked away for a moment.
"I think I'm in that bush," I'd say.
"That bush?" he'd ask, followed by silence. And then: "No, seriously, where'd you go?"
NO ONE KNOWS ME LIKE I KNOW ME
Now this might be time for an appropriate question: Why wouldn't I just take a lesson? I certainly aspired to get better, and it was apparent I wasn't getting very far on my own. Both good points. For starters, I was cheap. First, I was single and in an entry-level newspaper job, and then I was married and in a newspaper job, and then before long, there were these two boys at my dinner table. If I was going to spend time and money on golf, I was inclined to do so actually playing.
But that was only partially true. Because if I was convinced a golf pro could put me on the path to better golf, I suspect I would have forked over an irrational amount of money, even if it came at the expense of food and shelter for my kids. (I'm kidding! Mostly.) Thing is, I had taken some lessons, and save for temporary fixes, they only reinforced to me that my circumstances were intensely unique -- that no pro could quite understand how my limbs interacted with one another. It reminded me of when I was a kid and I told my mom I wasn't feeling well and she would ultimately say, "It's probably gas." Every time. It didn't matter if it felt like my throat or my head, and nowhere near my stomach. Perhaps that was when I lost faith in the ability of others to diagnose me properly.
THE BLESSINGS OF INDIFFERENCE
Time passed. Marriage. Those kids. An increasingly demanding career. All elements that comprise a meaningful and productive existence. But if your objective is good golf, it's poison. When my boys were babies and I was enraptured by their every move, the game receded to the periphery, and I didn't really mind. It was like when Tiger Woods was at the height of his dominance and Jack Nicklaus said family was one of the few things that could stand in his way. That was me, except A) I was never any good to begin with, and B) the whole sex-scandal part.
There were isolated outings. My brother's birthday. Some media boondoggle. Inevitably certain parts of my game deteriorated. Putting, once a relative strength, became a mystery. I'd leave one putt six feet short, I'd hammer the next eight feet past. In fact, I had no touch anywhere around the greens, having lost that fleeting, intuitive sense of what a 60-yard shot feels like versus one 10 yards longer.
Otherwise my level was surprisingly passable. My soul-crushing smother hook hadn't exactly been cured, but I was playing so infrequently, it loosened its grip on me. There's an advantage to foggy muscle memory, and one is both your good and bad habits tend to disappear below the surface.
But what really helped? Not caring as much. Or low expectations -- however you want to describe it. The point is, when you stop investing so much in the game, you're less dependent on the return.
I shouldn't oversell it. A 91 is still a 91, but remember, this was a time when I was barely playing, when I was content to treat golf like some light-beer commercial, a respite from the madness of everyday life. My swing thought was SWING SMOOTH, which epitomized my happy-to-be-here insouciance. My relationship with golf had reached a pleasant, amicable level, like a divorced couple who realize they can get along fine as long as they don't have to live together.
Then I got hired at Golf Digest, a dream job by many measures, but one that also squashed any hope of keeping the game at arm's length.
The problem with working at Golf Digest is the game has a way of seeping into your pores. The walls lined by pictures of classic golf swings. The hundreds of new clubs just lying around, inviting you to pick them up. There's even an indoor putting green where we have money putting contests on idle winter afternoons. Eventually there's spring, and an invitation for Friday golf. And then the inevitable, "That was fun. Let's do this again next Friday." And pretty soon you're hunched over your laptop in the dark studying a repeating slow-motion video of your takeaway.
Here is where my swing thoughts went into overdrive, because Golf Digest is nothing if not a high-volume dispensary of swing thoughts. Follow the recommended dosage, and they can be enlightening, but I gobbled them up in unhealthy batches. From Hank Haney I endeavored to weaken my grip ("HIDE YOUR LEFT THUMB"). From Jim McLean, I straightened my takeaway ("POINT THE SHAFT TOWARD THE TARGET"
). Phil Mickelson advised on quieting my legs (""KEEP YOUR HEEL ON THE GROUND"). For a while I toyed with Stack Tilt, a fairly radical swing methodology in which you load all your weight onto your left side and angle your front shoulder downward ("TURN YOUR BODY LIKE ON AN AXIS"). It worked for a little while, until, like most swing changes, it didn't. Or maybe I lost interest. I forget.
Compared with my peers I had gathered an exhaustive knowledge of the golf swing, but on a practical level, it has mostly worked against me. Instead, what sustains me -- or perpetuates my misery depending on how you look at it -- is an almost absurd level of optimism. For someone so battle-scarred, I continue to convince myself good golf is tantalizingly close. Even now as I write this, buoyed by six holes of stress-free golf at dusk a few days ago, I think, "Sure, I USED to be that way, but I'm better than that now."
Am I really? Probably not. But if only to stave off the notion that it's been a tragic waste of time and energy, I cling to any thread of hope I can. I think about two years ago, in the annual company golf tournament, when the final outcome hinged on my match, and my 7-year-old son served as my caddie. That day had been a familiar stew of good and bad, chunks and lip-outs, interspersed with occasional flashes of skill. By the final hole, all the other matches were over, so the entire editorial staff filtered out to watch us, drinks in hand, snark already flying at a rapid clip. It was 175 yards, over water, and I remember thinking it would be a victory if I did not miss the ball outright and have the hybrid fly out of my hands, striking our Editor-in-Chief dead. (Swing thought: "DON'T KILL YOUR BOSS.") Instead, I took the club back slowly (next swing thought: "TEMPO"), made square contact and watched the ball soar toward the green, eventually settling 30 feet left of the pin. Moments later I would complete a difficult two-putt, we ended up winning the whole thing, and my son jumped into my arms.
"I was so nervous," he said as he hugged me. He didn't say anything about everything that could have gone wrong in that moment, although having watched the first 17 holes, he surely entertained it. There would be plenty of time for us to dwell on all the misfortune golf can heap upon you. For a brief moment, we enjoyed the taste of something actually going right.
http://www.golfdigest.com/golf-instruction/2015-06/history-of-swing-thoughts-sam-weinman
About
Fashion is in my blood. When I was a kid, my mom would drive me two hours through crazy LA traffic for photo shoots. I used to hang out with the stylists, try on clothes, get advice. It was a great way to grow up. Eventually, I started giving my friends fashion advice, and never looked back.
After 20 years as a stylist for photographers, I was ready to start a business that would let me evolve my own fashion and consulting style. More than anything, I wanted to share my passion for fashion, and watch as my clients discovered the transformative power of a knock-out look.
Today my clients are CEOs, celebrities, corporate and creative people -- men and women who want serious input on their clothing style, advice on what to wear to an event, or how to put together and pack the most versatile travel wardrobe. I also do styling for fashion shoots, including art direction, makeup, hair, clothing and accessorizing. I’ll make you look great. I promise.
