Golf Digest India - July 2018

VOLUME 3 | ISSUE 3

JULY 2018 `150

THINK YOUNG | PLAY HARD

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THE OPEN CARNOUSTIE PREVIEW

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NEW MOVE

ADD 10 YARDS IN 10 MINUTES interview

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BROOKS KOEPKA DEFENDS US OPEN

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how to play. what to play. where to play.

l l

Contents

7/18

ArgentinA l AustrAliA l Chile l ChinA l CzeCh republiC l FinlAnd l FrAnCe l hong Kong l IndIa l indonesiA l irelAnd KoreA l MAlAysiA l MexiCo l Middle eAst l portugAl l russiA l south AFriCA l spAin l sweden l tAiwAn l thAilAnd l usA

India Digest 16

Newsmakers cover story Koepka Repeats As U.S. Open Champion

18

Australian Great Thomson Passes Away

20

Junior Girls Shine

22

Club Round-Up Updates From Courses Across India

26

Grow The Game

28

Business Of Golf Industry Updates

30

Improve Your Facility On A Budget

By Paul Jansen

32

Tête-à-tête Deepali Shah Gandhi, GIA President

34

Corporate Digest

35

Off The Course

36

Lifestyle

108 18 Holes

Features 56

‘Get Ready To Score’ Starting to play better is finding the right warm-up.

16

By JORdan sPietH 62

David Feherty on Comedy and Tragedy After losing a son, Feherty relies on his support team to live a complex life of his own.

By JOHn feinstein

70

Ready, Set, Shoot!

By keely levins

74

the open preview The Epic Bogey That Won at Birkdale Inside the ropes for Jordan Spieth’s crazy duel with Matt Kuchar.

By JOHn Huggan and dave sHedlOski

86

Asheesh Mohta, MD - Blackstone Real Estate

Feel the Burn What fresh hell awaits at Carnoustie’s finish?

Play Your Best 40

‘ADT Continues To Be An Effective Feeder Tour...’

By JOsH BuRack

42

Fiji Says ‘Bula’ To Gaganjeet Bhullar

44

Aphibarnrat Accepts PGA TOUR Special Temporary Membership

88

Tee to Green Finding control off the tee.

89

Driver Reboot: Stop the Slice

By ButcH HaRmOn

By david leadBetteR

90

swing sequence Try Tiger’s New Move

94

Add 10 Yards in 10 Minutes By sHaun weBB

98

56 42

What’s In My Bag Sergio Garcia

47

2018 Hero Challenge To Tee Off In Edinburgh

48

Fleetwood Ready To Make Major Step

The Golf Life

50

Korhonen Beats The Clock For Maiden Tour Title

69

Undercover Tour Pro A plea for a little decency from the fans. witH max adleR

52

PGA-Discovery Partnership

53

Pros Return To Web.com Tour

96

The Digest

99

Closeout When Tom Watson ruled the Open.

10 golf digest india | july 2018

By guy yOcOm

32 Cover Photograph: USGA

Simply

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Editor’s Letter Dear Readers,

I

n the last few issues, we have been following the challenges faced by the Indian Golf Union (IGU). In March they faced the daunting task of managing the US$ 1.75 million Hero Indian Open themselves and pulled it off successfully.

Next, they were told by the Sports Ministry to enforce the National Sports Code which required a complete change in the IGU constitution. As expected, the necessary changes were ratified in the IGU Extraordinary General Meeting on June 6. However, events and procedures at the meeting caused angry protests from certain member golf clubs as reported in the sports media and once again, the IGU is faced with more challenges.

Write to me at rishi@teamgolfdigest.com or We will be following their progress and we hope on Twitter @RishiNarain_ that those who end up in the decision-making positions are able to move the game forward. Currently, we gather the acting President is the Vice Chief of Army Staff and if the Defence Forces do decide to put their vast number of playing facilities to good use and encourage more youngsters into the game, golf can benefit significantly in this country. Time will tell and we will keep you posted.

The US Open at Shinnecock Hills during mid-June turned out to be a shocker once again and it demonstrated how overzealous administrators can turn one of the biggest tournaments in the world into a mockery of skills and rules. The Phil Mickelson incident of intentionally hitting a runaway putt while the ball was still rolling will need some review. It turned into a huge controversy for the USGA in much the same way as the late penalty against Dustin Johnson a couple of years ago, once again at the US Open. Perhaps the USGA should involve the PGA Tour with the US Open course set up and rules interpretation as they handle these tasks routinely, week after week.

In the meanwhile, most Indian golfers have been dealing with extreme warm weather.

However if you head to a hill station, Kashmir or Bangalore you can enjoy cool weather and great courses.

Once again in this issue, we hope you enjoy our tips and in-depth instruction features from the legends of the game.

Happy Golfing!

TEAM GOLF DIGEST INDIA Editor & Publisher Rishi Narain Contributing Editor Karthik Swaminathan karthik@rnsportsmarketing.com

Sales & Marketing Nikhil Narain, +91-9999990364 nikhil@rnsportsmarketing.com

Senior Content Executive Amit Pandey amit@rnsportsmarketing.com

Krishna Kant Dubey kk@rnsportsmarketing.com

Art Director Guneet Singh Oberoi

Prateek Chaturvedi prateek@rnsportsmarketing.com Subscription Monika Chhabra, Gautam Chhabra subscribe@teamgolfdigest.com +91-9999868051

Published and Printed by Rishi Narain on behalf of Rishi Narain Golf Management Private Limited and Printed at Thomson Press India Limited, 18-35 Mile Stone, Delhi-Mathura Road, Faridabad-121 007, Haryana and published from 501, Sushant Tower, Sector - 56, Gurgaon - 122101, Haryana. Phone Number - 0124-2841370, 1371, 1372. Editor: Rishi Narain. Contains material reprinted by permission from Golf Digest® and Golf World®. Golf Digest India is a monthly publication of Rishi Narain Golf Management Private Limited.

12 golf digest india | july 2018

Rishi Narain

GOLF DIGEST INTERNATIONAL EDITIONS AND EDITORS-IN-CHIEF GD ArGentinA Hernán SimÓ, Jorge R. Arias AustrAliAn GD Brad Clifton GD Chile Rodrigo Soto GD ChinA Echo Ma GD CzeCh republiC Robin Drahonovsky GD FinlAnD Sami Markkanen GD FrAnCe Henry Trouillet GD honG KonG Echo Ma GD inDonesiA Irwan Hermawan GD inDiA Rishi Narain GD irelAnD Linton Walsh GD KoreA Eun Jeong “EJ” Sohn GD MAlAysiA Patrick Ho GD MexiCo Rafa Quiroz GD MiDDle eAst Robbie Greenfield GD portuGAl João Morais Leitão GD russiA Fedor Gogolev GD south AFriCA Stuart McLean GD spAin Óscar Maqueda GD sweDen Oskar Åsgård GD tAiwAn Jennifer Wei GD thAilAnD Chumphol Na Takuathung GD usA Jerry Tarde

GOLF DIGEST USA EDITORIAL ChAirMAn & eDitor-in-ChieF Jerry Tarde exeCutive eDitor Mike O’Malley CreAtive DireCtor Ken DeLago MAnAGinG eDitor Alan P. Pittman Deputy eDitor Max Adler

ARTICLES eDitoriAl DevelopMent DireCtor Craig Bestrom senior eDitor Ron Kaspriske senior writers Bureau Jaime Diaz, Dave Kindred, Tim Rosaforte, Ron Sirak, Guy Yocom AssoCiAte eDitor Stephen Hennessey AssistAnt eDitor Brittany Romano eDitor-At-lArGe Nick Seitz writer-At-lArGe Dan Jenkins ContributinG eDitors Dave Anderson, Peter Andrews, Tom Callahan, Bob Carney, Marcia Chambers, David Fay, John Feinstein, Peter Finch, Thomas L. Friedman, Lisa Furlong, Matthew M. Ginella, John Huggan, Dean Knuth, David Owen, Steve Rushin, Dave Shedloski, Roger Schiffman, Geoff Shackelford INSTRUCTION senior eDitor Peter Morrice senior writer Matthew Rudy plAyinG eDitors / pGA tour Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Tom Watson, Rickie Fowler, Justin Leonard, Phil Mickelson, Nick Price, Jordan Spieth, David Toms plAyinG eDitors / lpGA tour Paula Creamer teAChinG proFessionAls Rob Akins, Todd Anderson, Chuck Cook, Sean Foley, Hank Haney, Butch Harmon, Hank Johnson, David Leadbetter, Jack Lumpkin, Jim McLean, Tom Ness, Renee Powell, Dean Reinmuth, Randy Smith, Rick Smith, Dave Stockton, Josh Zander proFessionAl ADvisors Amy Alcott, Dr. Bill Mallon, Gary McCord, Randy Myers, Judy Rankin, Lucius Riccio, Ph.D., Dr. Bob Rotella, Ben Shear, Ralph Simpson, Frank Thomas, Stan Utley EQUIPMENT senior eDitor Mike Stachura equipMent eDitor E. Michael Johnson AssistAnt eDitor Keely Levins teChniCAl pAnel John Axe, Ph.D.; Martin Brouillette, Ph.D.; Thomas E. Lacy Jr., Ph.D.; David Lee, Ph.D.; John McPhee, Ph.D.; Dick Rugge; George Springer, Ph.D. GOLF COURSES senior eDitor / ArChiteCture Ron Whitten ContributinG eDitor Topsy Siderowf GOLF DIGEST INTERNATIONAL GROUP senior DireCtor, internAtionAl Develop Ment & strAteGy Angela Byun ContributinG eDitor, internAtionAl Ju Kuang Tan

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The World's Richest Tour 14 golf digest india | july 2018

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Newsmakers

PLAYERS IN THE NEWS Koepka Repeats As U.S. Open Champion

F

”

Brooks Koepka kisses the trophy after winning the 2018 U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills

16 golf digest india | july 2018

I DON’T THINK I COULD HAVE DREAMED OF THIS, GOING BACK-TO-BACK. I ALWAYS FELT LIKE I HAD A CHANCE...

I KNEW CONDITIONS WOULD EASE UP AND THEY DID AND I TOOK ADVANTAGE OF IT. Brooks Koepka

our months ago, B r o o k s K o e p k a’s career was threatened by a left wrist injury that forced him to miss 15 weeks on the PGA TOUR and prevented him from picking up a club for 91 days.

On June 17, he removed any doubts about his health and made a little history, winning his second straight U.S. Open Championship.

Clinging to a oneshot lead after England’s Tommy Fle etwo o d tie d the championship record with a 63 two hours earlier, Koepka shot a 2-under 68 at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club and won the 118th U.S. Open for the second straight year.

He finished at 1-over 281, the highest winning score at the championship since 2012, to clip Fleetwood by one shot.

Koepka became only the seventh player to win the championship in consecutive years, the first since Curtis Strange in 1988-89.

“This is incredible,” said Koepka, who shot 75 in the first round. “I don’t think I could have dreamed of this, going back-to-back. I always felt like I had a chance (despite the poor opening round).

Make a couple birdies and make up a lot of ground. Keep grinding. I knew conditions would ease up and they did and I took advantage of it.”

The other three co-leaders never got on track. Dustin Johnson, the 36-hole leader, had another rough day on the greens and shot 70 to finish third at 3-over 283. Tony Finau shot 72, including a doublebogey on the 72nd hole and finished fifth at 5 over. Daniel Berger shot 73 and tied for sixth at 6 over.

Koepka proved last year he could win a birdie contest when the tied the championship scoring record

Newsmakers Brooks Koepka reacts to a putt on the 11th green during the final round of the 2018 U.S. Open

in his victory at Wisconsin’s Erin Hills. This year he won at Shinnecock Hills, one of the most difficult venues to host the event.

Koepka began the final round in a four-way tie for first.

He birdied three of the first five holes and turned in 33. He birded No. 10 and salvaged a bogey at No. 11, then retained a one-shot lead with four consecutive pars.

A birdie on the par-5 16th hole gave Koepka a two-shot lead and afforded him enough breathing room to finish with a bogey.

Fleetwood’s 63 matched the record shared by five others and was reminiscent of Johnny Miller, who shot a 63 at Oakmont in 1973 to deny Arnold Palmer the championship. Fleetwood, the No. 12-ranked player in the world, missed an eight-foot birdie on the 18th hole that would have given him the record and would have forced a playoff.

“I honestly never really thought I was out of it,” Fleetwood said. “All the way around, I always felt like I could get myself back in it. It’s funny, though, when you finish, you always feel like you’ve kind of missed your shot.”

Reigning Masters champion Patrick Reed began the final round with a barrage of five birdies over his first seven holes and had a share of the lead early.

But a pair of untimely bogeys

7

KAPPING KOEPKA’s WEEK

th

4 $2.16 th

Seventh man to win consecutive titles at the U.S. Open, and the first since Curtis Strange (1988, 1989)

Koepka moved to 4th in the Official World Golf Ranking (OWGR) and to 13th, up 33 spots, in the FedExCup Ranking

million Koepka’s prize purse of US$ 2,160,000 swelled his season earnings to us$ 3,955,417

Koepka’s 2017 triumph at Erin Hills took him 15 fewer shots compared to his win at Shinnecock Hills

Koepka has made the cut 78 times from 95 appearances and has earned us$ 17,520,172 in career prize money (PGA tour)

Koepka finished within the top-25 in the previous 7 majors and has recorded 4 top-10 finishes since 2014

halted his momentum and prevented him from winning the second leg of the Grand Slam.

He shot 68 and tied for fourth.

Joining Berger in the tie for sixth were Tyrrell Hatton, Henrik Stenson and Xander Schauffele, the reigning TOUR Championship winner.

Phil Mickelson rebounded from controversy and shot a 69. Mickelson incurred a twoshot penalty during the third round, when he intentionally hit a moving ball, which gave

Text courtesy PGA TOUR; Photographs courtesy USGA

him a 10 on the hole and an 80 for the day. He parred the 13th hole on Sunday and did a little celebratory motion.

The biggest bounce-back round belonged to Rickie Fowler, who played with Mickelson. After shooting 84 on day three, he rebounded with a 65 on the final day—the secondbest score of the week. “That’s the golf course I enjoy playing,” Fowler said. “It was a good time to go out with Phil. We kind of had nothing to lose.”

THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT U.S. OPEN Four golfers have won the US Open four times: Willie Anderson, Bob Jones, Ben Hogan and Jack Nicklaus Largest Margin: While Koepka won by a shot over Tommy Fleetwood, Tiger Woods won by a massive 15 strokes over Ernie Els and Miguel Angel Jimenez in 2000 Prize Money: Koepka’s triumph earned him US$ 2,160,000. The first winner, Horace Rawlins in 1895, won just $150 following his 2-stroke win over Willie Dunn A total of 10 players and 1 amateur played at the inaugural U.S. Open — a one-day, 36-hole event on the 9-hole course at the Newport Golf and Country Club 1965: Playing over four rounds (18-holes per day), the format followed today, is instituted for the first time; Gary Player emerges victorious

july 2018 | golf digest india

17

Newsmakers

AUSTRALIAN GREAT THOMSON PASSES AWAY

Lahiri finishes T-37 at The Memorial following strong start Anirban Lahiri seems to love the tournament at Muirfield Village Golf Club. His T-2 finish (joint-runner-up with Rickie Fowler) at the 2017 Memorial, which won him US$ 765,600, remains his career-best performance on the PGA TOUR. Lahiri’s efforts to go one better at this year’s event started in promising fashion when he led on the opening day. However, he couldn’t replicate his form on the other

three days and finished T-37. Shubhankar Sharma, meanwhile, was unable to make the cut. This was Lahiri’s third appearance at the Memorial Tournament.

Lahiri is currently 112 on the Official World Golf Ranking (OWGR) and 111 on the FedExCup Ranking, and his career earnings on the PGA TOUR stand at a little over US$ 4.1 million. The 30-year-old made close to US$ 2 million last year alone.

TOP-10 ON PGTI ORDER OF MERIT AFTER BTI OPEN POS

Golfer

Play

Win

Cut

Top-10

Total Prize (`)

1

HONEY BAISOYA

8

2

6

5

17,02,535

2

N THANGARAJA

8

1

6

4

12,04,310

3

UDAYAN MANE

5

1

5

2

10,18,977

4

SHAMIM KHAN

9

0

8

5

9,51,183

5

VEER AHLAWAT

9

0

7

5

8,43,745

6

MD ZAMAL HOSSAIN MOLLAH

7

0

7

2

8,03,010

7

M DHARMA

8

0

7

4

7,13,160

8

SHANKAR DAS

9

0

7

3

6,99,675

9

SYED SAQIB AHMED

9

1

4

1

6,82,560

10

OM PRAKASH CHOUHAN

7

0

5

3

6,65,580

18 golf digest india | july 2018

Peter Thomson breathed his last on June 20. He was 88 and, for the past four years, was battling Parkinson’s Disease. The five-time British Open champion will be remembered for his contribution to golf, especially in India and South-East Asia.

Arguably Australia’s greatest golfer, he helped establish the Asian Tour and brought life to the Indian Open in 1964, which he won thrice — a record equaled

by Jyoti Randhawa in 2007. Thomson also designed courses around the world and helped redesign Delhi Golf Club and Royal Calcutta Golf Club. He visited India most recently in 2015 and, on his way back, carried with him a replica of the Indian Open trophy he last won in 1976.

INDIA AMATEURS MISS THE CUT IN ABERDEEN

Following their runner-up showing at the 116th Malaysian Amateur Championship, 17-year-olds Aadil Bedi and Kshitij Naveed Kaul competed in The British Amateur Championship at Aberdeen, Scotland, from June 18-23. Joining them was 18-year-old Dubai-based Rayhan Thomas. The trio, however, found the conditions tough and missed the cut.

The 4-member team comprising Bedi, Kaul, Thomas and Harimohan Singh, who are part of the Indian contingent at this year’s Asiad, will later head to the biennial World Amateur Team Championship (Eisenhower Cup) to be held in Ireland from September 5-8.

Newsmakers Women’s Golf Sharmila Nicollet

VANI KAPOOR STAYS STRONG ON LET ACCESS SERIES

23-year-old Vani Kapoor has had a productive time on the LETAS Tour since her tour debut in 2014 at the Mineks ET Regnum Ladies Classic where she finished third — an impressive record for the first timer.

Her latest T-33 at the €40,000 Viaplay Finnish Open follows her strong T-9 finish at the €35,000 AXA Czech Ladies Championship. The Gurgaon lass sadly missed the cut at the €120,000 Ladies Jabra Open. She is currently 61st on the LETAS 2018 Money List.

“It’s much more difficult to play in Europe. There, you have to prepare for the winds. It can get pretty cold over there too. The quality of the players is also higher and steeper. Here, you’re used to playing against 25 other people. There, you have to compete with 150 other women. The bar keeps getting raised over there,” Vani was quoted as saying by Scroll.in Right now, Vani is the only Indian to hold a Ladies European Tour card. Her sixth-place finish at the 2017 Women’s Indian Open helped her retain it.

Vani is currently 566th in the World Ranking and has career earnings worth €28,730.33 on the Ladies European Tour. She is also 9th on the Indian Order of Merit, with INR 1,90,000/- to show in winnings in 2018 (one win from two appearances).

Vani Kapoor

TWO TOP-15 FINISHES FOR SHARMILA NICOLLET Indo-French Bengalurean Sharmila Nicollet finished T-13 at the €35,000 AXA Czech Ladies Championship at Golf Resort Konopiste (near Prague) on June 16. The 27-year-old, who was tied second at the end of the first round, was hampered by a troublesome ankle.

Sharmila had also participated in the Le Coq Sportif Beijing Ladies Classic, a China LPGA Tour event, towards the end of May. She was tied for the lead on the opening day, recording 5 consecutive birdies, and was T-2 on the

second before ultimately finishing 14th.

She collected RMB 14,480 (approx. INR 1.5 lakhs) for her efforts.

Sharmila Nicollet was in the limelight this time last year when fans helped her win a Twitter poll to secure a spot in the US$ 1,750,000 Shoprite LPGA Classic. Her last win came earlier this year in January when she defeated Neha Tripathi in a playoff to clinch the second leg of the Hero Women’s Pro Golf Tour at Bombay Presidency Golf Club.

SHARMILA NICOLLET WAS IN THE LIMELIGHT THIS TIME LAST YEAR WHEN FANS HELPED HER WIN A TWITTER POLL TO SECURE A SPOT IN THE $1,750,000 SHOPRITE LPGA CLASSIC

ASIAD BERTH A SENSE OF ACHIEVEMENT FOR SIFAT

Sifat Sagoo has already checked one box. The Chandigarh girl, who lives in Delhi, booked her Asian Games berth hitting 9-under-par. The four-member boys team and three-member girls team were chosen after six trial rounds that concluded on April 30. “It’s a big break for me. I will be totally focused on my game. I will play more events internationally before heading into the Asian Games where the golf event will be played at the Pondok Indah Golf course. We will go there a few days early to get accustomed to conditions. I will also make a few equipment changes besides focusing on my game,” a confident Sifat told Hindustan Times. Sifat, who is ranked third in IGU Ladies Order of Merit, will be joined by fellow 17-year-olds Ridhima Dilawari and Diksha Dagar. She took to the game as a 9-year-old when her father Harvinder Singh Sagoo took her to Qutab Golf Course. Soon after the Asian Games, Sifat will be participating in the biennial World Amateur Team Championship (Espirito Santo Trophy) which will be held in Ireland from August 29 to September 1.

july 2018 | golf digest india

19

Newsmakers Juniors

8-YEAR OLD VICTORIOUS IN SCOTLAND

Delhi-based Asara Sawhney won the U.S. Kids European Championship 2018 at Longniddry Golf Course in Scotland in the Girls 8 & Under category. The 8-yearold, whose home course is Delhi Golf Club, shot an impressive 116 (+8) over 27 holes before triumphing in a playoff against Anita Lumpongpoung (USA). Asara is coached by Nonita Lall Qureshi.

Arshvant Srivastava finished runner-up in the Boys 8 category while Zara Anand came third in the Girls 9 category.

Conducted by the U.S. Kids Golf Foundation in a 9-hole format, the event was held between May 29-31.

Rishika Muralidhar (R) after her win at Eagleton Golf Resort

RISHIKA IMPRESSES AT NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIPS

12-year-old Rishika Muralidhar is having a great time on the Junior and Amateur Ladies Golf Tour, recording three victories, besides one runnerup finish, in her four appearances at the IGU National Championships this season.

Rishika, who plays in category C of the IGU events, won the IGU Rotary Karnataka Ladies and Junior Girls Golf Championship at Eagleton Golf Resort in April with a commanding 16-shot lead over Nishna Patel.

The teenager then went on to win the IGU Maharashtra Ladies & Junior Girls Golf Championship by 15 strokes over Vidhatri Urs (at Oxford Golf Resort, Pune), before clinching the IGU Western India Ladies & Junior Girls Championship (at Kensville Golf Club, Ahmedabad) by a similar margin, against the same opponent, in May. Rishika was unstoppable last year Rishika receives her award in Ahmedabad with 5 wins from 7 tournaments, including 4 consecutive wins in Delhi, Noida, Pune and Ahmedabad. One just has to wait and watch how this young girl fares in future.

MALINI KEEPS HER PERFORMANCE AT PAR

Having spent 5 seasons on the varsity team, 17-year-old Malini Rudra has established herself as one of the top golfers in Nassau, New York. She staked her claim as the county’s best with a dominant win at the Nassau girl’s championship held at Bethpage State Park in New York in May. Malini shot 2-over-144 over two days of the event and came within one stroke of tying the tournament record for best two-day score set by Jenny Rosenberg in 2017. She won the event with a jaw-dropping margin of 10-strokes over Emilie Guo. The teenager has been on a roll for a while now, she finished 7th at the recently concluded NY State Championship — her fourth consecutive Top-10 finish — shooting 77 in the opening round and 76 in her final round.

Malini finished sixth in New York state as an eightgrader, eighth as a freshman and seventh last season.

20 golf digest india | july 2018

Malini Rudra

Asara Sawhney (L) poses with her father Akshay Sawhney

Across The Country

CLUB ROUND-UP

To share news on your club or updates from across the country, please email karthik@rnsportsmarketing.com

Bengaluru

Prestige Golfshire set to host Louis Philippe Cup 2018 Golfshire is currently playing the best it ever has and it would be fitting to host a tournament of the stature of the Louis Philippe Cup. This would be only the second Professional Tournament we have hosted since 2012 when the course opened and I am sure the players are in for a treat. The wind is always a factor at Golfshire along with the small greens and undulating fairways.

This would set up for a very interesting week and I hope to catch some of the live action myself!

— Faiz Rezwan, Executive Director, Prestige Estates Projects Limited

L-R: Khalin Joshi, Mani Ratnam, R. Madhavan, Sharmila Nicollet, Chikkarangappa S., SSP Chawrasia and Ajit Agarkar at Louis Philippe Cup 2016

Co-sanctioned by the Professional Golf Tour of India (PGTI) and Asian Development Tour (ADT), the US$75,000 Louis Philippe Cup will take place at Prestige Golfshire, Bengaluru from July 31 to August 3. The field will comprise 60 international and 60 Indian professional golfers. The main tournament will be immediately followed by a Celebrity Pro-Am (on August 4) which will see around 25 pros, 80 high-net-worth individuals and six to eight celebrities take part.

The likes of Mani Ratnam, Kapil Dev, R. Madhavan, Charu Sharma, Ajit Agarkar, Syed Kirmani and Murali Kartik have participated in past editions of the Celebrity Pro-Am besides golfers Jeev Milkha Singh, Anirban Lahiri, Jyoti Randhawa, Shubhankar Sharma, Gaganjeet Bhullar, Rahil Gangjee and Sharmila Nicollet.

Indian film actor Ileana D’Cruz at LP Cup 2014

22 golf digest india | july 2018

The return of the LP Cup on the PGTI calendar, this time as a joint-sanctioned event with the Asian Development Tour (ADT), is yet another milestone in PGTI’s journey on the path of positive growth. It is a great pleasure to work with the ADT for the third tournament in this calendar year. The tournament creates an opportunity for providing more international exposure to Indian professionals thus serving as a stepping stone for them to move on to higher tours.

We’re also proud to be associated with this event as it unveils the world-class Prestige Golfshire Club in Bengaluru to the global audience for the first time. We wish the players all the best and look forward to a fascinating week of golf.

—Uttam Singh Mundy, CEO, PGTI

Pro golfer Jyoti Randhawa walks the ramp at LP Cup 2015

Pro golfer Rahil Gangjee (L) and comedian Papa CJ at LP Cup 2015

L-R: Vikrant Chopra, Digvijay Singh, Anirban Lahiri, Gaganjeet Bhullar and Khalin Joshi

“We are delighted to welcome the Louis Philippe Cup onto the ADT’s 2018 schedule. The Professional Golf Tour of India (PGTI) has always been a strong supporter of the Asian Tour and the ADT. We are looking forward to working together with the PGTI again to provide another opportunity for budding golfers in the country and across the region to showcase their talent. We would also like to thank the event’s title sponsor Louis Philippe for supporting the event where we hope to see more young and exciting talents bursting onto the scene through the staging of the event next month.”

— Cho Minn Thant, COO, Asian Tour

Across The Country

Manesar

Industry leaders speak at Classic

Classic Golf & Country Club organised a workshop for managers on June 14 with industry partners and guest speakers in attendance. Accomplished names from the industry including Dhruv Verma (Founder & CEO - GolfLan Technologies), Rishi Narain (Editor-inChief - Golf Digest India & Managing Director - RN Sports Marketing) and Shashank Chaudhary (Director Sales & Marketing - Callaway India) were present.

The objective was to focus on how all stakeholders could synergise their efforts for the promotion of the game. To this end, the speakers and participants shared their individual perspective and collective observations about the current state of the industry, the factors and forces shaping the future of golf in India, emerging trends and the way forward.

Speakers present their views on the current state of the industry and factors shaping the future of Indian golf

Bengaluru

KGA to hold TAKE Solutions Masters 2018

After successfully hosting the inaugural TAKE Solutions Masters in 2017, Karnataka Golf Association (KGA) is set to stage the Asian Tour event — co-sanctioned with the Professional Golf Tour of India (PGTI) — for a second time next month (August 9-12). This year’s prize purse has increased to US$ 350,000.

Thailand’s Poom Saksansin, who defeated home hope Khalin Joshi by 2 strokes, is the defending champion. He had collected US$ 54,000 (approx. INR 37 lakh) in prize money for his efforts. The tournament featured 150 participants (84 from Asian Tour, 58 from PGTI, and 8 invites). Through this collaboration between TAKE Solutions, Asian Tour and PGTI, at least 40 Indian golfers will have the opportunity to compete against the region’s leading golfers and a win will be rewarded with full playing rights on the Asian Tour until the end of the following season.

Delhi

DGC to organise 8th Panasonic Open India Shiv Kapur can look forward to defending his title when the US$ 400,000 Panasonic Open India returns to Delhi Golf Club (DGC) on October 25-28. The tournament is one of three official Asian Tour events held in India (others being Hero Indian Open and TAKE Solutions Masters).

India’s Anirban Lahiri won the inaugural edition in 2011 and the event has since seen different winners on each occasion. Besides Lahiri and Kapur, four other Indians have triumphed in the past (Digvijay Singh in 2012, SSP Chawrasia in 2014, Chiragh Kumar in 2015, Mukesh Kumar in 2016).

Australia’s Wade Ormsby who won in 2013, is the only nonIndian victor. This year’s prize purse has seen a 13.3% increase from last year.

Noida

All India Seniors Inter-City to debut alongside IGU Seniors & Mid-Am Played annually on the IGU’s roster, the All India Seniors and Mid-Amateur Tournament will be held at Jaypee Greens, Greater Noida from July 9-13. The maximum permissible handicap is 14.

The new All India Seniors Inter-City Team Amateur Championship will take place simultaneously with the Seniors & Mid-Amateur. The team competition intends to motivate and add another dimension to the tournament and encourage more participation.

The individual seniors event has Over 50, Over 55, Over 60 and Over 65

age divisions with gross prizes and the Mid-Amateur is for ages 35 to 49, again on gross prizes. Based on individual standings, a 6-member team will be selected for the annual Asia Pacific Seniors Championship to be held in Japan in October – November 2018.

Meanwhile, the seniors’ inter-city team competition is open to teams with players over 50 years of age. A city can have more than one four-member team participating. The best 3 scores per day will be counted with prizes in gross and net.

Jaypee Greens, Greater Noida

july 2018 | golf digest india

23

Across The Country

Delhi NCR

Women’s Golf Day celebrations at Classic, DGC and NGC With the objective to engage, empower and support women golfers, Women’s Golf Day was first observed in 2016. Clubs in and around Delhi NCR celebrated the occasion last month.

Classic Golf & Country Club organised an event for members and non-members alike, in an endeavour to promote the game. It was a runaway success as participants flocked to the course for a round of golf besides connecting over refreshments and enjoying the fragrance of blooming flowers at the in-house nursery.

At Delhi Golf Club (DGC), over 60 participants (girls and ladies between 8 and 80 years of age) engaged in a fun round of golf over 9 holes at the Peacock Course. The group also commemorated World Environment

Day. Different formats were adopted on each hole and, to emphasise the use of non-plastic material, wooden tees and pencils were used.

Veterans Situ Puri and Aashna Monga were tied for top-spot while Himadari Singh was declared best junior. Anuva Saurabh and Lady Captains who preceded her planted a tree each to commemorate the occasion.

Over at Noida Golf Course (NGC), Lady Captain Kiran Chowdhury and her committee organised an enjoyable 9-hole tournament for ladies not only from the Club but from clubs across the National Capital Region as well.

Golfing skills of participants was put to the test as only 3 clubs and a putter were permitted.

Despite the oppressive heat, the event saw a large turnout. Vibha Singh won the competition Women’s Golf Day celebrations at Classic GCC while Raman Ahuja finished runner-up.

Anuva Saurabh (third from left) and DGC Lady Captains who preceded her plant a tree each to commemorate World Environment Day during Women’s Golf Day celebrations

NGC Lady Captain Kiran Chowdhury (fourth from left) and her team

Delhi

Kym Fuller appointed DGC Superintendent Based on a longstanding requirement from members to designate an experienced and well qualified Course Superintendent, Delhi Golf Course (DGC) finalized the appointment of Kym Fuller.

Fuller has over two-and-a-half decades of experience in Course Management, Agronomy, Construction and Maintenance in South-East Asia. Over the years, the Australian has endured a long and rewarding career as an ex-pat course superintendent.

He has worked in world-class courses like DLF Golf & Country Club (Gurgaon) and Jack Nicklaus Golf Club (South Korea) and many others across Australia, China, Malaysia, Mauritius and even Sudan.

24 golf digest india | july 2018

Pune

SSTA&SC wins inter-club caddies tournament The Sports Welfare Association, Mumbai along with Western India Golf Associates (WIGA) and YES Bank conducted an inter-club caddies’ tournament at Southern Star Training Area & Sports Complex (SSTA&SC), Pune on June 4.

Results: 1 – SSTA&SC 2 – Poona Club Golf Course, Pune 3 – Bombay Presidency Golf Club, Mumbai 4 – Willingdon Sports Club, Mumbai 5 – United Services Club, Mumbai

The winning team with Lt. Col. Ashwani Tyagi (Secretary, SSTA&SC)

G AM

Reputed golf coach and former international pro Amandeep Johl c ond u c te d a g ol f summer camp for the benefit of the wards of Petroleum Sports Promotion Board (PSPB) employees from May 20 to June 3 at Noida Sports StadiumGolf Range and Sirifort. A round of competitive golf in the mini golf course took place soon after.

During the camp, all participants got an insight into the fundamentals of the game along with an introduction to golf-specific fitness. The two-hour golf session offered individual attention to swing techniques and was followed by the fitness session.

The clinic was initiated by KL Tejwani – Joint Secretary, PSPB, with a single objective to help improve the children’s golfing skills and to bring more juniors into the fold.

Noida

NEW SHORT GAME FACILITY AT GREATER NOIDA A new short game practice facility — designed

by Vijit Nandrajog of Golf Design India — has opened in Greater Noida. It has been developed by Godrej Properties Ltd. for the region’s Golf Links project.

The facility looks to provide golfers with comprehensive conditions to learn and practice their short-games. It comprises a large putting green that features multiple slopes and undulations. A first-of-its kind chipping/ pitching practice area has been developed as well. Unlike conventional ones, this zone has chipping/pitching areas built at varied heights and slopes to provide golfers with every possible condition and lie to practice from. Overall, the facility aims to provide avid golfers with real golf-course-like conditions to play and practice in, besides helping create a friendly atmosphere to encourage beginners, ladies and children to start learning the game in a relaxed and fun environment.

A 9-hole executive golf course is also planned for this project. It is currently under construction and is likely to be ready for play next year.

26 golf digest india | july 2018

Vijit Nandrajog-designed short game facility at Godrej Golf Links, Greater Noida

TIVE • GRO W T NITA HE

A golf training program for 43 adults and juniors was held at Panchkula Golf Club from May 20 to June 10 under the aegis of NGAI Class-A instructor Gagandeep Ghotra. Raman Kumar (Class B), Darshan Lal (Class D) and Rajinder Singh (NIS cer tified Fitness Instructor) were also present.

IA I

TRAINING PROGRAM

• ITATIVE GROW THE N I IA

FD E • G O L I G E ST I ND

JUNIOR CAMP AT NOIDA SPORTS STADIUM

Panchkula

GAM

Noida

E • GO L F DI GE S T I ND

Promoting Golf

Business of Golf

TITLEIST INTRODUCES ALL-NEW AVX GOLF BALLS

The breakthrough performance of Titleist AVX – a new highperformance golf ball – will be available to Indian golfers (in white and high-optic yellow) later in July.

A comprehensive test conducted in Arizona, California and Florida from October 2017 to January 2018 resulted in the resounding validation of AVX, particularly among golfers who prioritize distance and extremely soft feel.

“Golfers have spoken loud and clear about the performance of AVX,” said Michael Mahoney, Vice President, Titleist Golf Ball Marketing. “… it was important to let golfers decide whether this golf ball had a place in our line and the results of our test market were emphatic. Many golfers were waiting for a product like AVX – our lowest flying, lowest spinning and softest feeling high performance golf ball – to help them play their best.”

The price of the AVX will be INR 4,740 per dozen.

AK SINGH APPOINTED GCS&MAI PRESIDENT Following the Annual General Meeting (AGM) in April, Wg. Cdr. A K Singh (Retd.) was formally appointed President of Golf Course Superintendents & Managers Association of India (GCS&MAI) on May 18. Singh, a former Director General of the Indian Golf Union (IGU), nominated Vijit Nandrajog as Honorary Secretary General and Vinod Goyal as Honorary Treasurer.

GCS&MAI assists golf courses in the country by providing professional advice and works towards improving their standard.

The Association also supports educational institutes and enables them to provide a higher standard of education in golf course and turf management. Recently, in association with the Golf Industry Association (GIA), GCS&MAI had organised a Turf Care Seminar during the India Golf Expo in April.

DSPORT TO TELECAST BRITISH OPEN AND PGA CHAMPIONSHIP IN INDIA

Popular sports channel DSport announced that it will offer live telecast of the British Open in July and the PGA Championship in August. The US$ 10,250,000 British Open will take place between July 19-22 in Carnoustie, while the US$ 10,500,000 PGA Championship commences on August 9. DSport was launched by Discovery Networks Asia Pacific on February 6, 2017. The channel caters to sports genre with over 4,000 hours of live content every year.

SALIENT FEATURES: • An innovative high speed, low compression core technology results in a powerful engine to drive remarkable distance • The invention of a new high flex casing layer enhances speed and controls spin to promote even greater distance • The proprietary GRN41 thermoset cast urethane elastomer cover delivers premium scoring control and durability • A unique catenary aerodynamic design delivers a piercing, low trajectory while providing a consistent ball flight on all shots

What The Future Holds For Indian Golf

I

ndian Golf Union (IGU) has faced testing times the past few months; first they were derecognized by the Sports Ministry for not abiding with the National Sports Code laid out by the Ministry of Sports and Youth Affairs, and then - recently - saw 50 members walk out of the scheduled Extraordinary General Meeting on June 6, 2018.

Though IGU claim that they successfully amended the constitution as per the demands of the Sports Ministry, the future of Indian golf remains unknown. Civilian courses call this a hijacking by the Armed Forces as they have over 90%

28 golf digest india | july 2018

of golf courses at their disposal.

The fact, however, remains that the Armed Forces have always produced the best sportsmen in India as they are an organised establishment and have always had the land and manpower to manage everything related to the game.

Army courses have produced some of India’s finest golfers — like Jeev Milkha Singh, Anirban Lahiri, Jyoti Randhawa, Digvijay Singh and Shubhankar Sharma besides rising stars such as Diksha Dagar, Amandeep Drall and others — as they provide the initial support and facility that aspirants require.

On the other hand, civilian courses forming a separate, competing union wouldn’t quite help the state of golf.

Most armed forces golf courses, however, are not in pristine condition; they are more like parkland courses with minimum maintenance of fairways and fairly decent greens and tee-boxes. The downside of this is that the ball runs a mile, especially in the dry months, and this camouflages the golfer’s limitations.

Golf is at the cusp of a revolution in India, but it needs a significant thrust.

Unfortunately, golf clubs are

all too few and they are under immense pressure to cater to their existing members. The opening up of the armed forces golf courses and their promotion of young talent could be just what the game needs to undergo a paradigm shift in fortunes.

Indian golf badly needs that timely boost.

Golf Digest India’s request for a comment went unanswered

by IGU.

Business of Golf

5 Golfers In 2018 Forbes Highest Paid Athletes List

Forbes announced its Highest Paid Athletes List for 2018 with boxer Floyd Mayweather, who reportedly made US$ 285 million in earnings, taking top honours. Others in the top-10 include soccer stars Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, and tennis maestro Roger Federer. Despite his limited playing schedule, Tiger Woods finished as the highest-paid golfer and, with US$ 43.3 million, was ranked 16th overall. Other golfers in the top-30 include Woods’ compatriots Phil Mickelson (22nd) and Jordan Spieth (23rd), and Northern Ireland’s Rory McIlroy (26th).

Forbes has published an annual list of the world’s highest paid athletes since 1990 and Tiger Woods has finished atop the rankings 11 times (2002-11, 2013), more than any other sportsperson.

Furthermore, in its most recent all-time list (of highest-paid athletes), published last December, there were 4 golfers in the top 6 alone – Woods (ranked second), Arnold Palmer (third), Jack Nicklaus (fourth) and Mickelson (sixth).

Rank Name

Sport

Earnings (in US$)

1.

Floyd Mayweather

Boxing

275 million

2.

Lionel Messi

Soccer

111 million

3.

Cristiano Ronaldo

Soccer

108 million

4.

Conor McGregor

MMA

99 million

5.

Neymar

Soccer

90 million

6.

LeBron James

Basketball

85.5 million

7.

Roger Federer

Tennis

77.2 million

BENEFITS OF GOLF ON THE ENVIRONMENT Many find it amusing that golf can benefit the environment.

After all, golf courses require a lot of water and land besides operations and maintenance personnel.

That said – golf courses are picturesque and provide habitat for various land and aquatic animals besides protecting water resources and filtering storm water runoff. The turf also protects topsoil from water and wind erosion. Furthermore, as an activity, golf improves physical health and helps reduce stress. The sport contributes to the economy too.

In the US, golf courses impact the economy at an estimated US$ 18 billion each year. Today, more than 24.5 million individuals - men, women and youth combined - spend 2.4 billion hours outside, playing one of the 14,500-plus golf courses around the country. Something India can learn from.

With golf courses spreading across India, the time has never been better to promote the sport as a niche tourism product too. The abundance of natural beauty, no dearth of land availability and – perhaps most exciting – the buzz around Indian professional golf (thanks to the exploits of Shubhankar Sharma, Anirban Lahiri and Aditi Ashok, besides others) offer enough reason to be proactively involved in the sport. In fact, the total revenue generated from golf tourism in India would be around Rs 35 – 37 crores (inbound and outbound combined).

As the legendary Greg Norman says “Golf courses can be community assets. Not only can they elevate property values, create jobs and provide tax revenues, they can also provide green spaces, filter air, purify water and create wildlife habitat.”

Golfers in Top 100 Rank Name

Earnings (in US$)

16

Tiger Woods

43.3 million

22

Phil Mickelson

41.3 million

23

Jordan Spieth

41.2 million

26

Rory McIIroy

37.7 million

66

Justin Thomas

26 million

UPCOMING GOLF CONFERENCES IN MELBOURNE & DUBAI

The Golf Business Forum is set to provide golf facility owners and managers with an impressive lineup of experts and ideas essential to maximising the potential of any golf business. To be hosted in Melbourne on July 30-31, the Forum will connect the industry with owners and operators from a diverse range of golf facilities besides helping develop innovative thinking, critical to industry growth. Key education and training opportunities will also be offered. Speakers include Stephen Pitt (Golf Australia), Gavin Kirkman (PGA of Australia) and Sam Squires (Channel9) among others. Guy Chapple, who was a speaker at the recently concluded India Golf Expo in April, is Director of Golf Business Forum.

To be held in Dubai on October 24-25, Global Golf Summit will feature a host of sessions set up to help attendees both leverage and maximize current business models. The innovative two-day event is ideal for golf course owners, operators, tournament heads and other industry professionals to meet their peers and showcase some of the cutting-edge tools and tactics currently transforming golf operations. Key areas of discussion will be Golf Tourism, Golf Technology and Improving Club Business. Golf Industry Association (GIA) is supporting the event and representing India globally at the Summit. Key speakers include Dhruv Verma (Founder/CEO of GolfLan Group), Lodewijk Klootwijk (CEO, European Golf Course Owners Association) and Sarah Forrest (CEO/Founder Golf Guru Group) among others.

Protects topsoil from water & wind erosion

Water harvesting & conservation

Provides wildlife habitat

Improves air quality Restores damaged land areas

july 2016 | golf digest india

29

Business of Golf

Improve Your Facility On A Budget

By Paul Jansen

A high percentage of golf clubs across the globe have minimal sums of money to spend on improving their facility. Whilst this is not necessarily ideal, these facilities should take comfort in the fact that spending large sums of money won’t necessarily equate to a considerably better golf course and experience. In my experience, golf clubs that focus their attention on the small detail – making sure they get this right – are more likely to achieve a successful outcome with limited investment. Let me explain this in much more detail highlighting examples from golf courses I have worked on and visited around the globe.

Royal Selangor Golf Club, Malaysia

UNDERESTIMATE THE IMPORTANCE OF ARRIVAL 1NEVER

OF PLACE EVERYTHING YOU DO 2AINSENSE

Many golf visitors would have already formulated an opinion of a golf course before they’ve even stepped foot on the first tee. Create a favorable impression at the outset by making sure the arrival experience is second to none and that the journey from the entry gates to the 1st tee is as memorable and seamless an experience as the golf course itself.

For instance, the entrance to the very unique and storied Royal West Norfolk Golf Club (Brancaster) in the United Kingdom requires golfers to enter the course via the beach and through a small entrance gate — an indelible scene and one you won’t quickly forget.

Closer to home, the historic Royal Selangor Golf Club - situated in the middle of the city of Kuala Lumpur - is graced by hundreds of native trees that existed on the property before the construction of the golf course.

Thankfully, many of these trees remain and form the focal point as you enter the golf course and wander about the clubhouse. They create a real sense of place and improve the golf course experience immeasurably.

Create sense of place by incorporating all the best features on site into the golf course and use native material as much as possible. This will not only ensure a golf course that is unique and distinct but also different from the competition and generally much cheaper to maintain because your forfeit having to build and maintain man-made features at a cost. Of course, where a piece of property might be bland and featureless, create a strong story that is closely linked with the surrounds and this will help improve the experience as well. This is the case at the prestigious Jagorawi Golf & Country Club situated just outside of Jakarta. It features course furniture that is local to the area and is memorable in every way. Such detail adds to the character of the golf course and helps improve sense of Jagorawi Golf & Country Club, Indonesia place and experience.

30 golf digest india | july 2018

Business of Golf

Laguna Phuket Golf Club, Thailand

Bagan Golf Club, Burma

3

EMBRACE UNCONVENTIONAL FEATURES

Typically — the more memorable the feature, the more memorable the golf even if some of these features are unconventional and unique! Take the Bagan Golf Club in Myanmar where pagodas - all built between 9 and 12AD - bound many of the play areas and create a remarkable scene. Likewise, the ancient tombs that bound some of the holes at the Delhi GC enhance the experience and help create a real sense of place.

AND GRASSING LINES 4MOWING Don’t reduce the impact of the natural terrain or any memorable feature by hiding them in long grass or keeping them out of view. Highlight these features – by taking the fairway lines up to them – and, in so doing, improve the impact they will have on play.

In addition to this, make your course more visually strong by ensuring your grassing lines are natural in appearance and mow your fairway with the least amount of striping to reduce maintenance costs. The majority of the best golf course on the globe employ very simple moving lines where golf course striping is limited, and the fairway/rough line are more natural in appearance. The world-renowned Shinnecock Hills Golf Club and Bethpage State Park Black Course - on the outskirts of New York city - are great examples. Also highlight memorable humps, bumps, rolls by mowing these at fairway height and show off your site’s outstanding features by taking the fairway up to them which is the case at the attractive Laguna Phuket Golf Club in Thailand.

St. Andrews, Scotland

CONTOURS ARE NOT TABOO 5GROUND

LAND HOLES 6THEBETWEEN

Ground contours are the most underused golf feature today, which is alarming given what they bring to the party at a fraction of the cost of any other feature. Something as simple as a bump or depression can offer as much interest as any other feature.

Maintain a firm base and even a ground ripple will add strategic interest and make for fascinating play. Ground Contours are the most sustainable of all golf features A high amount of the play strategy and interest when playing golf at St. Andrews (old) course is determined by the myriad of humps, bumps and depressions scattered about the golf course.

This is perfectly highlighted by the hump in front on the 4th green or depression in front of the 18th green on the Old Course.

Great golf courses take golfers on a journey of discovery through the property. The way the Architect routes the holes to highlight the best parts of the site is paramount to achieving this. Whilst it’s not advisable to have long distances between greens and tees, particularly if you wish to create a seamless golf experience, at times this may not be possible. In this case, make sure these transition areas or the “other parts of the golf property” compliment the golf course and are memorable in every way For instance, some of the walkways between certain holes at the Royal Zoute Golf Club in Belgium are memorable and compliment the golf course experience. Closer to home at the Victoria Golf & Country Club in Sri Lanka, golfers are afforded wonderful views at different staging points around the course.

Royal Zoute Golf Club, Belgium

about paul jansen Paul is widely regarded as one of golf’s most talented and well-traveled young Golf Course Architects. After having schooled in South Africa, he began his career in the USA before relocating to Europe where he worked as Lead Golf Architect for Nick Faldo Design on a variety of projects in Europe, Africa and South East Asia. In 2011, Paul established Jansen Golf Design & Construction with a focus on creating highly sustainable golf courses that provide strategic, stimulating and memorable golf that is FUN. Paul is currently improving the storied Royal Colombo Golf Club in Sri Lanka and involved withThe R&A and Bangladesh Golf Federation in creating a new 18-hole golf facility near Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. july 2018 | golf digest india

31

Tête-à-tête with Deepali Shah Gandhi

Thought Leader

‘All sports, including golf, must be encouraged’ eepali Shah Gandhi was unanimously elected President of Golf Industry Association (GIA) by the Board during the seventh annual India Golf Expo in Bengaluru. The Director of Zaverchand Sports takes over the reins of the association from Devang Shah, Managing Director of Navratna Group, who developed Kalhaar Blues & Greens in Ahmedabad. Zaverchand Sports Pvt Ltd. are pioneers in the field, having first developed golf club head production in India. As the business grew, Deepali became involved in the distribution of golf brands such as Titleist, Footjoy, Club Car, Bagboy and Bushnell, which they continue to do today.

D

B orn in 1959, D eepali belongs to the family of Z av e r c h a n d L a x m i c h a n d who were titled Raj Ratna Raj Mitra in Vadodara, Gujarat.

In the absence of her father, Late Vinay Shah of Baroda Rayon, she was nurtured by her maternal uncle. She is also the granddaughter of Late K K Shah, Hon. Governor of Tamil Nadu in the early 70s.

Based in Mumbai, Deepali travels across the country and has personally visited a plethora of clubs over the years. She has served on the Board of Directors of GIA and was one of its founding members too. Here she is, in conversation with Amit Pandey of Golf Digest India…

GDI: How and when did you decide to get into the business of golf?

DEEPALI: I belong to a family of golfers; my father Vinay used to play regularly with Mrs Mariwalla and Mr Madan Mohan Ruia at Willingdon Club. I have seen the scarcity of products first hand. My uncle Ashok, a keen golfer in Baroda, played the sport and decided to produce clubs.

I was sent to Taiwan for mould production and then to UK for shaft production. I also trained at Golfsmith USA for fitment and assembly of clubs. We produced clubs till 1998. I felt we needed to broaden our activities and so we added distribution of brands.

Both my husband Anand – who played the sport at University in the US – and I are very quality conscious, and we decided to work only with the best. I closed the manufacturing activities in 1998 as it was not viable.

GIA President Deepali Shah Gandhi along with husband Anand Gandhi of Zaverchand Sports at the Golf Digest India photo booth during India Golf Expo 2018

32 golf digest india | july 2018

GDI: Please take our readers through your experience, having personally visited more than 100 clubs and courses in the country…

DEEPALI: India is my love. I am proud of the heritage we have, to be Indian, and to see what we have achieved. I was pleasantly surprised to see the variety of courses across the country!

Golden Panther in Amritsar,

Tête-à-tête with Deepali Shah Gandhi Imperial in Ludhiana, Kalhaar in Ahmedabad, Memon Club in Pathankot, Oxford in Pune, and the ones Digboi, Margerita, Ooty, Udhampur, Gaya, Patna and Jhansi, just to name a few...

I have visited many distant locations and wherever I went, I received the same camaraderie and warmth. I would say that our courses are now of international standards. Of course, Kashmir is very special to me. I used to visit Royal Spring Golf Course when it was being built.

GDI: Your thoughts on how the business around the sport has changed in India over the years (since you commenced your career) DEEPALI: When we started, there was no one in the organised sector! The IGU would import some clubs and balls.

Mechanised equipment was not available. Neither were electric carts (for seniors). All that is a thing of past, virtually every product line is available here.

Golf courses have improved tremendously and are at par with international standards.

... GIVEN THE SEVERE STRESS AND COMPETITION TODAY, ONE NEEDS TIME TO REJUVENATE. WHAT BETTER WAY OTHER THAN GOLF?!

L-R: GIA Board members Vineet Mathur, Col. Pravin Uberoi (Retd.), Vijit Nandrajog, Ravi Garyali, Phil Ryan, Karan Bindra, Deepali Shah Gandhi, Devang Shah, Mohan Subramanian, P.K. Bhattacharya, Anit Mehrotra and Rishi Narain

provide a platform - a knowledge base - where everyone in the industry benefits. And third, liaise with all agencies involved in golf so that we become dynamic and fill the gaps.

formed a sub-committee headed by a very experienced golf tour operator to work on these areas.

GDI: What in Indian golf, or in the business of Indian golf, do you think needs to be attended to with utmost priority?

DEEPALI: The industry should work closely with clubs, the government, and IGU to increase participation and grow the sport in a sustainable manner.

Likewise, with developers to promote the benefits of golf to the environment. Earlier this year, the government raised duty on sports goods (2018 Budget) just one day after declaring “Khelo India”! All sports, including golf, must be encouraged.

GDI: Given your experience with brands like Titleist, Bushnell etc. what is your opinion on the impact of technology on golf?

DEEPALI: Technology is a double-edged sword. It helps golfers to improve their game and further enjoy the golfing experience, but it also puts pressure on golf courses as they have to be longer or more challenging.

Aerodynamics being one of the key factors, most golfers do not understand what goes behind the products they use and how to get the best out of them.

GDI: What do you envisage as the future drivers of new golf projects in India?

DEEPALI: Golf-centric community living. One no longer has to be in a city to go to work and make a good living. Thanks to the internet, one can live anywhere and yet be connected.

Nothing like living in the midst of nature and scenic views, without the rush. People need to move out of cities. Wherever one goes — Kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, etc. —traffic is a killer! In fact, a percentage of one’s life is wasted in the commute! People need to move out and live better. Projects around golf courses offer just that.

GDI: Your favourite golfers (among men and among women)— both, in India and overseas.

DEEPALI: Jordan Spieth and Michelle Wie are my favourite golfers. Among Indians, Shubankar Sharma and Aditi Ashok.

GDI: What is the potential for golf development and tourism at the state level and how can India attract more golf tourists?

DEEPALI: Thailand, as you know, has become the favourite golf destination in this part of the world. I recall their tourism department hosting “Visit Thailand” shows and events to attract people. Similar efforts can be applied here. We have everything: the culture, food, dance and music, and coupled with golf, we could well be one of the go-to destinations. GIA have

GDI: CSR will play a big part in bringing financial support especially for grassroots and junior programs. How is GIA leveraging this?

DEEPALI: To promote golf, an Olympic sport, at the school level, GIA is working closely with various institutions and corporate houses for increasing and maintaining better practise facilities. I am happy to share that J&K Bank are funding the reconstruction of Kashmir Golf Course, which was destroyed during the 2014 floods, under their CSR budget. Similarly,

GDI: What is your vision as GIA President?

DEEPALI: Grow golf in India, first and foremost. Our “India Learn Golf Week” programme has been successful, and the momentum has begun. Second,

many corporates have shown interest to fund the development of various upcoming learning facilities.

GDI: What benefits does golf bring to the average club golfer? Or in other words… why, according to you, should people play golf?

DEEPALI: I have found that golf is the one sport that fosters a unique bond and camaraderie.

Team spirit is found in most sports, but its depth in golf is different. And given the severe stress and competition today, one needs time to rejuvenate.

What better way other than golf?!

GDI: What are the challenges facing Indian golf today?

DEEPALI: India is expensive in terms of land and there is a dearth of affordable facilities and pay-and-play facilities.

The government needs to open more municipal golf courses and popularise them by conducting clinics. For instance, we need to replicate Delhi’s Qutub Golf Course in other cities and towns. Furthermore, we must make a concerted effort to lift the misconception that golf is a sport for select people.

GDI: Anything else that you would like to tell our readers…

DEEPALI: “Golfer grow golfer”.

Make it your aim to add one more golfer.

july 2018 | golf digest india

33

Corporate Digest

MercedesTrophy

‘Drive To The Major’ Winner To Visit The Open

L-R: Karam Naresh Singh, Dealer Principal - Panjab Motors; Rohit Mittal, Director - MS Nachiketa Papers; Deepak Joshi, Dealer Principal - Joshi Autozone (Mercedes-Benz India Pvt. Ltd.)

M

ercedesTrophy India is the country’s biggest corporate golf event. What started out in one city - Delhi - at the turn of the millennium has gone from strength to strength and now covers 12 cities, featuring more than 3,000 golfers over a span of 91 days. Easily one of India’s finest amateur golf tournaments, participants compete for a place in the World Final which is held in Stuttgart, Germany. This year’s edition saw Bhavkaran Singh (Chandigarh), Aman Sawhney (Gurgaon) and Rajesh Natarajan (Mumbai) emerge victorious in the National Final in Categories A, B and C respectively.

The ‘Drive to the Major ’ competition is unique to the MercedesTrophy, combining the premium amateur series with a major - The Open Championship. It has been an integral part of the event since 2013. Rohit Mittal was this year’s ‘Drive to the Major’ winner from India. He won the Grand Lucky Draw (Straightest Drive winners from various legs of MercedesTrophy India were entered into the draw) organised during the National Final in Pune (on April 6).

Mittal, a resident of Chandigarh, will travel to Carnoustie to watch this year’s British Open.

Besides experiencing MercedesBenz’s unmatched hospitality, he will also have the chance to qualify for the ‘Monday After Event’, which is directly played after The Open on Monday at Carnoustie Golf Links. A truly once-in-a-lifetime opportunity awaits.

34 golf digest india | july 2018

L-R: Rajiv Bansal,Inderpreet Singh Kang, Kartik Gupta and ‘Drive to the Major’ winner Rohit Mittal

The ‘Drive to the Major’ competition is unique to the MercedesTrophy, combining the premium amateur series with a major — The Open Championship.

OFF THE COURSE

Achievers

corporate golfers and aficionados of the sport who have been in the news lately...

Sanctum Wealth Raises Rs. 73 Crore In Funding

Nitin Gadkari, Hon. Minister for Road Transport & Highways, calls on Rana Kapoor (C) and Bindu Kapoor (R) in Mumbai

Nitin Gadkari meets Rana Kapoor

The Minister for Road Transport & Highways, Nitin Gadkari, recently met YES Bank MD & CEO Rana Kapoor at the latter’s Mumbai residence as part of the “Sampark for Samarthan” (Contact for Support) campaign. The pair discussed development initiatives of the ruling government in the last four years.

Kapoor, who pioneered green financing in India besides digital payments technologies, is a keen golfer and often participates in corporate and charity golf events. He was most recently seen at the Madhavrao Scindia Golf Tournament earlier this year at DLF Golf & Country Club, Gurgaon. His oldest daughter Radha, who owns a sports management firm, is also into the sport.

Introducing ‘Golfer’ CJ

Papa CJ, who was recognised as ‘Asia’s Best Stand-up Comedian’ by Top 10 magazine in Kuala Lumpur in 2014, thoroughly enjoys golf. In fact, he loves golf more than cricket — which isn’t the sentiment one would associate with Indians in general.

He has been part of many a corporate and fund-raising event such as World Corporate Golf Challenge, Louis Philippe Cup, Madhavrao Scindia Golf Tournament and MercedesTrophy. Tollygunge Club, Kolkata is one course Papa CJ visits very often. The 41-year-old can also be seen cheering Indian golfers via social media.

Mumbai-based wealth manager Sanctum Wealth Management raised Rs. 73 crores from homegrown private fund Multiples Alternate Asset Management Pvt Ltd. Sanctum, which started in 2016 through the acquisition of the Indian private banking business of Royal Bank of Scotland, was founded by Shiv Gupta. Corporate golfer Prateek Pant is among the Co-Founders and he also doubles up as Head of Products and Solutions.

Pant was a finalist at the Tata Hitachi World Corporate Golf Challenge in Bengaluru. He also represented corporate India at the 2016 World Amateur Golf Championship in Durban. The 18-handicapper lists Karnataka Golf Association golf course, Oxford Golf Resort and Thai Country Club as some of his favourite haunts.

july 2018 | golf digest india

35

Hi-Life Lifestyle

To share news on your products or updates on new launches, please email karthik@rnsportsmarketing.com

GADGET SAMSUNG DEBUTS NEW GALAXY J & A SMARTPHONES WITH INFINITY DISPLAY

Samsung launched four new smartphones, all running Android Oreo out-of-the-box, with Infinity Display on May 21.

The Infinity Design on the Galaxy J6, J8, A6 and A6+ gives users nearly 15% more display area without increasing the overall size of the device. This can be attributed to extremely thin bezels and by swapping the physical home button with software powered in-display home button.

The finger print sensor also moves to the back of the device for added convenience. Samsung’s Infinity display experience is further strengthened by a new ‘Chat Over Video’ feature that facilitates an uninterrupted and uncompromised viewing experience while chatting.

The new smartphones are designed to impress. Galaxy A series smartphones feature a metal unibody and sleek design while the Galaxy J series smartphones come with a premium polycarbonate unibody. All four have sleek curves and an ergonomic design with elegant style and comfortable grip.

“Galaxy J6, J8, A6 and A6+ are built for today's millennial. These smart phones will set the standard for an unparalleled viewing experience with Samsung’s signature super AMOLED Infinity Display. These phones also get dual rear cameras that let users capture professional grade bokeh images and express themselves in a unique manner. Our latest 'Make for India' innovation Chat-over-Video allows uninterrupted viewing experience just the way millennials want it…"

— Mohandeep Singh, Senior Vice President, Mobile Business, Samsung India

Brief Specs

Galaxy A6

Galaxy A6+

Galaxy J6

Galaxy J8

Processor

Exynos 7 Series

Snapdragon 450

Exynos 7 Series

Snapdragon 450

5.6” HD+

6” FHD+

5.6” HD+

6” HD+

Display

Super AMOLED

Super AMOLED

Super AMOLED

Super AMOLED

Primary camera

16MP (f/1.7)

16MP (f/1.7)+5MP (f/1.9)

13MP (f/1.9)

16MP (f/1.7)+5MP (f/1.9)

Secondary camera

16MP (f/1.9)

24MP (f/1.9)

8MP (f/1.9)

16MP (f/1.9)

4GB + 32GB 4GB + 64GB

4GB + 64GB

3GB + 32GB 4GB + 64GB

4GB + 64GB

microSD slot (up to 256GB)

microSD slot (up to 256GB)

microSD slot (up to 256GB)

microSD slot (up to 256GB)

Battery

3,000 mAh

3,500 mAh

3,000 mAh

3,500 mAh

Price

` 21,990 (32GB) ` 22,990 (64GB)

` 25,990

` 13,990 (3/32GB) ` 16,490 (4/64GB)

` 18,990

Memory

36 golf digest india | july 2018

Lifestyle

APPAREL CELEBRATING A MILESTONE To celebrate its 85th anniversary, Lacoste is paying tribute to the inventiveness of its founder and to its history by reissuing a selection of polo shir ts and emblematic items from its archives.

The anniversary collection offers an oppor tunit y to rediscover the multiple facets of the Lacoste style which, since its creation, has proven its ability to play with fashion codes and innovate over time without

compromising on elegance.

This capsule collection consists of 15 reissues – 8 unisex polos, 3 dresses, a pair of shoes and 3 bags. Reflecting 85 years of creativity in their graphic design, materials and shapes, these

items take on contemporary colours borrowed from the Spring/Summer 2018 range and give new life to the legendary “La Chemise LACOSTE” label.

Price: ` 4,800 onwards

FOOTWEAR SKECHERS INTRODUCE NEXT-GEN TRANSITIONAL RUNNING SHOES The Skechers GoRun family welcomed the addition of GoRun6 on May 16. The knit pattern with the sock like stretchable collar offers the much-needed breathability making it ideal for summers.

GoRun6 provides exceptional comfort and performance output and targets the avid runner and the simple enthusiast alike. Designed for speed, it is responsive, supportive and lightning fast.

Features include: l Ultra-lightweight Cushioning - The ultra-lightweight cushioning offers more durability and stability while running l M-Strike Technology - Shoes are engineered with M-Strike

technology to promote mid-foot strike with a separated heel pad which offers an added no-rub comfort l Flight Gen - Next generation of 5Gen makes the shoe ultralightweight giving high flexibility; this innovative technology provides memory retention that avoids lurching from the ground and helps absorbs impact l Parametric Web Outsole Using carbon stretchable rubber gives maximum rubber coverage which further helps in giving efficient grip while running l Abrasion Resistance Property - Strategically placed in key strike zones thereby enhancing durability

Price: ` 7,999/- onwards

FOOTWEAR ADIDAS LAUNCHES NEW RANGE OF GOLF SHOES

Leading sports apparel manufacturer Adidas released a new line of golf footwear that prioritises walking comfort, swing stablity and breathability besides improving durability and green friendliness.

Adicross Bounce Price: ` 8,990/-

Adidas Tour 360 Price: ` 14,990/-

Adidas Climacool Knit (Women) Price: ` 7,990/-

july 2018 | golf digest india

37

Lifestyle

In partnership with THE MAN magazine

SPLURGE

Make a statement off the course Dormio Tinnitus pillow Price: ` 16,000

High Power Audio Systems MHS-V81D from Sony Price: ` 51,990

Tresmode SS18 Belts Price: ` 6,900

Glenmorangie Private Edition 9 Spios Bottle and Pack

Truefitt & Hill 1805 cologne Price: ` 5,300

38 golf digest india | july 2018

Aqua Jet Mist fan from Fanzart India Price: ` 1.28 lakh

Mr Burberry Indigo Price: ` 7,250 / 150ml

Glenfiddich 18-year-old Price: ` 11,000 (Delhi NCR)

On the Asian Tour

‘ADT Continues To Be An Effective Feeder Tour...’

BY JOSH BURACK Asian Tour CEO

I

n late May, we took another important step toward expanding the Asian Tour’s presence in China at our last tournament which was the Asia-Pacific Classic (APC) in Zhengzhou. Following the game-changing strategic partnership we signed with the China Golf Association (CGA) last year, the APC was the third tournament we sanctioned in China during the past six months. This solidifies the East Asia corporate strategy we devised last year which has seen China become our fastest growing market!

November for the Asian Golf Championship in Xiamen. We are also in discussions to add at least one additional event in China this season.

DEVELOPING CHAMPIONS

The APC saw some outstanding golf with Asian Development Tour (ADT) stalwart, John Catlin of the United States, breaking through on the bigger stage to

CLOSER AND STRONGER

During this period, our team have developed strong camaraderie with CGD Sports, who are the promoter of the China Tour and our co-sanctioned tournaments. Through the success of the APC, the owner of St Andrews Golf Club in Zhengzhou, Mr Fan Zhiqiang, committed to help underwrite and host the cosanctioned tournament again in 2019 which is terrific news for both Tours. In the interim, we will return to China next in

Josh Burack (L) with Fan Zhiqiang (Owner, St Andrews Golf Club, Zhengzhou)

Xiao Bowen

40 golf digest india | july 2018

capture his maiden Asian Tour title with a two-shot victory over Adam Blyth. Catlin was the second consecutive ADT player to earn a “Tournament Winner” card following Sweden’s Malcolm

On the Asian Tour

Habitat for Humanity Standings After U.S. Open

John Catlin

Sanghyun Park

Malcolm Kokocinski

Kokocinski’s impressive three-shot victory the week prior at the AB Bank Bangladesh Open.

Eight years after we founded the ADT in 2010, the circuit continues to be an effective feeder to the main tour.

In addition to Catlin and Kokocinski, Berry Henson of the United States, Chinese Taipei’s Chan Shih-chang, Thailand’s Pavit Tangkamolprasert and Poom Saksansin, as well as Malaysian duo Gavin Green and Nicholas Fung were winners on the ADT before they progressed to become Asian Tour champions.

third extra hole. After his win, Park took up Asian Tour membership and with that, he’s in contention for the Habitat for Humanity Standings title.

Park is ranked seventh (after the Asia-Pacific Classic), about US$400,000 behind the leader, India’s Shubhankar Sharma. With so many lucrative events on the horizon, the race is wide open. Speaking of which, we are looking forward to the KRW1,200,000,000 (approximately US$1,110,000) Kolon Korea Open, popularly known as one of the country’s golf majors, in late-June.

WELCOME TO THE ASIAN TOUR

EXPANDING HORIZONS

The 37th GS Caltex Maekyung Open Golf Championship marked our formal re-establishment of ties with the Korea Golf Association (KGA). It was the first time we co-sanctioned an event with the KGA since 2009. It was truly a momentous occasion for all our stakeholders, as well as everyone who worked hard to make the tournament so successful.

The event was staged at the Namseoul Country Club, saw many of our young Asian Tour stars step up their play to contend for the title.

Yikeun Chang and Gaganjeet Bhullar ended up in a four-way playoff along with Sanghyun Park and Junggon Hwang of the Korean Tour. Eventually, Park secured victory with a par at the

While the first five months of our schedule have been very solid, the remaining seven months are even stronger. The Asian Tour will have a busy schedule all the way to the end of December, highlighted by new events that are set in exotic locations.

The inaugural Sarawak Championship will be happening in early July. It is the first Asian Tour tournament to be held in the East Malaysian state after staging ADT events there from 2012 to 2017.

The event will offer a prize purse of US$300,000 and will be staged at the Arnold Palmer designed Damai Golf and Country Club.

Similarly, the Asian Tour will be staging a main tour tournament in Pakistan in October after

POS

PLAYER

EARNINGS (US$)

1.

SHUBHANKAR SHARMA (IND)

589,575

2.

MATT WALLACE (UK)

446,660

3.

KIRADECH APHIBARNRAT (THA)

360,737

4.

RAHIL GANGJEE (IND)

286,346

5.

SIHWAN KIM (USA)

226,710

6.

PAUL PETERSON (USA)

215,759

7.

SANGHYUN PARK (KOR)

187,124

8.

SCOTT VINCENT (ZIM)

152,816

9.

DANIEL NISBET (AUS)

151,884

10.

BERRY HENSON (USA)

141,364

11.

GAGANJEET BHULLAR (IND)

132,402

12.

PANUPHOL PITTAYARAT (THA)

129,874

13.

HIDETO TANIHARA (JPN)

123,206

14.

SHAUN NORRIS (RSA)

118,285

15.

JAZZ JANEWATTANANOND (THA)

116,205

16.

KHALIN JOSHI (IND)

111,140

17.

YIKEUN CHANG (KOR)

110,826

18.

PROM MEESAWAT (THA)

108,742

19.

TERRY PILKADARIS (AUS)

105,908

20.

MASAHIRO KAWAMURA (JPN)

101,464

Josh Burack with Korea Golf Association officials

an 11-year hiatus. The CNS Open Golf Championship will also offer US$300,000 in prize money. We are enthusiastic that our involvement in Pakistan will grow

the game in the country as well as the region.

My thanks to everyone for your continuing support to the Asian Tour! #whereitsAT

july 2018 | golf digest india

41

On the Asian Tour

Fiji Says ‘Bula’ To Gaganjeet

Gaganjeet Bhullar

I

ndia’s Gaganjeet Bhullar will make his debut at the Fiji International presented by Fiji Airways at the Natadola Bay Championship Golf Course from August 2 to 5, 2018.

Bhullar, one of the most successful professional golfers from India and an eight-time winner on the Asian Tour, is the latest player to confirm his place in the tournament.

He’s no stranger to the ISPS HANDA PGA Tour of Australasia having teed it up in the past two ISPS HANDA World Super 6 Perth tournaments in 2017 and 2018, which are, like the Fiji International presented

by Fiji Airways, tri-sanctioned with the European Tour and Asian Tour.

“I’m really looking forward to playing in Fiji for the Fiji International presented by Fiji Airways, I can’t wait to see the Vijay Singh designed Natadola Bay Championship Course for myself,” said Bhullar.

“I’m sure he’s made it a real test, especially with some of those exposed holes on the coast, I’m looking forward to the challenge.”

Bhullar has enjoyed a steady start to the 2018 Asian Tour season, a top-10 finish at the Leopalace21 Myanmar Open and a runner-up result at the 37th GS Caltex Maekyung Open Golf Championship where he narrowly missed victory being defeated in a four-man playoff.

He currently sits just outside the top-10 on the Asian Tour’s Habitat for Humanity Standings but has his work cut out for him to catch countryman Shubhankar Sharma at the top of the standings. “ This being a tri-sanctioned tournament with the ISPS HANDA PGA Tour of Australasia, European Tour and

“I’M REALLY LOOKING FORWARD TO PLAYING IN FIJI FOR THE FIJI INTERNATIONAL PRESENTED BY FIJI AIRWAYS, I CAN’T WAIT TO SEE THE VIJAY SINGH DESIGNED NATADOLA BAY CHAMPIONSHIP COURSE FOR MYSELF... I’M SURE HE’S MADE IT A REAL TEST, ESPECIALLY WITH SOME OF THOSE EXPOSED HOLES ON THE COAST, I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO THE CHALLENGE.” Asian Tour is going to provide a great chance for me to make up some ground on the Habitat for Humanity Standings,” said Bhullar. “ We saw Kiradech (Aphibarnrat) make a huge jump up that list when he won in Perth so hopefully I can get a good result and try and catch those leaders.”

Bhullar’s last victory came at the 2017 Macao Open where he won by three-shots from countryman, Ajeetesh Sandhu.

“We are happy to welcome one of India’s greatest golfers to Fiji for the Fiji International

42 golf digest india | july 2018

presented by Fiji Airways,” said Honourable Faiyaz Siddiq Koya, Minister for Industry, Trade, Tourism, Lands and Mineral Resources.

“A s o n e o f t h e m o s t successful golfers on the Asian Tour, we’re sure Bhullar will be a great addition to the field which currently includes golfing stars like Ernie Els and our own Vijay Singh.

“Once again, we know the Fiji International presented

by Fiji Airways will prove an impressive platform to promote golf and tourism in Fiji,” added Hon. Koya.

Bhullar’s addition to the field carries on a strong history of Asian Tour stars, teeing it up at the picturesque course with stunning views of the Coral Coast Sea. “ We’re excited to have Gaganjeet confirmed for the Fiji International presented by Fiji Airways, his performance on the Asian Tour over the years has been fantastic,” said Gavin Kirkman, CEO of PGA of Australia which owns the ISPS HANDA PGA Tour of Australasia.

“The Asian Tour has been a strong supporter of the tournament here in Fiji and we’ve had some of their strongest performers compete in the tournament, highlighted by rising Thai star Jazz Janewattananond thrilling us all with a final round of 8-under 64 last year.

“I’m looking forward to seeing how Gaganjeet will take on the Vijay Singh designed Natadola Bay Championship Course this year.”

On the Asian Tour

Jazz Janewattananond

Jazz Prepares For The Unexpected At The Open

P

romising talent Jazz Janewattananond of Thailand will brace himself for new challenges when he makes his debut at The 147th Open at Carnoustie in July.

The 22-year-old Jazz, who earned the coveted berth by finishing tied-fourth at The Open Qualifying Series at the SMBC Singapore Open in January, is excited to make his first Major appearance at the venue where he watched his idol Tiger Woods in action in 2007.

“My father brought me to watch Tiger at Carnoustie when I was around 10 years old so earning my Major debut to play at the same venue this year makes me feel really special. It has been a long journey since.

“I’m just trying to gather as many [sic] information as I can before I head there. It’s going to be a different kind of golf tournament for sure. I have never played there before so I need to expect the unexpected and go there with an open mind and

see what I can do,” said Jazz.

Jazz reckons that playing in the unfamiliar conditions will be his biggest test when he tees off in the year’s third Major championship from July 19 to 22.

“I’ve been asking around to find out how it is like to play on a links course. I played with Thongchai (Jaidee) and Kiradech (Aphibarnrat) during a practice round at the Volvo China Open last month and they gave me some good advices on what I should be prepared for,” he added.

Jazz turned professional at the end of 2010. Earlier that year, he played his way into the history books of the Asian Tour by becoming the youngest ever player, at the age of 14 years and 71 days, to make the halfway cut at the Asian Tour International.

He failed to retain his Asian Tour card for the first time at the end of 2016 but a breakthrough

win at the 2017 Bangladesh Open saw him turned his career around and eventually finished the season in a career-high ninth place on the Asian Tour Order of Merit.

“It’s difficult to find something that’s similar to the links course here. The weather is different and the ground is firmer. Everything is going to be different. Sometimes, when a big event comes, you try and do something different. But it doesn’t necessarily work all the time.

“I just want to give it my best.

I will prepare to my best capability and see what happens.

My parents will be heading over to Carnoustie with me so I am looking forward to it. Playing in a Major tournament is every professional golfer’s dream. I can’t wait to be there,” Jazz said.

This July, Jazz will represent his country alongside Kiradech Aphibarnrat, world number 30, and Danthai Boonma, who also secured his Major debut after finishing tied-fourth at the

season-opener in Singapore in January.

Reigning Order of Merit champion Gavin Green o f M a l ay s i a a n d I n d i a’s Shubhankar Sharma, who leads the current Habitat for Humanity Standings, will also feature at The Open, golf’s oldest Major championship.

Other players expected to spearhead the Asian Tour challenge at The Open include 2015 Order of Merit champion Anirban Lahiri of India, South African Shaun Norris, Japan’s Yuta Ikeda and Mashiro Kawamura.

The Kolon Korean Open at Woo Jeong Hills — which ended on June 24 — was part of The Open Qualifying Series. Cosanctioned by the Asian Tour and the Korean Golf Association, two spots were awarded to the leading two players (not otherwise exempt) finishing in the top-eight and ties.

july 2018 | golf digest india

43

On the Asian Tour Kiradech Aphibarnrat

Ben Leong

INAUGURAL SARAWAK CHAMPIONSHIP TO BE STAGED THIS MONTH

Kiradech accepts PGA TOUR Special Temporary Membership

K

iradech Aphibarnrat’s success on the international stage has been rewarded with a Special Temporary Membership for the remainder of the 2017-18 PGA TOUR Season.

Kiradech, the 2013 Asian Tour Order of Merit champion, needed to earn 269 non-member FedExCup points to become eligible for Special Temporary Membership, equal to the number of points earned by the player at 150th in last season’s FedExCup standings.

The 28-year-old is the first native of Thailand to accept PGA TOUR membership. In eight PGA TOUR starts in 2017-18, he has two top-five finishes – a pair of tied-fifths at the World Golf ChampionshipsMexico Championship and the WG C-Dell Technologies Match Play. He surpassed the required total of 269 non-member FedExCup points following a tied-30th at THE PLAYERS Championship. Most recently, he finished tied-13th at the Memorial Tournament presented by Nationwide, bringing his total to 340.

Kiradech came into the 2017-18 PGA TOUR Season ranked 147th in the Official World Golf Ranking (OWGR).

Following his tied-13th finish at the Memorial, he climbed to 31st.

In 34 career starts on the PGA

44 golf digest india | july 2018

TOUR, Kiradech has collected five top-10s, highlighted by a tied-third showing at the 2013 CIMB Classic.

Kiradech is the winner of five international titles, most recently the 2018 ISPS HANDA World Super 6 in Perth, Australia on the Asian Tour. He has also won the 2011 SAIL OPEN and the 2013 Maybank Malaysian Open on Asia’s premier circuit.

As a Special Temporary Member, Kiradech is eligible for unlimited sponsor exemptions for the remainder of the 2017-18 season as he attempts to earn PGA TOUR cards for the 2018-19 season through the Nonmember FedExCup Points List.

Special Temporary Members are, however, not eligible for the FedExCup Playoffs, but Special Temporary Members or non-members who subsequently become regular PGA TOUR members by winning an official event during the season will be counted on the FedExCup points list, along with any FedExCup points earned as a non-member (excluding those won at World Golf Championships events as a non-member) and thus be eligible for the FedExCup Playoffs.

To earn his card for 2018-19 PGA TOUR Season, Kiradech will need to match or surpass the points earned by the 125th on the FedExCup Standings at the end of the current season.

The Asian Tour will stage the inaugural Sarawak Championship, a new event in Malaysia from July 4 to 7.

Supported by the Ministry of Tourism, Art, Culture, Youth and Sports Sarawak, the inaugural tournament will offer a prize purse of US$300,000 and will be staged at the Arnold Palmer designed Damai Golf and Country Club which is located in Kuching, the capital of Sarawak.

The Sarawak Championship will welcome the region’s leading stars to the Borneo Island where they face stern challenges from the talented Malaysian golfers.

The Sarawak State Government and the Ministry of Tourism, Arts, Culture, Youth and Sports Sarawak, hopes to leverage the Tour’s global coverage to promote tourism. By hosting this event, the State plans to showcase Sarawak as a destination for golfers in Asia and around the world while also promoting the beauty of the state.

This is the first time the Asian Tour will host a tournament in Sarawak after staging Asian Development Tour (ADT) events from 2012 to 2017.

Asian Tour Chief Executive Officer Josh Burack welcomed the addition of the new event to the Tour’s robust 2018 Schedule. The Sarawak Championship will be the fourth event sanctioned by the Asian Tour in Malaysia in 2018 along with the EurAsia Cup, Maybank Championship and CIMB Classic.

“This is excellent news for golf in Asia. Malaysia is a very important market for the Asian Tour...

Our Asian Tour players are excited to compete in Sarawak and be able to enjoy the vast culture which the state has to offer. Malaysia is a huge melting pot of culture and I’m confident the beauty of Sarawak will be extensively promoted through our television highlights show and the additional content we produce and distribute on our digital media channels,” said Burack.

The event will see a total of 150 players, including a minimum of 25 Malaysian golfers, competing for the title.

Poom Saksansin Micah Shin

Gavin Green

Daisuke Kataoka Gaganjeet Bhullar

Jeunghun Wang

2018 IN NUMBERS:

TOP PLAYERS FROM MORE THAN 35 NATIONS OVER 30 TOURNAMENTS PLAYED ACROSS 21 COUNTRIES Miguel Tabuena

Bowen Xiao

Hung Chien-yao

This is #whereitsAT Web Partners

Feeder Tour:

Tour Sponsor

Media Partners

asiantour.com Tour Partners

Affiliate of:

On the European Tour

Fowler Targeting More Gullane Glory

Rickie Fowler of the United States in action at The Memorial Tournament Presented by Nationwide at Muirfield Village Golf Club

R

ickie Fowler will return to the scene of his 2015 victory when he tees it up in the Scottish Open, a Rolex Series event, at Gullane Golf Club on July 12-15, 2018.

The American star recorded a memorable win the last time Gullane hosted the event, birdieing the 18th hole on Sunday to deny compatriot Matt Kuchar, who is also part of the world class field gathering on Scotland’s Golf Coast this summer.

Kuchar had set the clubhouse target on 11 under par after a closing 68, but after bogeying the 14th, Fowler responded in thrilling style with birdies at the 15th, 16th and 18th to snatch

FOWLER JOINS A STELLAR FIELD THAT INCLUDES DEFENDING CHAMPION RAFA CABRERA BELLO, ANOTHER FORMER WINNER IN WORLD NUMBER THREE JUSTIN ROSE, AND 2016 OPEN CHAMPION HENRIK STENSON... victory from his Ryder Cup team mate by a single shot.

It was a second brilliant finish of an impressive season for Fowler, who had earlier claimed victory in the Players Championship in the United States, playing the last six holes in six under par to finish birdie-eagle-birdie-birdie.

This year the Scottish Open is once again part of the Rolex

46 golf digest india | july 2018

Series – the premium category of tournaments on the European Tour’s Race to Dubai, each with a minimum prize fund of US$7million.

Fowler joins a stellar field that includes defending champion Rafa Cabrera Bello, another former winner in World Number Three Justin Rose, and 2016 Open Champion Henrik Stenson, as the tournament once

again takes its traditional slot in the week before The 147th Open Championship at Carnoustie Golf Links.

The 29-year-old has recorded three second-place finishes in Major Championships, most re c e n t ly a t t h e M a s te r s Tournament earlier this year, and he is well aware of the importance of preparation on the links, with six out of the last eight players to lift the Claret Jug having played in the Scottish Open the previous week.

Fowler said: “Gullane is a special place for me and I can’t wait to get back there for the Aberdeen Standard Investments Scottish Open this summer.

“I love links golf – the golf

On the European Tour

First Edition Of 2018 Hero Challenge To Tee Off At Iconic Edinburgh Castle

course can play so differently each day and its always such an interesting challenge. Gullane was a very good test back in 2015.

I had played the last four holes well all week, so I knew that I had some birdies in me after dropping a shot at the 14th on Sunday, and it turned out to be a perfect finish.

“The Scottish Open is a great week, and the Scottish fans are always so knowledgeable and appreciative, but it’s also good preparation for The Open. You often see guys who have played in the Scottish Open doing well the following week, so I’m looking forward to two good weeks on the links in July.”

The Hero Challenge is returning for the 2018 season and this time the fast and fun night golf contest will take place in a series of iconic city locations - with Edinburgh Castle providing a stunning backdrop for the opening edition.

Some of the world’s leading golfers will battle it out on the castle esplanade, high on the great rock that dominates Scotland’s capital city, on the evening of July 10.

The stars of the golfing world will gather in a purpose-built arena at the world-famous visitor attraction - which dates from the 12th century and is a key part of the Edinburgh World Heritage Site - just two days before they take to the fairways in another breath-taking location for the Aberdeen Standard Investments Scottish Open at Gullane Golf Club from July 12-15.

The line-up of stars who will bid to emulate Masters Tournament winner Patrick Reed’s win at the first Hero Challenge on Scottish soil in 2017 will be announced in due course.

After a successful debut for the nightgolf event at the British Masters in 2016, Hero MotoCorp Ltd - the world’s largest manufacturer of motorcycles and scooters - reaffirmed its commitment to innovation on the European Tour by extending the Hero Challenge by another three years and to three marquee events – the British Masters, Scottish Open and DP World Tour Championship, Dubai.

Pawan Munjal, Chairman, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Hero MotoCorp, said: “The overwhelming success of this unique concept of golf in our debut season

and last year has encouraged us to bring the 2018 edition of the Hero Challenge to the European Tour once again.

“I am glad to see the Hero Challenge playing a role in attracting a large number of new fans to golf and I am sure this will go a long way in further popularising the game among young fans.”

Keith Pelley, European Tour Chief Executive, said: “Edinburgh Castle is arguably Scotland’s most recognisable landmark, and we are thrilled to bring the Hero Challenge to such an iconic location.

“Since we launched the Hero Challenge at the British Masters in 2016, it has proved to be hugely popular with players and spectators alike. We have had a lot of fun growing and developing the format at some spectacular golf courses, and we believe that bringing this innovative contest to internationally recognisable landmarks is the perfect way to make it even bigger and better, while showcasing our world-famous stars…”

The Scottish Open once again takes its place as part of the Rolex Series – the premium category of tournaments on the European Tour’s Race to Dubai, each with a minimum prize fund of US$7million. Some of the world’s best golfers will tee it up in Gullane from July 12-15, including defending champion Rafa Cabrera Bello of Spain, 2015 champion Rickie Fowler, his United States Ryder Cup team mate Matt Kuchar, World Number Three and 2014 winner Justin Rose, and the 2016 Open Champion Henrik Stenson.

HERO CHALLENGE RETURNS FOR THE 2018 SEASON; THE FAST AND FUN NIGHT GOLF CONTEST WILL TAKE PLACE IN ICONIC CITY LOCATIONS — AND EDINBURGH CASTLE IS SET TO PROVIDE A STUNNING BACKDROP FOR THE OPENING EDITION... july 2018 | golf digest india

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On the European Tour

Fleetwood Ready To Make Major Step

T

ommy Fleetwo o d is convinced he is getting closer to a first Major Championship victory after making history on an exhilarating final day of the US Open.

The Englishman entered round four 6 shots behind the leaders but fired a remarkable 63 at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club to set the target in the clubhouse and pile the pressure on the leading groups as they played the back nine.

Fleetwood's 7-under-par effort on the notoriously difficult Long Island layout equalled the record for the lowest round at a US Open and the lowest score on the final day of a Major Championship but he ended up finishing one shot behind winner Brooks Koepka.

The 27-year-old has come a long way since needing a top ten finish at the last event of the season to keep his European Tour card in 2012, and the Race to Dubai champion is happy to be edging closer to a win in one of golf's four biggest events.

“So many positives, so many great things,” he said. “I had a chance to shoot a 62 and at the end of the day, I got within one of winning when I was so far back at the start of the day.

“So it's been a great day. It's easy to look at it and think I was one shy and you can be disappointed but there's so many positives to look at and so much

that you can take from it and learn from it.

“It's another Major where I've ended up sort of up there at the end of the day. Majors in tournaments are 72 holes so it doesn't matter how you do it, if you end up there at the end of the week, it's a positive.

“In golf, all of us that play, that's where our dreams and ambitions are - we want to win Majors. A lot of us want to be World Number One and there's certain tournaments we want to win.

“I'll just continue to put in the hard work and surround myself with the people that I need and hopefully I will get there and hopefully I'll win one or more than one.

“At the end of the day, this is my best result in a Major yet so now there's only one I can do from here and that's win one. At the position I'm in, performing in them a little bit more, at some point I'll start to look and think, 'yeah, I can win these Majors' and I'll start to find a way to try to win them.”

Fleetwood made a fast start with the putter on Sunday, holing a 50-footer on the second and a 19-footer on the third to get to seven over. A stunning approach to the sixth and a nice tee-shot into the next had him right in the mix before he dropped a shot on the ninth.

The Abu Dhabi HSB C

Tommy Fleetwood of England receives a medal after his 7-under par 63 during the final round of the 2018 U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club

THE 27-YEAR-OLD HAS COME A LONG WAY SINCE NEEDING A TOP-10 FINISH AT THE LAST EVENT OF THE SEASON TO KEEP HIS EUROPEAN TOUR CARD IN 2012...

Championship presented by EGA winner needed a response to that disappointment and he holed another long putt on the 12th before leaving himself a tap-in on the next.

His hot streak with the putter continued with a 20-footer from off the front of the 14th and a putt from 30 feet on the 15th, and he was the man to catch with a place in the history books.

An agonising wait of over two hours followed but with young son Franklin at his side on his first Father's Day as a dad

and with the cheers of a vociferous crowd ringing in his ears, Fleetwood kept his cool.

“The best players in the world are up there trying to win a US Open and watching them down the stretch, you've got nothing but respect for how well Brooks did, just to hole the putts at the right time,” he said.

“He kept it together and he's one of the best players in the world.

“It wasn't great for me but it was great as a golfer to watch how he did it and watch how he closed it out.”

Francesco Molinari Voted Hilton Golfer Of The Month For May

Francesco Molinari of Italy in action during the final round of the 2018 BMW PGA Championship

48 golf digest india | july 2018

Francesco Molinari has been named Hilton Golfer of the Month for May after his victory at the BMW PGA Championship – his fifth European Tour title.

The Italian claimed a massive 62 per cent of the fan vote – the biggest winning percentage so far this year – to secure the monthly honour, ahead of Spaniard Adrian Otaegui who took 17 per cent of the vote.

May saw Molinari blossom into form as he battled past a star-studded BMW P GA Championship field, including former World Number One and Wentworth champion Rory McIlroy.

In the first Rolex Series event of the year, the 35-yearold carded three successive rounds in the 60s – 67-66-68 – to add to his opening day 70, as he charged to victory by two shots ahead of McIlroy.

Otaegui was runner-up for the May award after clinching his second European Tour title at the inaugural Belgian Knockout by beating Benjamin Hebert by two shots in the final.

As the most recent recipient of the award, Molinari will be automatically upgraded to Hilton Honors Diamond S t a t u s — H i l to n’s awa rd winning loyalty program.

On the European Tour

Paralympians Give Willett Perfect Perspective

N

ot many golfers in the world know more about keeping things in perspective than Danny Willett.

Like many great players before him, and there will be many more to follow, the Englishman’s rise to the summit of world golf, when he produced that unforgettable final day charge to win his first Major championship at the 2016 Masters, has been followed by a well-documented loss of form (not helped by niggling injuries) from which he still recovering.

Willett has certainly lived through the most extreme highs and lows that sport can offer, but even a man of his experience can still be inspired by putting life into perspective.

That was certainly the case in the Italian Open pro-am at the stunning Gardagolf.

Willett teamed up with three of Italy’s best Paralympic golfers – Alessandra Donati, Stefano Palmieri and Paolo Vernassa – and his experience was humbling and inspirational in equal measure.

“It was one of those days that just puts life into perspective when you see what this games does to bring people

together,” smiled Willett.

“To see those guys playing good golf shots just makes it all worthwhile in many ways.

It was inspiring and was just another lesson in keeping life in perspective.

“We golfers don’t know how lucky we are sometimes...

“Stefano is blind and to watch him out there playing some great shots was just amazing. His friend was there to help line up his shots and we would try and help with distances and lines. Paolo had an artificial leg which obviously makes the game very difficult and then Alessandra has a rare neurological condition which affects her limbs and makes it very difficult for her to grip the club.

“We tried to make it as much fun as possible for the guys and we had a great time together. There were some good and bad shots from everyone – me included! – but the general feeling in the group was just pure enjoyment and appreciation throughout the day. It was very humbling.

“It’s just so cool that golf can bring anyone and everyone together, and yesterday was just the perfect example of the power our sport has to do that.”

WILLETT TEAMED UP WITH THREE OF ITALY’S BEST PARALYMPIC GOLFERS AND HIS EXPERIENCE WAS HUMBLING AND INSPIRATIONAL IN EQUAL MEASURE...

Danny Willett (2R) of England is pictured with his Pro-Am team during the Pro-Am event prior to the start of the Italian Open at Gardagolf Country Club

Gregory Havret of France poses with an award for competing in his 500th event

Havret Reaches 500 European Tour Appearances For Grégory Havret, the Italian Open is not just another tournament. In his first full season on the European Tour in 2001, the man from La Rochelle won his maiden title at the historic event at Circolo Golf Is Molas in Sardinia.

He could not have imagined that 465 events later, he would be marking a milestone appearance at the same event.

Havret will make his 500th start, becoming the 40th player and third Frenchman to reach that landmark.

That such an achievement comes at the site of his first win on the circuit adds some romanticism to a feat that will live long in the memory for the three-time winner.

“I had my card in 2000 and have played 18 years on the Tour, every year, so reaching 500 means a lot for sure. It's a big number,” said Havret.

“I feel like it's a big family honestly, with all the friendships, we are pretty close. There's so many players that have come to me this week and said well done and that's really great.

“All of my wins were pretty special. The very first one was Italy in 2001 and it was my very first year on Tour. I wasn't expecting to win on my first year and that helped my confidence for the rest of my career.”

After triumphing for the first time in Italy 17 years ago, Havret would have to wait six more years

for his second victory. The wait was undoubtedly worth it, as he went on to defeat the then World Number Three Phil Mickelson in the 2007 Scottish Open play-off at Loch Lomond.

Another victory in Scotland followed 13 months later at the Johnnie Walker Championship at Gleneagles, a result that moved him to a then career-high of 85th in the world.

“I would say defeating Phil Mickelson in a play-off at Loch Lomond at the Scottish Open, which is probably one of the most beautiful course I ever played, is probably the one I will put at number one in those three. And of course, the Johnnie Walker at Gleneagles the year after, gave me a lot of good memories for sure.”

Without question one of his career highlights came in 2010, when he finished runner-up to Graeme McDowell at the US Open.

Playing alongside Tiger Woods in the final round, his performance at Pebble Beach almost resulted in the first Major Championship for a Frenchman.

During that week in California, Havret said golf could be hell or paradise. It’s safe to assume his 500th appearance will make this week the latter.

“I feel fortunate to be here in front of you talking to you, but I hope I keep going because I just love this game so much.”

july 2018 | golf digest india

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On the European Tour

Korhonen Beats The Clock For Maiden European Tour Title

M

ikko Korhonen produced a brilliant display of front-running to blow away the field and win his first European Tour title at the Shot Clock Masters.

The Finn entered the final day with a five-shot advantage, but his lead was cut to three in the early stages and he had to contend with two weather delays at Diamond Country Club.

Korhonen is no stranger to adversity after his 12 visits to the Qualifying School, though, and he signed for a closing 69, a 16 under par total and a six-shot victory over Scotland's Connor Syme.

The European Tour was breaking new ground this week with every player on the clock for every shot and penalties in place if shots were not played in the allotted time.

Only four players were handed penalties over the course of the week and with round times significantly quicker than the season average and players full of praise for the event, the innovative new format was a great success in Atzenbrugg.

With the win, the 37-year-old boosted his chances of a first appearance at the seasonending DP World Tour Championship, Dubai.

“I didn’t dare to think about winning,” he said. “When my last shot had landed on the 18th green, then I knew I had like five or six putts of cushion.

Mikko Korhonen of Finland with his trophy after winning The 2018 Shot Clock Masters at Diamond Country Club

“It feels great, beautiful. It’s been a long wait so it feels so good. Yes, I have thought that I might not be in this position. I’ve been up there a couple of times and couldn’t do it at those times but now I’m so happy and relieved that I have done it.

“It’s not easy to win, especially not the first win, so I’m really happy to have done it.

I have no words, it’s so good.”

WITH THE WIN, THE 37-YEAR-OLD BOOSTED HIS CHANCES OF A FIRST APPEARANCE AT THE SEASONENDING CHAMPIONSHIP IN DUBAI...

Mikko Korhonen of Finland in action during The 2018 Shot Clock Masters at Diamond Country Club

50 golf digest india | july 2018

Photographs Courtesy European Tour/Getty Images

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On the PGA Tour

PGA-Discovery Alliance Could Boost Lahiri’s And Sharma’s Following P GA TOUR Commissioner Jay Monahan has had a front-row seat to watch India take over the sport of golf, as Anirban Lahiri and Shubhankar Sharma both become two of the TOUR’s most rapidly rising stars.

As the PGA TOUR’s presence expands into new markets, it is vital for golf to find unique and modern ways to reach its audience. Enter Discovery, which has announced partnership with the PGA TOUR to form a pioneering strategic alliance to deliver the sport to fans around the world.

“This is an exciting next step for the P GA TOUR, which presents a tremendous opportunity to accelerate and expand our media business outside the United States...”

Monahan said.

The unprecedented 12year alliance (worth U.S. $2 billion), set to begin next year and go through 2030, will include global TV and multiplatform live rights, outside the United States, to all PGA TOUR media properties. Building on a heritage of world-class coverage and storytelling, Discovery will broadcast the PGA TOUR on its portfolio of pay-TV and free-to-air channels, digital and short-form platforms.

“There is no sport that’s more global than the PGA TOUR,” said David Zaslav, Discovery President and CEO. “There’s no sport that’s more loved

than the PGA TOUR. There’s no sport that’s more local than the PGA TOUR. And there’s no sport that has a demographic that’s voraciously hungry to consume content.

“So when we looked at the PGA TOUR, 43 weeks a year of content, four days a week, we looked at the fan base, and we said, ‘This is an extraordinary opportunity to build a global platform, an ecosystem around golf that will nourish and excite every golf fan everywhere in the world.’”

INDIAN STARS LIKE ANIRBAN LAHIRI AND SHUBHANKAR SHARMA SHOULD SEE THEIR POPULARITY GROW...

The TOUR began looking into the future of its international business at the end of 2016, Monahan said, when “more and more top international stars (came) forward.” Discovery, with its vast experience in managing global sports rights—including the Olympics and localized sports coverage—emerged as the clear favorite to market players like Lahiri and Sharma in their home countries.

The alliance with Discovery, and its rich expertise and relationships in local media markets worldwide, has made it clear that the PGA TOUR no

PGA TOUR Commissioner Jay Monahan and David Zaslav, President and CEO, Discovery, visit NASDAQ after announcing the 12-year partnership

longer has to work on its own.

And as a result, Indian stars like Lahiri and Sharma should expect to only see their popularity grow from here.

“Coming together with the largest international media company in the world with its

demonstrated experience is going to help us grow our TOUR and grow the profile of all of our players and to continue to lead the game of golf forward from a professional tour standpoint, and that’s something that players can bank on,” Monahan said.

2019 JUNIOR PRESIDENTS CUP DATES, VENUE ANNOUNCED The PGA TOUR, in partnership with the American Junior Golf Association, announced that the 2019 Junior Presidents Cup will take place on December 8-9, 2019 at The Royal Melbourne Golf Club in Melbourne, Australia. It will precede the 2019 Presidents Cup, which will also be contested at the same venue.

The 24 best junior boys from the U.S. and around the world, excluding Europe, will reunite Down Under for a 2-day competition. They will have the opportunity to compete at Royal Melbourne prior to their heroes taking center stage December 12 onwards.

The U.S. Team captured the inaugural Junior Presidents Cup in 2017 at Plainfield Country Club in New Jersey by a score of 14-10. David Toms led the U.S. Team, while South Africa’s Trevor Immelman captained the International Team. Honorary Captains Jack Nicklaus (U.S.) and Gary Player (INT) were on hand during the Singles matches to provide added encouragement and inspiration and distribute medals to both teams.

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Nick Price of Zimbabwe (International Team Captain) greets Junior Presidents Cup players at the 2017 Presidents Cup

On the PGA Tour

Trial and Error: Once-PGA TOUR pros return to Web.com Tour Journey starts over for those looking to earn back coveted TOUR cards

Scott Langley is tossed a ball by his caddy during the final round of the Web.com Tour’s Savannah Golf Championship at the Landings Club Deer Creek Golf Course

T

he sweltering humidity of a typical Carolina afternoon is on full display here, and Brett Drewitt’s attire—a mostly-black getup— isn’t doing him any favors.

Nevertheless, the 27-yearold Australian presses onward toward the TPC Wakefield Plantation driving range.

“You’ve got to learn from your experiences, because that’s where you want to be,” he said. “... That’s what I’m doing.”

Drewitt finds his promising career on a temporary detour.

He’s in Raleigh competing in the latest Web.com Tour event, hoping to earn enough points on the money list to reclaim his TOUR card.

In 2016, Drewitt was one of the coveted few to secure the prestigious card on the strength of tying for fifth at the Nationwide Children’s Hospital Championship. But his rookie year on TOUR saw him make the cut in just nine of 19 events, with a tie for 33rd at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am his best finish. He ended the season No. 196 in the FedExCup Standings, enough to qualify for the Web.com Tour finals and ultimately another season on this circuit. “I was there, but I didn’t play great, and I didn’t manage my time very well,” he admitted. “... Now that I’ve been there and had a taste of it, I want to get back there.

“That’s why I think I’ve got a little bit of an extra drive this year,” he continued. “I’m doing those extra one-percent and two-percent things that make you just a little bit better.”

Finding hours in the week for that extra one percent can often be challenging in a player ’s maiden voyage on the PGA TOUR. Time management proved to be one of the more-difficult aspects of the rookie year, attest Drewitt and American Scott Langley, who lost his card after the 2016 season.

“Out there, there’s just a little more going on, and you have to be better at managing your time,” Langley said as he shuffled his way back to his car.

Langley believes his stint on the Web.com Tour has taught him valuable lessons he didn’t have when he first arrived on the PGA TOUR. Things looked easy at first for the now-29year-old, who tied for third in his first professional start, at the 2013 Sony Open in Hawaii and, a year later, won more than $1.15 million, which earned him a top-80 finish in the FedExCup Standings.

B

ut in 2016—due in part to what he believes was the push and pull of obligations outside the game— he missed the cut in 12 of his 22 starts and landed on the Web.com Tour for the first time in his career.

“I used to worry too much about some things I couldn’t control,” he said. “Now I just kind of focus on my own world and making sure that I do everything in my power to be prepared and play well…

Being in a good frame of mind on the golf course is of utmost

Brett Drewitt in action during the Web.com Tour Qualifying Tournament at Whirlwind Golf Club on the Devil’s Claw course in December 2017

KEEP GOING, THEY MUST. THE ROAD IS LONG AND ARDUOUS, BUT THERE IS LIFE BEYOND IT. ANOTHER CHANCE AT THE PGA TOUR AWAITS, AND ANOTHER OPPORTUNITY TO MAKE NEW MEMORIES. importance, and I feel like I’m better at getting to that place and I get there more quickly than I used to.”

In retrospect, Langley had as much himself to blame for many of those obligations as those around him, when the allure of hefty purse prizes every week proved too tempting for a young golfer like him to turn down.

L

ife on the PGA TOUR requires delicate balance.

Be careful not to commit to too many tournaments and end up exhausting yourself, they’ll tell you, but be sure to still make enough money in order to stick around for another season.

And your game requires a

similar level of equity: Do you be aggressive off the tee with driver, or conservative with a 2-iron, knowing a birdie might get you to the weekend and a par could send you home early?

The mental strain can be intense for a first-timer, knowing one miss here or one make there can very well dictate the next year of their life.

It’s not breaking news that smarts are essential to success in golf. The grip-it-and-rip-it strategy may work well at the local municipal, but preparation and study are keys to climbing the ladder to the PGA TOUR. For these players, the Web.com Tour has been as much about reflection as it has progression. It’s been a sabbatical of sorts as they dissect the reasons why they’re all back, and yet, an affirmation of why they’ll soon return. The bright lights of the PGA TOUR are in reach.

“Everything is just a little bit better,” Drewitt said. “You’re playing for more money...

It’s harder out here because you’ve got to play well just to keep going.”

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On the PGA Tour

TOUR SNIPPETS

APHIBARNRAT AND NIEMANN ACCEPT PGA TOUR SPECIAL TEMPORARY MEMBERSHIP

Rickie Fowler tees off during the final round of the Quicken Loans National at TPC Potomac at Avenel Farm in 2017

MORTGAGE GIANT INKS DEAL TO BRING PGA TOUR STOP TO DETROIT, BEGINNING IN JUNE 2019 Quicken Loans, United States’ largest mortgage lender, and the PGA TOUR have unveiled a long-term agreement to create a new professional golf tournament in Detroit, beginning in 2019.

“Professional golf belongs in Detroit,” said Quicken Loans CEO Jay Farner. “The Motor City—and the entire state of Michigan—have long served as a premier golf destination with some of the best courses in the country. We will be working with the PGA TOUR to make the Detroit stop one of the most exciting and engaging events on the professional golf calendar.”

Quicken Loans is partnering Intersport, a leader in sports and entertainment marketing, to oversee the operation of the

tournament, as well as create numerous related attractions and festivities that are planned to take place throughout Detroit during the event. “Quicken Loans has been a tremendous PGA TOUR partner for several years now, making an impact through the innovative spirit and community-first mindset the organization and its leaders bring to every endeavor,” said PGA TOUR Commissioner Jay Monahan.

As part of the agreement with the PGA TOUR, Quicken Loans will retain title sponsorship of the Quicken Loans National taking place at TPC Potomac in the Washington, D.C., area in 2018. This will mark the fifth consecutive year that Quicken Loans will be title sponsor of The National.

PGA TOUR CAREER MODE ADDED TO AWARD-WINNING “THE GOLF CLUB” VIDEO GAME

Davis Love III plays a golf video game against soldiers stationed in Landstuhl, Germany during the World Golf Championships-CA Championship 2009

54 golf digest india | july 2018

The PGA TOUR will return to the video game space this summer when a comprehensive PGA TOUR Career Mode is integrated into the award-winning “The Golf Club” franchise for Sony PlayStation 4, Microsoft Xbox One and PC platforms.

Launching in August, “The Golf Club 2019” will also feature six precise replicas of renowned TPC courses: Summerlin, Scottsdale, Sawgrass, Southwind, Deere Run and Boston.

“We are so excited for the launch of The Golf Club 2019…,” said Len Brown, PGA TOUR Chief Legal Officer and Executive Vice President of Licensing. “This will allow our fans to take the same path to the PGA TOUR by earning their card through the Web.com Tour. Additionally, this will give gamers the opportunity to play under the same tournament conditions that our players face week in and week out. We are thrilled with this partnership.”

Thailand’s Kiradech Aphibarnrat and Joaquin Niemann of Chile have accepted Special Temporar y Membership for the remainder of the 2017-18 PGA TOUR Season.

Aphibarnrat and Niemann bring the total number of active international PGA TOUR members to 87 from 27 countries. Both players needed to earn 269 non-member FedExCup points to become eligible for Special Temporary Membership, equal to the number of points earned by the player at No. 150 in last season’s FedExCup standings.

Aphibarnrat, 28, is the first native of Thailand to accept PGA TOUR membership. He came into the 2017-18 PGA TOUR Season ranked 147th in the Official World Golf Ranking; but after a pair of top-five finishes earlier this season, he climbed to No. 31 as of early June. He is the winner of 5 international titles, most recently the 2018 ISPS HANDA World Super 6 in Perth (European Tour). At 19 years, 6 months, 28 days, Niemann is the youngest player since Sergio Garcia in 1999 (19 years, 4 months, 29 days) to accept Special Temporary Membership on the PGA TOUR. The former World No. 1 amateur made his professional debut at the 2018 Valero Texas Open, finishing sixth. He is the only current member from Chile.

As Special Temporary Members, the pair are eligible for unlimited sponsor exemptions for the remainder of the season as they attempt to earn PGA TOUR cards for 2018-19 through the Nonmember FedExCup Points List. However, they are not eligible for the FedExCup Playoffs.

Kiradech Aphibbarnrat of Thailand plays a shot during the final round of The Memorial Tournament (June 2018)

FOLLOW THE RACE FOR THE FEDEXCUP ALL SEASON LONG

COVERAGE AVAILABLE ON

© 2017 PGA TOUR, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Player appearance subject to change.

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Photographs by Walter Iooss Jr. at Trinity Forest Golf Club, Dallas

PRIMED TO PLAY

A great round starts with a great warm-up

BY JOR DA N SPI ET H with ma x adler

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see a lot of amateurs warm up on Wednesdays, which is pro-am day on the PGA Tour. For many of them, it’s a big day and really wanting to play well is an attitude and energy I appreciate being around. However, hitting balls in front of a gallery and alongside the pros is, I’m sure, an experience that could make a club player rush or get frazzled.

Whether this is how they get ready to go at their home course, I’m not sure. From what I can see, it seems a lot of amateurs would benefit from applying some structure to their warm-ups. There’s a way to get the body and mind primed to play, and then there’s digging holes beating balls. Hard practice has its place, but never before a round. Basically, I have two routines—one takes a half an hour and the other is an hour and 15.

The shorter one I recently filmed with Golf Digest. Cameron McCormick— my coach since I was 12—and I wore microphones, and you can watch and listen to the entire session on Golf Digest All Access. On these next pages, Cam and I will provide an overview of that routine. The thing about warming up properly is that it doesn’t require any extra skill, only the discipline to commit to it. When you start playing better more often, you’ll be glad you did. july 2018 | golf digest india

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Photograph by First Lastname

walk the wedge spieth Before I hit ball one, I dial in a feeling for the bottom of my swing. Standing with my feet together, I lightly rock my lob wedge back and forth with the force of what would produce about a 20-yard shot. I swing until I see the sole of the wedge consistently bruising the turf. Even though I’m not making a shoulder turn or even hinging my wrists, the rhythm of this pendulum motion sets the tone for my full swing that day. With the first ball, I kick off a game we call Walk the Dog. I hit a little pitch, and wherever that ball stops, maybe 20 yards away, becomes the target landing spot for my next shot—and so on. Each ball runs a few yards farther than the previous, and this is how I gradually, yet quickly, work toward hitting full lob wedges.

Not only does this game loosen the joints, it puts you in the mode of reacting to a target instead of exploring mechanical thoughts. If you start the day by, say, hitting to a flag that happens to be 50 yards away, the tendency is to get lost searching for the technique to hit

that shot perfectly over and over. Before you know it, you’ve blown through half the bucket, your grip gets too tight, and the only shot you know how to hit is from 50 yards. mccormick If you watch Jordan warm up, you’ll see how he pops the turf with his club to give himself a slightly raised, flawless lie.

You might think, Isn’t that making it too easy?

Well, practicing from tough lies can be good training, but the warm-up should be done in the vacuum of ideal conditions. Take a lie that allows the shot. Why do anything to disrupt the freedom of your swing on game day?

work the irons spieth Even for my quicker warm-up, I’ll work down the bag from my shortest irons to my longest, using the even numbers one day and the odds the next. I’m moving quickly, but if you watch, you’ll notice that I never hit a careless ball—every shot has a purpose. Before each swing, I announce to Cam or my caddie (or just to myself) the trajectory I intend to hit, like a high fade

or a low draw. If I’m struggling to achieve these flights, I’ll take a break and try some wild shots. I’ll slice a 6-iron as far to the right on the range as possible, and then with the next ball, I’ll hit a low, running punch with hook spin over to the left side. Either shot might travel only 100 yards and look pretty ugly. It’s funny because I’ll do this at tournaments, and I know fans are thinking, Wow, he really doesn’t have it. But what I’m doing is bracketing extremes to find the middle for the day. When you stand on the range and try to hit every shot perfect, you can get locked into playing golf swing. Better to stay loose by hitting some funky shots, so you’re better prepared to actually play golf. mccormick It almost goes without saying: Only highly skilled players should concern themselves in a warm-up with varying the trajectory and shape of shots high, low, left and right. For most of us, the goal should be to find one reliable shape to go play with. But you can still learn from Jordan’s example.

Don’t be afraid to experiment with the feeling of a major slice or hook to learn control of the clubface and club path through impact.

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‘IT’S FUNNY BECAUSE I’LL [PURPOSELY HOOK AND SLICE SHOTS ON THE RANGE], AND I KNOW FANS ARE THINKING, WOW, HE REALLY DOESN’T HAVE IT. BUT WHAT I’M DOING IS BRACKETING EXTREMES TO FIND THE MIDDLE.’ —SPIETH

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gutter credit tk

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Photograph by First Lastname

‘WHAT AMAZES ME ABOUT JORDAN, AND COMPETITIVE GOLFERS IN GENERAL, IS THE COURAGE THEY DISPLAY IN TRYING THINGS THAT EXPOSE THEM AS HUMANS.’ —MCCORMICK

tame the driver spieth On the range, most amateurs spend way too much time hitting driver. I get it; it’s the club that’s the most fun to hit. But whaling away and bending over to re-tee 50 times is no way to prepare for a round.

Not only is it physically taxing, it can wash away the good feel and tempo you’ve presumably just established with your wedges and irons. I’ll often hit only four or five balls with my driver to close a warm-up session.

But you might notice I start to become more deliberate. I step behind the ball and walk into the shot as I would on the course. I’m visualizing the tee shots on the opening holes, imagining the borders of the fairway and the trouble. I stretch the time between shots to better simulate the pace when I’m on the course. Hitting only a handful of drivers—but like each one really counts— gives me the confidence that I’ll bring my range game to the tee.

mccormick I love this photo (previous page) of the top of Jordan’s swing. His hip turn is unrestricted, providing ample freedom for a deep shoulder turn. One undesirable tendency Jordan monitors, and that I see from many amateurs, is the front hip buckling and causing the torso to tilt forward. A few times during the warm-up, I’ll ask Jordan to rehearse a “hip check,” where he pauses the swing halfway back to verify that his front hip is stable. It’s especially important that we do this with the driver, because bad idiosyncrasies often surface when using the longest club. It’s OK to check one or two mechanical elements in a warm-up, but no more.

lasting lessons spieth The first thing I learned from Cam was patience. For me to become a more consistent ball-striker, he believed it was necessary to make a couple significant swing changes. I remember hitting bags

where only one out of every three balls got off the ground. It was frustrating because my friends were going out to play, but a lot of weeks Cam didn’t want me on the course.

When practice got real dreary, he’d try to keep it somewhat fun by making up games.

The simple range tuneups we now enjoy are the result of a lot of work. To any golfer not willing to sacrifice the time to make swing changes, my advice is to practice your short game as much as possible. mccormick Mapping out a program for a golfer to get better is a responsibility that doesn’t sit lightly with me. At the highest level, the difference between success and failure can be a matter of millimeters, and it’s my job to tease out those millimeters.

What amazes me about Jordan, and competitive golfers in general, is the courage they display in trying things that expose them as humans. Whenever I take on a new student, the first order of business is always a lengthy conversation in my office. I want to know the person before I see the swing. july 2018 | golf digest india

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AFTER THE TRAGEDY OF LOSING A SON, DAVID FEHERTY

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Photograph by First Lastname

SMILING THROUGH THE TEARS

:’D RELIES ON HIS SUPPORT TEAM TO LIVE A COMPLEX LIFE OF HIS OWN BY JOHN FEINSTEIN

Photographs by J.D. Cuban

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it’s a rainy night in georgia, and david feherty is on fire.

He has been on stage at Atlanta Symphony Hall for almost two hours, and those in the audience of about 1,200 have only stopped laughing when one of his stories brings them to tears of hysteria.

“Tiger Woods is funnier than people know,” Feherty says at one point. “When I was walking with him for CBS, he used to pull the brim of his hat down low so the cameras couldn’t pick up what he was saying—he was convinced everyone watching could read lips. “One day he says to me, ‘Hey, Farty,’—that’s what he called me—‘do you know what you call a black guy flying an airplane?’

“I said, ‘No, what?’ “And he said, ‘A pilot, you f------ racist.’ ”

Feherty shakes his head. “Can you imagine that career move? He was lost in so many ways. Reminded me a lot of me.

Which is just one of the reasons I can’t help but feel devastated and guilty about what happened to him.”

On July 29 of last year—Shey’s 29th birthday—the phone rang early at the Feherty home in Dallas. Anita answered. It was Rory, David’s younger son. Shey, his older brother by four years with Feherty’s first wife, Caroline, had died that morning of an apparent overdose at their mother’s home. The coroner would later determine that a mixture of cocaine and alcohol had killed him.

Anita walked the phone into the bedroom where David was still sleeping.

“You need to take this phone call,” she said softly, handing him the phone as he slowly came awake. “It’s Rory.”

It was Rory who then told his father the news. It was stunning, but not completely shocking. On July 4, Anita had gotten a text

People can’t stay in their seats, they are laughing so hard. One woman, who has been letting out loud whoops at the punch line of every story, doubles over, unable to stop laughing.

Twenty-four nights a year, Feherty does his act—three nights a week on eight occasions. He does an hour and 40 minutes of straight stand-up, pausing only occasionally for brief sips of iced tea. The stand-up is his life story—told as only he can tell it.

It includes a good deal of bathroom humor, plenty of profanity and some poignant moments, especially when he talks about his parents and his wife, Anita.

After the stand-up, he pulls a chair out from behind the desk that is designed to look like the set of his TV show, “Feherty,” and does 20 minutes of Q&A with his audience.

On this night, the Saturday of Masters Week, he is asked—predictably—why he isn’t in Augusta.

“I’d rather be here with you,” he says.

Then he points out that he’s no longer with CBS, which has the broadcast rights. What he doesn’t mention is that Golf Channel, which is part of NBC, his current employer, would love to have him there during the week to add some much-needed humor to the shows it does before and after live coverage.

Except that Feherty has an agreement that he doesn’t have to work Masters Week.

“I never felt comfortable there,” he says.

“Never had a problem with anyone or anything. I just didn’t feel I could be myself.

I was in the clubhouse once in 19 years when I went up to have lunch. That was it.”

Which means he’s telling the truth when he tells his Atlanta audience he’d rather be with them. That doesn’t mean he isn’t terrified every minute of the evening.

from Shey saying he needed to go back to rehab. He had never gotten there.

For a year, Feherty had been told by professionals that he needed to stay away from Shey, that he was enabling his drug habit by giving him money. He and Anita had agreed the night before that they would call him the next day—Saturday—to wish him a happy birthday.

“The truth is, I’d broken down on several occasions and given him money again,” Feherty says. “He was so sweet, and I couldn’t say no to him. Plus, like all of us addicts, he was a very good liar. He convinced me the money wasn’t for drugs. I’m sure I knew deep down he was lying, but I wanted to believe he was really on the way to coming out on the other side.

“Not talking to him regularly, not seeing him, was painful. But this . . . ” He stops, unable to go on.

Feherty’s memory of the rest of the day is blurred. Anita’s is not. “David, Rory and I went to the funeral home,” she says. “Rory

. .

.

.

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‘THE SWEETEST BOY YOU WOULD EVER MEET’

V

ery few subjects are out-ofbounds in Feherty’s routine. He talks about his parents, about his first wife, about Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus and Ken Venturi and Tiger Woods. The only person he doesn’t joke about is Anita.

And there is one subject he won’t go near, if only because he knows if he did, he wouldn’t get to the end of the act.

Shey.

“He was the sweetest boy you would ever meet,” he says very softly—his voice is rarely louder than a whisper when he talks about him. “He liked people, and people liked him. He had that kind of personality. He was working in a restaurant for a while and doing very well because he had a way with people.

He was moving up the ladder there.

“But he got it in his head that he wanted to start a ticket-reselling business. He was going to compete with StubHub. He was a naïve kid in many ways. Lost, really, just lost.”

did the best he could to take charge. David couldn’t speak—literally. He couldn’t move his mouth. His face was frozen. He was completely paralyzed emotionally. He zoned out completely. I think he had to.”

Somehow, the family has moved on—as best is possible—through the tragedy. Feherty was diagnosed with clinical depression and bipolar disorder several years ago. Not surprisingly, the depression has worsened since Shey’s death.

“It doesn’t get better,” he says. “It just gets farther away.”

Fortunately, Anita instantly recognizes when he is, as she puts it, “heading to a dark place,” and will force him to leave the house—go to lunch with her—anything to change his mind-set.

“He never wants to go,” she says. “And then when we get home, he thanks me for making him do it.”

Rory McIlroy, who has become close to Feherty in recent years, puts it another way: “David does best,” he says, “when he’s thinking about anything but David. It’s why he’s so good with helping others but struggles at times to help himself.”

SUPPORT FROM PRESIDENTS, SOLDIERS AND THE GOLF WORLD

F

eherty got through the tragedy, he says, because of the overwhelming outpouring of support he received from his family, from friends like McIlroy and from people around the world whose lives he has touched—often at times without knowing it. Wounded soldiers he’d visited or joined for golf or pheasant hunting (an annual trip Tom Watson helps put together in North Dakota), not to mention the golf world.

‘I THINK THAT HIS GENUINE KINDNESS HAS GIVEN HIM A FEW MORE MULLIGANS IN LIFE THAN MOST PEOPLE GET.’ —ANITA FEHERTY

Three former presidents reached out to him. “President Bush [43] and President Obama both sent me beautiful notes,” he says. “President Clinton called. He was unbelievable. Kept telling me what a good dad he knew I was and that if there was anything he could do to help . . . ” That was the recurring theme: anything I can do to help. Watson spent hours with him on the phone and in person. “I just let him talk,” Watson says. “There’s really nothing you can say in that situation. You can’t bring back life. So, you just listen and let him know you’re there—always there.”

McIlroy remembers feeling helpless. “I had no idea what to say or do,” he says. “I finally fell back on just, ‘Whatever you need.’ ” It all kept Feherty going and keeps him going now.

The pain, he knows, will never completely go away. He has four other children: Rory, who is now 26; Anita’s two sons, Fred, 35, and Karl, 33; and Erin, their 19-year-old daughter who is finishing her freshman year at Oklahoma.

Rory is a member of the Texas National Guard and deployed to Djibouti in May. “I couldn’t be more proud of him,” Feherty says, “and I couldn’t possibly be more frightened.” His eyes cloud. “I can’t even think about the possibility of losing another son.

Just can’t think about it.”

I

‘SHE SAVED MY LIFE’

t’s an hour before Feherty has to become Feherty for an audience. He has not paid any attention to the third round of the Masters that afternoon because he knows nothing will be decided until the next day.

He is stretched out on a couch in a tiny room in the basement of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra building. There’s no Internet service, and only by walking down the hall is there cellphone coverage. Feherty knows he’ll hear what’s happening in Augusta soon enough.

There’s a piano against the wall on the far side of the room that Feherty could no doubt play quite well if he were so inclined.

He’s not. He’s tired and eager to get home to Dallas later that night. He’s already been in Little Rock on Thursday and Biloxi, Miss., on Friday.

He eats a few bites of a greasy hamburger and swigs from a bottle of water.

“Right now, I’m almost frozen with terror thinking about what I have to do tonight,” he says. “It’s that way every time I do this. I’m very aware of my ADD, and I worry about losing my place in the middle of a story and standing there with a blank look on my face.

I’m absolutely convinced it can happen.”

He has been doing the show for four years. Has that ever happened?

SHEY ‘WAS LOST IN SO MANY WAYS. REMINDED ME A LOT OF ME.’ —DAVID FEHERTY “Lose my place? All the time,” he says.

“Totally frozen and unable to go on? Close, but no. Not yet.”

The show was conceived by Brad Jones, a young promoter who, five years ago, convinced Feherty to come to his hometown of London, Ontario, to speak at a corporate event. When Feherty was finished with his talk, Jones asked him: “Have you ever considered doing a stand-up act?”

“Isn’t that what I just did?” Feherty answered.

“What blew me away,” Jones says, “is that nobody had ever approached him with the idea before.”

Jones put together a proposal, and Feherty unveiled the Feherty Off-Tour act in November 2014. Each year, the number of performances has increased and the venues have gotten bigger.

Feherty, who will be 60 in August, has Anita and Andrew Elkin, his agent at Creative Artists Agency, handle all his finances.

He and Anita have been married for 22 years after meeting on a blind date in Dallas in the summer of 1995. Each had been through a failed marriage that had produced two children.

“She saved my life,” Feherty says. “I mean, literally. My life was an absolute mess when we met. I was trying to raise two little boys [Shey and Rory] alone in a two-bedroom apartment. I was addicted to alcohol, cocaine, marijuana, painkillers and just about anything else you could name. I was running like Forrest Gump and weighed about 150 pounds. When Anita and I went on our first date, I was so thin she thought I was HIV-positive. The first date lasted about half an hour before she walked out after I had reached over, put my straw in her drink and drank from it. Fortunately for me, for some july 2018 | golf digest india

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end, though, it wasn’t his humor, which was apparent, or even his charm.

“It was his kindness,” she says. “His kindness outshines everything else. I think that his genuine kindness has given him a few more mulligans in life than most people get.”

Feherty moved in with Anita before the end of the year, and when Shey and Rory were with him—he had split-custody with his first wife—they stayed there, too. He

FEHERTY WITH SON SHEY, WHO DIED ON HIS

went to South Africa early in 1996 to play the Sun City Tour, one of the few places he still had playing privileges. When he came back a month later, he walked into Anita’s garage, and when she came out to greet him, he said, “Please marry me.”

She said yes, and they were married May 31, 1996. Life got better for Feherty—slowly.

“I haven’t had to write a check for 22 years,” he says. “I have no idea what I’m worth or what anyone is paying me. Anita has allowed me to just do the things I can do without worrying about any of the other stuff. Much more important, though, when

29TH BIRTHDAY OF WHAT THE CORONER CALLED A MIXTURE OF COCAINE AND ALCOHOL.

HIV-positive,” she says. “Remember, this is when people were terrified by the epidemic.

He was much too skinny. Plus, he showed up drunk. When he put his straw in my drink, that was it—I had to leave.”

Through Knott, Feherty asked for one more chance. Knott told Anita that David had promised he’d show up sober. He did—30 minutes early. Anita thought it was charming that he was trying so hard. In the

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‘TOM [WATSON] LOOKED AT ME AND SAID, “YOU’RE NOT WELL.” HE WAS RIGHT, OF COURSE—I WASN’T. I ASKED HIM LATER WHAT IT WAS HE SAW, AND HE SAID, “I WAS LOOKING AT MYSELF A FEW YEARS EARLIER.” ’ —DAVID FEHERTY

the boys and I moved in with her and her two kids, we became a family. That was life-changing.”

So was his career change, from good golfer to unique TV presence. To hear Feherty talk now, you might think he never made a cut as a professional golfer and that he can barely remember which end of a golf club to hold.

“Actually,” he says, “I’m not always certain about that nowadays. I’ve forgotten a lot of things.”

What he does remember is turning pro at 17 after deciding he wasn’t meant to be an opera singer, which is what he aspired to do for most of his childhood.

“I had a good voice,” he says. “I trained and worked at it. But I knew I wasn’t going to be good enough. Of course, I wasn’t good enough at golf, either. I was like a 5-handicap at the time, but I figured I’d try it. I went to work at a club north of London [Mid Herts, where he was paid �10 a week] but came home after a few months because I missed my mom [Vi]. That’s when I went to work at Holywood.”

Holywood Golf Club is most famous as the place where Rory McIlroy learned to play and where his father, Gerry, tended bar and taught his son the game. In his standup, Feherty points out that he got to Holywood in 1976, “years before the little bastard was born.”

Feherty adores McIlroy, who adores him. “He is absolutely a product of his parents,” says Feherty, who got to know Gerry and Rose McIlroy while at Holywood. “He hasn’t been changed by fame or fortune.

He’s just one of the most thoroughly decent people I’ve ever met. I had nothing to do with him becoming who he is, but I’m just so damn proud of him.”

McIlroy says there’s nothing he wouldn’t do for Feherty because he knows there’s nothing Feherty wouldn’t do for him. He often tells the story about Feherty coming to find him after his Sunday meltdown at the Masters in 2011. As soon as Feherty got off the air, he drove to where Rory was staying. In Feherty’s version of the story, he was blown away by McIlroy’s ability to keep the loss in perspective. In McIlroy’s version, he couldn’t believe how quickly Feherty helped him forget what had happened.

“Once he decided I was really OK, he just sat down with me and my friends and basically did a ‘Feherty’ show for us right there,” McIlroy says. “An hour after he got there, we were all literally falling off our chairs, we were laughing so hard.

“He’s a complex and wonderful individual,” McIlroy says. “Anita calls it kindness; she’s right. I’d add compassionate. Kind, compassionate, brilliant—and very, very hard on himself at times.”

Courtesy of feherty family

reason, she agreed to go on a second date—to a baseball game.

“I didn’t know the rules of baseball. Neither did she, but I kept asking her questions, and she tried to answer them. Finally, she stood up and said, ‘Would you like something to eat or drink? A hot dog or a beer?’ It was the nicest thing anybody had said to me for years. Honestly. I sat there and thought, I think I’m in love with this woman.”

Anita Schneider had to be convinced to go on that second date. She was a successful interior designer who ran her business from home so she had flexibility to take care of her boys, who were 12 and 10 at the time.

She wasn’t looking to remarry. But she was talked into meeting Feherty by a mutual friend, Gary Knott. They were the same age, they were both divorced, and they both had two boys. Worth a try, she figured.

The first night they met, she wasn’t impressed.

“It did cross my mind that he might be

‘DAVID DOES BEST WHEN HE’S THINKING ABOUT ANYTHING BUT DAVID. IT’S WHY HE’S SO GOOD WITH HELPING OTHERS BUT STRUGGLES AT TIMES TO HELP HIMSELF.’ —RORY MCILROY

F

A MARRIAGE AND A CAREER CRUMBLE

rom Holywood, Feherty moved on to Balmoral Golf Club, where he worked for Fred Daly, the 1947 Open champion and the only Northern Irishman to win it until Darren Clarke in 2011 and McIlroy three years later.

“I was playing with Fred one day, and he hit a ball into a bunker, blasted out and hobbled onto the green,” Feherty says in the act.

“He said, ‘I’m really having trouble getting out of bunkers as I get older.’ I said, ‘Fred, you just hit a fine shot there.’ He shook his head and said, ‘I don’t have any trouble getting the ball out of the bunker, I have trouble getting my body out.’ ” Balmoral was a largely Catholic club, but there were also Protestant members because it was set between a Catholic neighborhood and a Protestant neighborhood. “There were never really any problems,” says Feherty, who grew up in Bangor going to a Protestant church three times a week with his family but now describes himself as an agnostic.

“People just came there to play golf. But the clubhouse did get blown up twice while I was there.”

Phone calls warning people to leave a building were taken very seriously during The Troubles. Feherty was on the golf course once when a bomb went off. “Very loud pop is all I remember,” he says.

Feherty won five times on the European Tour after getting his card in 1980 and was on the European Ryder Cup team for the famous/infamous War by the Shore at Kiawah in 1991. There, he beat Payne Stewart, 2 and 1, and fondly remembers thinking that he and

Seve Ballesteros had truly bonded through the week as teammates—“until I saw him in the locker room a week later in Stuttgart and he called me Donald,” Feherty says. “I was crushed.”

What was truly crushing Feherty during that period was his first marriage, to Caroline DeWit, a beauty queen he had met while playing in South Africa. Shey was born in 1988 and Rory in 1992. In 1993, Caroline decided she wanted to relocate to Dallas; Feherty believed it was because of another man.

Even so, he followed, if only because he didn’t want to be apart from his sons. He had to go to PGA Tour qualifying school to earn playing privileges. He succeeded but never really adapted to playing in America. He did, however, play well enough at Turnberry in 1994 to have a real chance to win the Open Championship. He trailed co-leaders Fuzzy Zoeller and Brad Faxon by two shots after three rounds and shot 70 on the final day, which left him tied for fourth behind Nick Price, who shot 66 to win.

“Looking back now, I don’t think I wanted to win,” Feherty says. “I had a few very makable putts around the turn that if I’d made, I’d have had a very real chance. But I missed them. I’m not saying I tried to miss, I’m just saying subconsciously I just didn’t believe I was good enough to win the Open. I didn’t want the responsibility. I’d had a chance in ’89 [T-6 at Troon], too, and the same thing had happened.”

B

GETTING A LIFELINE

y 1995, Caroline had left Feherty, and he was about to lose his playing privileges on the PGA Tour.

He was drunk or high more often than not and had no idea what he was going to do.

Then, Anita and CBS came into his life—specifically, in the case of CBS, Gary McCord. The two men had never met, but McCord was in the locker room during an opening-round rain delay at The International in 1995. He was there to find players who would come on-camera and kill time for USA, which had the Thursday-Friday cable rights.

“I was there for a while,” says McCord, now one of Feherty’s closest friends. “David was in there telling stories. I knew who he was but didn’t know him. People were falling over laughing while he talked. When we went off-air I said to him, ‘You ever do any TV?’ He said no. I said, ‘Would you like to?’ He said, “I don’t know.’ I said, ‘Well, if you want to, I’ll be in the tower at 15 tomorrow from 2-5, and if you want to, come on up there.’ I did it as much to keep myself from getting bored because I figured if I had someone to listen to, I’d have to pay attention.”

The next day, when he got to the tower, McCord told longtime CBS golf producer Frank Chirkinian that he’d invited Feherty.

“What?” Chirkinian screamed into McCord’s headset. “No way. No way you two f------ guys are going to be together on-air.”

Chirkinian knew Feherty’s reputation for blunt humor.

McCord didn’t blink. “First, it was cable, not the network,” he says. “It was Friday afternoon, small audience. Frank liked to yell and grumble; that’s what he did. Plus, I didn’t even know if David would show.”

Feherty showed. And he blew McCord away. “He just went to places with his answers to questions I never imagined anyone could go,” McCord says. “As we walked down the steps from the tower, I said to him, ‘This is what you’re going to be doing next.’ I knew he wasn’t playing well and was going to need something soon. So, I said, ‘When the time comes, please call us.’ As in CBS, not me.”

Months later, CBS was forced to fire Ben Wright after his politically incorrect comments about why women—in his opinion— struggled to play golf well.

Feherty was sitting in a hotel bar, drinking vodka and Gatorade—“because I was still an athlete,” he says—when he saw CBS producers Lance Barrow and Rick Gentile approaching.

“When they said, ‘CBS,’ I thought they were from ‘60 Minutes’ and they were doing a story on golfers and drugs,” he says. “Who better than me to talk to? I was terrified.”

Barrow and Gentile offered Feherty a three-tournament contract to take Wright’s spot for the rest of the year. Feherty was hired full time in 1997.

Having a job he was very good at and a happy marriage didn’t mean that Feherty got

‘I NEED TO BE BUSY. IF I’M HOME FOR MORE THAN A WEEK OR SO, I START TO LOSE MY MIND.’ —DAVID FEHERTY

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‘THERE ISN’T A DAY THAT GOES BY WHEN I’M NOT SAD FOR AT LEAST PART OF THE DAY. AND SOME DAYS, I’M JUST SAD ALL DAY. . . .

SOMETIMES I JUST START TO CRY AND CAN’T STOP.’ —DAVID FEHERTY sober overnight. When Erin was a pre-kindergartner, Anita came home after dropping her from school one morning and told David if he didn’t get sober, she was leaving him.

He did. For a while. But never for good.

He drank so much on a trip to Barbados early in 2006 that he got alcohol poisoning.

After that, he and Anita went to an addiction therapist.

Still, he was fighting a losing battle.

Then, that summer, he was doing the playby-play for an exhibition match on Prince Edward Island between Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus.

Feherty has told the story often about that being a turning point in his life. “Tom looked at me and said, ‘You’re not well,’ ” Feherty says. “He was right, of course—I wasn’t. I asked him later what it was he saw, and he said, ‘I was looking at myself a few years earlier.’ ” It wasn’t as if Watson sprinkled magic dust on Feherty and he was cured. Anything but. Feherty wasn’t willing or able—in Anita’s opinion—to handle rehab. Watson found him an AA group in Dallas, and even though it was difficult for Feherty, he went to a meeting every day. Until one day, he didn’t.

“I’d been riding my bike to the meetings every morning,” he says. “That day, I just kept going.”

He was north of McKinney—about 35 miles from Dallas—when he finally called Anita to come and get him.

“I don’t do well in groups,” he says. “I like being alone. When I’m home, I don’t answer the door and I don’t answer the phone.”

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“David is OK in a group if it’s on his terms,” Anita says. “Fortunately, the bike became his addiction. That’s when he got sober.”

Feherty would be up before dawn, ride the bike for several hours, stop for coffee with friends and come home too exhausted to go to any dark places or to think about drinking. “When he wasn’t riding the bike,” Anita says, “he was working on it.”

Unfortunately, he was hit by cars on three occasions on the bicycle. The first accident crushed his left arm so badly he had to give up playing golf. The third one forced him to give up the bike.

But, with a lot of therapy and support, he came out on the other end—sober. If Anita ever thinks things might go bad again, she’d call Watson.

“He was clearly struggling, physically and emotionally,” Watson says of the Prince Edward Island weekend. “I said, ‘I see you.

I’ve been where you are. Let me help.’ He was very receptive. It wasn’t an easy process, but he got through it.”

Watson says their friendship really took off when they went to Iraq together in 2007 as part of a trip to entertain the troops, put together by Rick Kell, co-founder of Troops First Foundation, a group Feherty has been extremely involved with for years. When Feherty became an American citizen in 2010, one of the people who flew to Dallas for the ceremony was Watson. In 2016, after Watson played his final round at the Masters, his family threw a party with about 60 friends invited. The star of the evening was Feherty, who was funny and poignant.

“When I was in the abyss, at the bottom of a well I thought I’d never climb out of,” Feherty said that night, “I looked up for help, and the face looking down at me and the hand reaching for me was Tom Watson.”

The first person to tell you that Feherty still struggles with his addictions every day is Feherty. He takes 14 pills a day—seven of them psyche meds—to help him deal with his depression, bipolar disorder and various physical maladies that will never go away.

“There isn’t a day that goes by when I’m not sad for at least part of the day,” he says.

“And some days, I’m just sad all day. It’s gotten worse since Shey died. Sometimes I just start to cry and can’t stop.”

He stops there and smiles. “And yet, I love my life. I don’t see how I could possibly be any happier than I am right now.”

He left CBS at the end of his contract in 2015 and signed a deal that calls for him to do 16 of his “Feherty” shows each year for Golf Channel, NBC’s golf tournaments and various other events, like the Olympics.

NBC offered more money than CBS—a good deal more—but it wasn’t so much the money as the chance to do some things that

were different—including spending some of his time in a tower rather than walking with the final group—that made the deal attractive. Add the 24 Off-Tour dates, speaking gigs, the occasional outing and events for Troops First, and he’s on the road almost nonstop.

“I need it that way,” he says. “I need to be busy. If I’m home for more than a week or so, I start to lose my mind. Most of the time, I like the work. I might be terrified on stage, but I do enjoy it. Once I stop shaking with fear.”

He isn’t exaggerating. “I can see it on stage,” Anita says. “But I also know when he’s really frightened, that’s when he’s at his best. If he’s not, he might lose focus and then, even though he’s still terrific, he’s not as good as he can be—or wants to be. He always knows, even if the audience doesn’t.

He’ll come off stage and say, ‘I didn’t have it tonight.’ The crowd is out there screaming, but he knows. He always knows.”

T

A SON LONGS FOR HIS DAD: ‘I MISS HIM’

he evening in Atlanta is winding down. There’s time for one more question. It’s the one everyone who has ever played golf is often asked: “What’s your dream foursome?”

“Jack Nicklaus,” Feherty says quickly.

“He’s the one great player of my time I never got to play with.” He pauses a split second for applause. He’s done this before. “Annika Sorenstam,” he continues. “Never played with her, either, and I’ll never forget her first tee shot at Colonial [in a 2003 PGA Tour event], when she hit it perfectly and staggered off the tee because the pressure on her that week was so overwhelming.”

He pauses again. Not for effect or because he’s thinking, but to gather himself. “And my dad,” he finally says. “I’d like to play one last round with him.”

His voice catches. The emotion is quite real. “Happens to me every time,” he says later. Billy Feherty died in November 2016 of Alzheimer’s at the age of 91.

“I miss him,” his son says.

He’s thinking back to his childhood now, and he smiles at the memory of his parents. “They say that humor is a sixth sense if you’re Irish,” he says. “When I was a kid, humor was my defense. I was clearly ADD and wasn’t any good in school except in math and music. Humor was what kept people from making fun of me, from calling me dumb. I’m not sure where I’d be or what I’d have become without it.”

The humor is matchless. But those who know him best will tell you it is the remarkable kindness and the compassion that his wife and friends speak of that makes Feherty Feherty.

And that’s no joke.

E

Undercover Tour Pro A plea for a little decency from the fans y wife and I travel to tournaments with our young children, and we have one strict rule: The kids aren’t allowed to step foot past player dining. I don’t even want them coming out for five minutes to the flash area where I get interviewed after rounds.

Maybe it’s just a sign of my maturity, but I believe the amount of obscenities we hear from the crowd has gotten way worse since I began my career.

It used to be Phoenix was the raucous one, but now it’s half a dozen events. I’m not the only player who insists his kids stay inside the clubhouse or hotel.

Yes, I’ve fantasized about punching spectators. The closest I ever came was a Saturday one year at Phoenix. It wasn’t quite noon, so theoretically still short of the drunkest hours, but I’m coming off a tee box when a

M

man shouts a vulgar comment about my then-3-month-old daughter. Normally I’ll just keep walking, but this was so far beyond the line. I stopped and turned to the gallery, the blood in my face pumping hot.

“Who said it?” I asked. “Who’s the big man?”

Not a peep. Why a crowd of people, presumably some with at least average moral decency, would protect such a person— I have no idea.

Later in that same round a sheriff joined our group. I told him the story and asked what would’ve happened if I stuck a 2-iron up this guy’s you know what. The sheriff said he would’ve pulled me off him and probably brought us

downtown, but his department wouldn’t have pressed charges against me. What the idiot had said was that awful.

Most rounds I don’t play with security. You only get a police escort if you’re paired with a big-name player or in the last few groups on Sunday. Not that a couple badges with guns is a guaranteed deterrent. Earlier this year, I was playing with Jason Day when three guys in their early 20s stepped across the rope and started walking with us. Our caddies moved to the middle, and the two patrolmen behind us quickened their pace. These punks didn’t yell, but you could tell they were lit.

They start mouthing hateful things to Day, mentioning his wife. Now, I’m not sure why anyone would target Jason, who’s one of the nicest guys you’ll meet out here, but I guess some people feel the price of

their ticket entitles them to that most special experience of getting hammered and harassing a pro golfer. Day keeps his cool, just says to the patrolmen, “I think it’s time for these fellas to go home,” and that was that.

The world saw Justin Thomas get a fan tossed coming down the stretch when he won at Palm Beach this spring. But the truth is, it happens every week.

Our security on tour does a fantastic job—they handle tons of problems and threats we never even see or hear about—but one stupid fan can still rattle you. You make three birdies in a row, then a drink gets poured on you as you’re walking through a grandstand.

Rhythm gone. It definitely took me a few seasons to learn to not let it affect my game. At least not too much.

Some of the younger players like that the atmosphere of our tour is getting to be more like a football or basketball game. They think it’s fun and can thrive off that energy. I’d prefer to see golf remain something special. Because we don’t play in a traditional stadium, a regular ticket allows anyone to watch the biggest stars from eight feet. The price for that access should be a little civility.

I’m not sure when I’ll allow my kids to watch me play in person. I suppose in their early teens, when they’ll probably know all the bad words anyway.

Problem is, it’ll be harder then for them to miss school, and who knows if they’ll even want to travel to golf tournaments on their summer vacation. It’s a shame, because I’m pretty proud of having made it to this level in professional sports, and it’d be cool if they could have memories of watching their dad compete.

But I won’t risk them having the wrong kind of memory.

— with max adler

Photograph by Nathaniel Welch

illustration by tim l ahan

Mr. X The Golf Life

RE AD Y, S ET 70 golf digest india | july 2018

T, S HO OT !

ONE-ON-ONE WITH DANIELLE KANG, INCLUDING THE COBRA AND THE TARANTULA

BY KEELY LEVINS

Photographs by Jay Hanna

danielle kang qualified for the u.s.women’s open at 14,

only about a year and a half after she started playing golf.

She won the U.S. Women’s Amateur in 2010 and 2011, turning pro at 19 after that second victory. But it took six years and 144 LPGA Tour starts before she broke through for her first professional win, a major: the 2017 KPMG Women’s PGA Championship. We caught up with Kang, 25, after she competed at this year’s LPGA stop in San Francisco. She covers everything from how her relationship with the game changed after her father passed away in 2013, to her erratic sleep patterns, to martial-arts combat—and that time her friend Michelle Wie talked her out of buying a tarantula. what’s a week at home look like compared to a week on tour? Actually quite calm.

I love waking up without an alarm clock. I usually don’t sleep well, so when I’m home, I have what I call “crash days.”

People say I hibernate. Sometimes I’ll sleep for 14 hours.

My record is 21 hours. I didn’t get up once. My mom was concerned; she didn’t know what was going on. I need those days, though, because I go weeks sleeping two or three hours a day. I’m really energetic. No matter if I wake up at 2 a.m. or 7 p.m., I’m the same: “Let’s go!” ●●●

how hard is it to maintain friendships when you’re on the road? I’m so blessed

to have my friends. I know no matter what, they’re by my side. They’re mostly not golfers. To have them, that helps keep me sane. But even when I’m home, it’s not like we’re in high school, just hanging out. My friend Hillary just got her real-estate license. In my

phone, I have her as That bitch who has a real job, because every time I ask her to go to lunch, she’s like, “No, I have a real job. I’m at work.” I tell her to just get out early. She’s like, “I can’t—I have a real job.”

She makes time, though, asks for time off and comes to watch me play. ●●●

how did you start playing?

I was almost 13. My brother, Alex, was getting really good, and I was getting jealous about how much people talked about it. He’s on the Web.com Tour now. I like the attention. I love crowds. I’m a competitor. I’m a performer. It’s fun. Getting there, that’s the tough part. ●●●

you rushed onto the 18th green when lydia ko won in san francisco [ko’s first victory since 2016]. what was it like watching her win? With golf, you don’t really

get a lot of positive reinforcement. You could play great and finish second. So when I see my friends and my competitors, whoever gets that moment, I just feel for them, because they’ve worked so hard. That feeling of relief, when you make that putt—it’s the greatest feeling ever.

72 golf digest india | july 2018

game I love, and I wanted him to see me win. I wanted to give him the fight, to show him I’m OK. I wanted him to be able to check my scores—he liked seeing me make birdies. ●●●

how did your relationship with golf change after he passed? I didn’t want to be

there. It’s not that I didn’t love golf. I just felt that golf took away something. It was this hollow feeling. Every time I stepped up to a golf course, I was angry. After being angry for three years, I finally let a lot of that anger go in 2017. I changed the drive into more of wanting to win than needing to win. ●●●

how were you able to get into that better state?

relief, because it had just been gloomy, negative, everyone asking me what happened— I was the No. 1 amateur before turning pro, and then I’d never won. It just kills you. It’s like, Finally. It paid off. It’s an obsession. There’s always that little doubt in the back of your mind that makes you think it’s not going to happen.

Honestly, this is pretty private, but I don’t mind sharing: I had a therapist. I have a really great life, and I’m blessed for what I have, but what I was going through mentally, losing my dad, and then not winning, trying to play through it, all of the images in my mind, I couldn’t calm it down. To find some peace, I needed to talk to somebody. Therapy helped a lot. She told me it was OK, that everything was going to be fine.

She helped me with different mechanisms on how to deal with anger.

●●●

●●●

when you were struggling, fighting that doubt, did you ever think about quitting? No matter how much you

what’s the best lesson you learned? People say time

is that what you felt when you won in 2017? A load of

fail, you just want to keep trying. All those years, the toughest part was that I couldn’t—or didn’t—win while my dad was alive. The harder I tried, the more frustrated I got. When my dad passed away, a lot of people asked me why I kept playing while he was sick. I can’t really explain it to people. I kept playing because it wasn’t for me.

I wanted him to wake up and know I’m out there playing the

heals all—it’s a lie. Time will help you cover it up, help you manage. I learned to accept that life goes on, and I have to do what I have to do. I came to peace with him being proud of my hard work, of doing my best. And being angry wouldn’t help me do that. So I was able to enjoy golf again, and enjoying the process of trying to be my best. ●●●

what changes after the first win? I get noticed more,

I have more fans, I do more media—all those shenanigans.

But my life hasn’t really drastically changed. I felt so much love when I won. I’m just really happy people are coming out more and are interested

in women’s golf. If I made one person tune in to golf, then I did something good. The better I play, the more of a difference I can make. That’s why I partnered with UNICEF. I’ve been with them for about seven months. It was just a dream of mine to work with them. When I won KPMG, I wrote a proposal, gave it to my agent. I got a meeting the next week. ●●●

what else interests you outside of golf? Tae kwon

do was my passion. I was a second-degree black belt. I love martial arts and the one-on-one fighting. I’ve been punched and kicked in the face, and I’ve done the same to others. I was so strong when I was younger.

My brother used to make me do one-handed push-ups. I’d do pull-ups. If I got in a fight with my 14-year-old self, I’d lose. Outside of that, when I was younger, I wanted to be an actress or a lawyer.

how did you get to know the gretzky family? I grew

up with Ty Gretzky [Wayne’s son] and got to know the family.

I was under Wayne’s membership at Sherwood and played with Wayne and [wife] Janet a lot. I was young, so I didn’t know how famous Wayne was. Obviously as I grew older, I realized. I was in Canada, and there was a statue of him, and Wayne Gretzky Drive. They’re a great family. Wayne surprised me and came and played the pro-am with me at the L.A. tournament.

ing it so bad. I told him, “I can’t do this for another 15 holes. We’ll fix it; give me five minutes.” We did. He told all his buddies that I yelled at him. When I see him, I ask him if he’s still chunking it. The worst is if they’re trying to win.

I want them to enjoy the time with me, but I can’t do anything about it if they keep missing five-footers.

I got offered roles to be an extra in a movie and a jeans commercial, but I didn’t take either.

It was the same time when I started playing golf. When I wanted to pursue acting, my parents were like, “You have to pick acting or golf; you can’t do both.” I chose golf.

ask me a lot when I’m going to retire. And I’m like, “Retire?

I’m just getting started.” But

●●●

what other crazy things have you tried? I get in-

trigued easily. I’m that friend that’s like, “Wanna go try this?”

I don’t think the things I come up with are crazy. I tried scuba diving and bungee jumping.

They sell cobras to eat in Thailand. No one would eat with me, so I ate it by myself. I’ve tried almost everything. You’ve got to find the cool things where you travel.

●●●

if you could have one role in movies or tv, what would it be? I want to be in an Adam

favorite actors? I love Leo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy. Angelina Jolie; she’s my hero. She does so much work for women and children. She’s a humanitarian, a mom, a producer, an actress—so impressive.

what will you do after you stop playing golf? People

there are still some things I’d love to do after golf. I love marine biology. I love animals.

I would work at an aquarium; I want to work at a zoo. If I didn’t travel, I’d buy all the animals I could. I’m on a list— I get emails if rare species become available. I got an alert about a tarantula, and I called Michelle, asking if I should get it. She screamed at me not to.

I asked my friends if they’d feed it. No one would, so I didn’t buy it. But I wish I had one.

ever get any acting jobs?

●●●

●●●

‘TAE KWON DO WAS MY PASSION. . . .

I’VE BEEN PUNCHED AND KICKED IN THE FACE, AND I’VE DONE THE SAME TO OTHERS.’

●●●

Sandler movie. He does a lot of golf stuff, too. I don’t even care about the role. He seems like a dude who gets life and doesn’t care about the extravagant stuff.

painting since I was a kid. I don’t do it much now, though.

I’m good at it, and I love the result of what I can create, but I don’t enjoy the process. I’m too much of a perfectionist.

KANG WITH HER PUG, BOODA, AND SOME OF HER ARTWORK.

how was wayne as a proam partner? It was so fun. It

do you watch the pga tour? I don’t really watch TV.

was just us playing like the old days. He kept telling me his back hurt from carrying the team, that I’m just the face.

He’s really good—he makes clutch putts and hits good drives. He can outdrive me if I mis-hit.

I watched the last two holes when DJ won the U.S. Open, and I haven’t watched since.

When I’m not playing, I want to do something else. I don’t want to see someone miss a putt.

I don’t want to be stressed.

●●●

what’s the best and worst thing about pro-am partners? The best is if they’re

out there to have fun and enjoy it. I talk a lot of s---, so if they like that and they like to have fun, then it’s fun for me. I had a pro-am guy who was chunk-

●●●

tell us about your artwork. I’ve been drawing and

●●●

what’s cobra taste like?

Like a chicken and fish hybrid.

It’s delicious. ●●●

what advice do you have for young players? There’s

no rush in turning pro. Having success is awesome, but you have to enjoy what you’re doing. If you’re not, even if you get success, it won’t be that satisfying. Be a kid, because one day you’re going to be home and texting your friends to go to lunch, but they’re going to say no because they’re at work—they have a real job.

july 2018 | golf digest india

73

inside the ropes for jordan spieth’s crazy duel with matt kuchar at birkdale

THE BOGEY THAT WON THE OPEN by dav e shed l osk i & j ohn h u gg a n

74 golf digest india | july 2018

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s p i e t h c o n f e r s w i t h r u l e s o f f i c i a l d a v i d b o n s a l l a f t e r a n e r r a n t f i n a l - r o u n d d r i v e at t h e 1 3 t h h o l e .

AN EARLY OMEN henrik stenson : I remember thinking

about this early in the first round: There I was, the defending champion, playing with Jordan. One year before at Troon, I played the first two rounds with Zach Johnson, who won at St. Andrews in 2015. So it crossed my mind, That might be a good omen for Jordan, especially when he got off to such a good start [a five-under-par 65 to share the lead with Kuchar and U.S. Open winner Brooks Koepka]. Of course, I’m now hoping to be drawn with Jordan again at Carnoustie. [Laughs.]

I played the first two rounds with Jordan at the 2015 Masters, which he went on to win, and I got the same feeling at Birkdale. He putted beautifully in that Masters; he made every putt dead center with perfect pace.

On those greens, that is remarkable. Unreal.

I got the same vibe at Birkdale. jordan spieth (on winning the Travelers the month before the Open): That was the first tournament I felt like, Wow, I can win on the PGA Tour without fantastic putting.

The second hole [at Birkdale], I hit a downhill slider for birdie, and I made it. When

76 golf digest india | july 2018

it goes in, you feel like the putter’s back: OK, that felt exactly how I wanted it to; it went in exactly like I wanted it to; I feel like I can stroke it today. rich beem (Sky Sports on-course announcer and 2002 PGA Championship winner): I walked with Jordan on Thursday and Friday as well as Saturday [rounds of 65-69-65].

On Friday, his round was more of a labor.

Watching most people play like that, you would have doubts about them keeping it going, but he has an uncanny ability to get the ball in the hole as quickly as possible.

Matt just played his game on Saturday [a 66 after Friday’s 71]. But it would be wrong to say he missed a chance that day. How do you do that when the other guy shoots 65? You’re helpless against that sort of scoring. He shot 66 and lost ground. matt kuchar: I wasn’t on my best form. All I could do at the Scottish Open and British Open was fade the ball. I could not hit a draw.

It was everything I could do to hit a straight ball. But being able to hit the ball only one way, I knew where it was going—I knew it wasn’t going left. And so I pretty much just played it.

13 green

john wood (on Kuchar playing the final two rounds with Spieth and Greller): I love playing with Jordan, and Michael is one of my best friends out here. It’s a fun pairing. matt kuchar : Everybody likes Jordan. If you’re older, you consider him a little brother. If you’re younger, you consider him a big brother. He’s the type of kid you want to be around.

SHAKY START TO FINAL ROUND

Spieth enters the final round at 11 under par for a three-stroke lead over Kuchar.

••• jordan spieth: I waited from 7:30 a.m. until

4 p.m. for that first tee shot with the wind off the left and the out-of-bounds right. That one shot was bothering me the entire day.

I remember telling Michael and Cameron [swing coach Cameron McCormick], “Man, I’m not feeling great about this first shot.”

I stepped up on the tee and just flushed a draw and was so pumped up. That’s what was frustrating about the break. wayne riley (Sky Sports announcer): He hit a great shot, but the ball didn’t kick off the

Opening pages: Chris COndOn/r&a/pga TOur/geTTy images • aerial Of 13Th: nBC/gOlf Channel

IF

THE MASTERS, as lore has it, begins on the back nine on Sunday, you could say the 2017 Open Championship began on the 13th hole of the final round at Royal Birkdale.

Tied with Matt Kuchar for the lead, Jordan Spieth hit his tee shot “so far right, it was almost left,” according to NBC’s David Feherty.

Adds colleague Roger Maltbie: “It went over this mountain.” The search for the ball turned frantic—“It was pandemonium,” according to one of the hundreds of spectators poking through the tall, thick grass— and for Spieth and caddie Michael Greller, thoughts of a quadruple-bogey 7 to give away the 2016 Masters came flooding back. It was in the ensuing moments, you’ll soon see, that Greller told Spieth his second artful fib of the day. ▶ To make sense of the chaos that occurred that day, Golf Digest interviewed more than two dozen of the key characters, including Spieth, Greller, Kuchar and his caddie, John Wood, and the rules officials who spent tense moments piecing together the procedure that produced the bizarre scene of Spieth hitting a shot amid equipment trailers on the adjacent practice range. (It was during that wait that Feherty told Kuchar a joke that can’t be repeated here.) ▶ A year after the Henrik Stenson-Phil Mickelson duel at Royal Troon, we got another classic. If you’ve wondered what a player and a caddie say and do to cope with excruciating turmoil, wonder no longer. These candid comments put you in the middle of an Open that will be remembered forever.

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s p i e t h ’ s d r i v e at t h e 1 3 t h w e n t r i g h t, o v e r a h u g e d u n e . a f t e r ta k i n g a n u n p l aya b l e l i e , h e d r o p p e d on the range, encircled by a crowd (near left) f o r h i s t h i r d s h o t. a s o l i d spieth drop on range

pitch and an eight-foot p u t t s a lv a g e d a b o g e y.

johnny miller (NBC/Golf Channel announcer): He might have thought that he was in trouble of maybe blowing it like he did the Masters. jordan spieth: Thoughts creep in. cameron mccormick: I guess there was a bit of psychological tug of war: Am I really going to do this again? That’s what happened at Augusta. But he said to himself, I’m not going to go down this path again.

•••

aBOve (frOm lefT): 1, 2, 4, 6, riChard heaThCOTe/r&a/ via geTTy images • 3, sTuarT franklin/geTTy images • 5, ChrisTian peTersOn/geTTy images

Spieth birdies the fifth hole and then makes a terrific par at the sixth to Kuchar’s bogey to build the lead to two. bank like he expected it to. He drew a terrible lie from a good shot. It was a foot from being perfect, but because the grass was so damp, the ball stuck instead of kicking out. matt kuchar: An unlucky break, but it was part of the risk of hitting 3-wood. roger maltbie : Jordan was out of sorts.

If you listen to the broadcast, you can hear him. He’s saying, “That’s not right. That basically sucks,” whatever term he used. michael greller: Yeah, we got a kick in the gut right out of the gate on the hardest tee shot at Birkdale by a mile. So he was showing his emotions there when he saw the lie.

I told him to get over it. You don’t want your guy beating himself up right out of the gate. david bonsall (referee with Spieth and Kuchar during the final round): He could only hack it forward. He then hit a so-so pitch to 20-odd feet. And his putt wasn’t great, either. [The bogey cut Spieth’s lead to two strokes.] nick faldo (NBC/Golf Channel announcer): Jordan looked like he was going to lose after the fourth hole [Spieth’s third bogey of the day, giving Kuchar a share of the lead]. He just looked bloody lost.

••• matt kuchar: I birdied 9, and he missed a

“THE DRIVE [BY SPIETH AT 13] WAS ABOUT AS POOR AS A PRO COULD HIT ONE. YOU COULDN’T HIT IT OVER THERE IF YOU TRIED.” —johnny miller

short putt, three-putted. So caught him, excited to make the turn, had a real shot at the claret jug. jordan spieth : The wheels were kind of coming off with the putter on the front nine.

You know, Oh, boy, am I really going to have to go through the constant questioning that I did back then [hitting two balls in the water at Augusta National’s 12th hole, turning a one-stroke lead into a three-shot deficit] and the frustrations from it? Am I going to be looked at as somebody who’s a closer, or has that changed now off of a couple events? It was difficult to mask, so I was verbal with Michael about it, wondering if anything that he could say could get me really positive. He was like, “It’s a totally different situation. You’re in a great position. We’re going to pretty much go about our business, we’re going to play the golf course, so let’s set a goal for the back nine and forget about everything.”

•••

Spieth and Kuchar parred the first three holes of the back nine, remaining tied for the lead.

Then things began to get really interesting. ▶ july 2018 | golf digest india

77

roger bathurst (member of the R&A rules

committee): I was the assistant referee with the last group. That basically means I was the forward man, seeing where the tee shots finish. If there’s no problem, you walk on to the second shots. By and large, you don’t have a great deal to do. However, the 13th at Birkdale [a 499-yard par 4] was different. rich beem: I watched Jordan play the 13th hole on each of the first three days, and I can tell you he never once tried to hit the fairway.

Every day he was aiming for the rough on the right. I asked Michael Greller about that, and he confirmed it. “The bunkers were all in play for us,” Michael said. “We knew that if we just got a decent break with the lie in the rough, that was the place to be.” david bonsall: Kuchar hit a good drive on 13 into the correct spot. Jordan was trying to do the same thing. cameron mccormick: The conditions were really difficult. The wind shifted; it changed the shot. It was a triple witching hour. jordan spieth : The rain had come down a little bit, so that changed the shot that I wanted to hit. When you get water on the clubface or the ball, the ball tends to not spin, and it’ll squirt right off the tee. I lined up down the trouble on the left side, and I bailed out a little on it. Whether it was a combination of the wind going that way, the water on the face, and I didn’t trust the shot, they all led to a foul ball that just kept moving right on the wind. My reaction when I looked up was, Oh, wow, I don’t even know what’s over there. matt kuchar : Gone. That’s miles right to where we expected it to be. john wood: When you’re watching guys hit, especially pros, you have a window where you expect the ball to be. I looked up, and I didn’t see it. roger maltbie : I said, “Oh, this is way right—I mean, this is waaay right—this is a hundred yards right of the center of the fairway.” It was almost a flinch. johnny miller: The drive was about as poor as a pro could hit one. You couldn’t hit it over there if you tried. david bonsall: I was standing right behind Jordan. I saw the ball come down, and it looked like it hit someone. Then I lost sight

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m at t k u c h a r i s j o i n e d b y his wife, sybi, and sons cameron and carson after the final round; kuchar and spieth inspect the claret jug; spieth welcomes the trophy for his third majorc h a m p i o n s h i p v i c t o r y.

of it. Jordan dropped his club and put his head in his hands. jordan spieth: Thinking, Oh, boy, this could be 6. david bonsall : I was then focused on whether he should be playing a provisional. jordan spieth: I was like, “Is that going to be OK, Michael?” He’s like, “I’m not sure.” michael greller: We’re about 50 yards off the tee box, and the walking scorer with us says, “They can’t find the ball. What would you like to do?” Jordan said, “Well, we’re going to find it—just keep walking.” My first thought was, Somebody’s going to pick it up.

There were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of spectators there. It was just absolute chaos. jordan spieth: I’m thinking, Wow, all I had to do is make 4. Now I’ve got a difficult 6 going back to the tee if we can’t find it. john wood: Where they were looking, the people in the heavy stuff, I’m thinking, Boy, that would be a miracle if they find it. nick faldo : We all were sitting there and thinking, Well, that’s it—that’s going to cost him the Open. roger maltbie : At that point, you figure he’s toast. Kooch is such a consistent player, there’s just no scenario I can see where the wheels are going to come off. But they clearly have come off of Jordan. jr jones (R&A rules official and NBC/Golf Channel rules contributor): I got on the radio to David Bonsall and told him I had seen the ball come to ground and that it was surrounded—or so I thought. david bonsall: Jordan looked at me, and I told him that.

roger bathurst: I went across the fairway and into some very thick, scrubby rough.

There was a huge amount of confusion. No one had seen a ball land. I spent some time asking if anyone had seen anything. But nothing. mark bates (spectator): They were all on the fairway side of the dune—well to the left of where it was eventually found. roger bathurst : Eventually I asked some spectators on top of this huge sand bank—it’s probably 50 to 60 feet high—and, after a bit of interrogation, they gave up that the ball had hit someone on the head [drawing the circle of spectators] and had flown way over the other side of the sand bank. I have no idea why they didn’t volunteer that information. It was very odd, because they could see everyone scrambling around looking for the ball. david bonsall : We had walked forward maybe 120 yards when JR came back on the radio to say they now didn’t think they had found the ball. When I told Jordan, he asked if he should go back and play a provisional. But I told him we had come too far. So we wandered over to the right-hand side. We were well shy of the ridge in some really bad rough. People were finding balls all over the place. Jordan went leaping in there, with Michael following slightly reluctantly. I was saying to Michael, I didn’t think we were anywhere near where the ball was. He agreed. But the spectators seemed to think we were. Jordan actually looked at three balls that were not his. I was saying to David Rickman [R&A rules official in the rules headquarters] on the radio that I hadn’t started my stopwatch because I didn’t think we were anywhere near the right place. He told me to carry on. jordan spieth: The more people, the more frustrated I’m getting. That’s what made it a little more difficult to think quickly and clearly. But I don’t remember it feeling chaotic. I remember feeling, OK, the only way to save shots here is to not overreact and to make as smart a decision as you possibly can. mark bates: The guy who had been hit was actually on top of the dune. The ball hit him on the head and went right of the dune. When I arrived, there were people saying they had seen the ball land in the area on the fairway side of the dune, which was nonsense—that was 50 yards from where the ball ended up.

Kuchar family: GreGory ShamuS/Getty imaGeS • Kuchar and Spieth: chriStian peterSen/Getty imaGeS • Spieth with trophy: dan mull an/Getty imaGeS

CHAOS AT THE 13TH HOLE

It was all really strange. I saw the bloke who had been hit. His head was cut and bleeding.

He was on top of the hill Jordan eventually hit over. It was pandemonium.

Jordan was asking everyone to get out of the way. He wasn’t panicked, but he was definitely getting frustrated with all the people.

There was a television cameraman there. He was obviously in communication with his director and was being directed to where the ball actually was. It was only two minutes before there was a shout from the other side of the dune. Someone had to have seen the ball ricochet off the guy’s head. Jordan’s ball finished up at the bottom of the dune on the other side from the fairway. jordan spieth : Someone had seen it roll and found it. And then it was, Wow, I found it; that’s great. Now let’s see where it is and let’s weigh the options from here and figure out a way to not lose two shots. michael greller: I don’t know how long it was, 28 minutes or whatever. From a mental standpoint, I think for both of us, everything went very slowly, which was pretty neat because usually things go 100 miles an hour in that situation. I think what happened at the ’16 Masters played a massive role in how we handled that situation on 13, because it was a similar shock. We have a history of being in a moment like that, which is pretty unbelievable, but we were able to apply that into that moment instead of compounding it.

It was just very matter-of-fact. I remember thinking, You’re going to find this, get this back in play, make a 5, hopefully worst-case 6, we’re down one or two with five holes to go in a major with somebody we respect greatly, one of our favorite guys, Matt Kuchar. But with all due respect, Matt hadn’t won a major. There are two par 5s left, Jordan had a little more length, and one or two shots is nothing to make up in that scenario. So that was where the thinking went versus, Oh, boy, here we go again.

What people forget in that ’16 Masters is that Jordan didn’t back down [after the 7 at No. 12]. He made a great birdie on 13, almost birdied 14, birdies 15 and stakes one on 16 with a seven-footer [missed] for a chance to get within one of somebody who had a phenomenal round [Danny Willett with a 67]. So he knew how to go on offense after something crazy happened. That’s exactly what he did at Birkdale. roger bathurst : The ball was lying on a very steep upslope, maybe 70 degrees and in a pretty poor place. There was no sense of panic, which was amazing for a guy who was potentially making a real mess of the Open. michael greller: By the time I had gotten to the ball, Jordan had already decided it was unplayable, which was significant because he’s not afraid to take on a shot. He knew that quickly that he couldn’t play it.

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jordan spieth : Michael said, “How’s it

john wood : There’s a strokes gained/

look?” I said, “I might be able to get a wedge on it, but it’s not going to go very far.” Then he goes, “What about going back to the tee?”

I said, “Hold on, let’s look at the unplayable drops.” So I’m looking around within two club-lengths in any direction. There were some spots where I could have dropped it, but the likelihood is, it would have bounced backward against a bush, and then I wouldn’t have had a swing from there. So I didn’t like any of those options. That’s when we went up to the top of the hill.

Within 30 seconds, I’m looking back and I’m thinking, OK, if I keep on going back and back and back, I can still reach the green.

I couldn’t reach the green from the other side of the trailers—the hills were too high, and they were too close to me. I could have probably gotten a 7-iron out, but it would have gotten to 60 yards [from the green], probably.

I thought there was the potential for me to hit the ball on or around the green to give me a better chance of getting up and down.

That ran through my head, and I thought, Is the driving range in play? roger bathurst: I told him that, to the best of my knowledge, it was. But I would check with the referee when he arrived. jordan spieth : Michael then reiterated, “Are you sure? Because you can re-tee and have a putt at 5 and make 6.” I just . . . I hate that. I’m like, “There’s got to be another way; there’s got to be a better way.” I don’t want to lose two shots. One shot can be made up quickly. Two shots means the ball’s in his [Kuchar’s] hands. So yeah, I didn’t like the word “6” that kept coming out of his mouth.

putting stat, and I always joke with Webb Simpson that there should be a strokes gained/attitude, and Webb and Matt are the best on tour. They aren’t going to let anything bother or fluster them. What can you do? They [Spieth and the officials] are just trying to get it right. matt kuchar: We could see on a big screen a little bit of what was going on. And now I get word that Jordan has found his ball.

He’s got to take an unplayable.

KUCHAR’S LONG WAIT wayne riley: As we wondered what was go-

ing on with Spieth, I looked at Kuchar, and I could tell he was thinking, I could have this. john paramor (European Tour rules official): Kuchar was standing around not really knowing what to do. I told him this was likely to take a bit of time, so if he wanted to hit, he should just go ahead. So he did. matt kuchar: I hit a fantastic shot [with an 8-iron], 20 feet away. So I’m thrilled. I’ve got a great birdie opportunity here. john wood: And then the waiting game was on at that point. We were telling stories and talking. Just—gosh, we talked about sports.

We talked about the book I was reading.

Talked to the official a bit, trying to get an idea of what was going on. david feherty: I told Matt and John a joke.

I can’t repeat it. It just starts out, “Flanagan goes to a proctologist.” It’s a beauty. It might have cost Matt Kuchar the Open. matt kuchar: We had a laugh. We were going to be there for a while, knowing we’ve had these issues ourselves.

SPIETH’S SOLUTION john paramor: I heard the match referee in

my earpiece. He was asking David Rickman if the practice ground was out-of-bounds.

David then confirmed that it was not, neither for the club nor for the Open. Taking the range out-of-bounds was never even considered. That wasn’t a conscious decision; I don’t think anyone thought anyone would

“I TOLD MATT AND JOHN A JOKE. I CAN’T REPEAT IT. IT JUST STARTS OUT, ‘FLANAGAN GOES TO A PROCTOLOGIST.’ IT’S A BEAUTY. IT MIGHT HAVE COST MATT KUCHAR THE OPEN.” —david feherty ever go there. Besides, why would you invent a boundary? I know we put one in on the 10th hole, but that was for a very good reason [because players were considering hitting shots from the ninth tee to the 10th fairway, which would have put spectators in danger]. david bonsall: I told David [Rickman] that going straight back, it looked as if we might head straight into some equipment trucks on july 2018 | golf digest india

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the practice ground. I told David I thought all of the trucks should be treated as one single temporary immovable obstruction [TIO]. That seemed reasonable to him. I then told him there was a metal fence around the trucks that should be treated as “movable.”

Again, he agreed. Initially, Jordan was asking me if he could drop back on a line, keeping the point where the ball was between him and the hole. I told him that was fine.

I then asked the marshals to get the crowd out of the way, moving them so that we could go back to the practice ground. That was fine until we discovered a buggy in the way. It was sitting there abandoned with no keys in it.

And it was right on the line Jordan had to follow to make his drop. If Jordan had wanted

“I THINK WHAT HAPPENED AT THE ’16 MASTERS PLAYED A MASSIVE ROLE IN HOW WE HANDLED THAT SITUATION ON 13, BECAUSE IT WAS A SIMILAR SHOCK.” —michael greller to drop back short of the trucks, he would be doing so right where the buggy was. I told David we would need to get it moved, but if we couldn’t, it would have to be an immovable obstruction. He agreed. matt kuchar: As luck would have it, being on the driving range, you at least get a proper lie. There are some unplayables where you get to a better, more playable lie, but not a good lie. david bonsall: I told Jordan he could drop on the practice ground, but the line he would have to take goes right through the middle of a TaylorMade truck. So off we went. He had picked up the ball by this time. At first, we went way behind the trucks. We’ve agreed that he’s going to take an unplayable, then have interference from the trucks. So we

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would have to then figure out his nearest point of relief on the practice-ground side.

That sounds complicated, but everyone was staying pretty cool and calm. We just had to work it out, step by step. tommy roy (NBC/Golf Channel producer): Here’s the amazing thing about the whole scenario with the drop. We had a wire cam that was over on the practice area, so it went the distance from the chipping green all the way down the right side of the driving range.

It was about a 200-yard run. Its purpose was to show players on the range, and it was primarily used by the Golf Channel for pregame shows and in some pre-tournament coverage. But by happenstance, it was total luck that this unfolds on 13 next to the range, and that this camera was there and had the perfect view of setting up the drop and the next shot for Jordan.

We could have shown a whole bunch of golf shots while Jordan was trying to figure out his options on the drop, but I learned a long time ago—and my boss, Dick Ebersol, really reinforced it—that when you have something unique going on, it’s OK to stay.

Everything on the line, and it was so crazy watching what Jordan was going to do. peter jacobsen (NBC/Golf Channel announcer): At Troon, Mickelson and Stenson looked like they were playing in a club-championship match and everyone else was in the sixth flight of the member-guest. You couldn’t take your eyes off those two guys. Then we get another showdown the next year. And you can’t take your eyes off them, either. david bonsall : Jordan went back maybe 30 yards beyond the trucks. He asked if he could drop there. He wanted to be back far enough that he could hit over everything. I told him he could. Then he walks forward to the last truck and asked if he could drop there. Again, I told him he could. And that, of course, would then allow him relief to the side of the trucks.

At that point, I asked him to hold on.

I wanted to check that his nearest point of relief was indeed on the practice-ground side of the trucks. I then dived in among the trucks and determined that, the more forward he went, the more certain I was that he had to drop on the practice-ground side. That was where we needed to be. Jordan then asked if he could drop right in the middle of the trucks. I said he could.

Just as we were about to do that, I got on the radio to David Rickman. I told him what we were proposing to do—make the drop, then take relief from the trucks to the right, on the practice ground. Was he OK that I didn’t actually make the player drop the ball?

He told me, in the circumstances, that was the right course of action—the reason being, I didn’t want the ball to roll under one of the trucks and have the leader in the Open

scrambling on his hands and knees trying to get his ball back. Besides, we knew what we were going to do. Having dropped the ball, we were certainly going to pick it up and drop again to the right of the trucks. There was no point in him making that first drop.

Just as we were about to do all of that, John Paramor appeared. john paramor : I’m sure Jordan was pleased to see me after I gave him a penalty for slow play in Abu Dhabi the year before.

[Laughs.] He remembered me. Jordan and the rules officials were in the penned area off the driving range, inside the metal barriers looking at an area where Jordan thought he might like to drop his ball. The referee told him no, they had to work out where the ball should be dropped applying the unplayable rule, then go from there. Jordan said, “I think it will end up here.” The first thing I wanted to do was make sure Jordan was going to drop on the nearest side of the trucks. So I asked Jordan, “Is this where you are trying to get the ball?” He said it was.

I then told him we had to first drop under “unplayable,” but I had to check to see what the nearest side was.

On the side of the Titleist truck was a flagpole with a flag sticking up [from the wind].

The farther back he came, the farther to the right his relief option would have been.

Which meant that the nearest point was to the left. Which was not what he wanted. So I told him he actually had to go closer to the hole than the point he was looking at. He said he wanted to be back where he was so that he could get over the sand hill easier. He wanted more margin for error. I told him I was sorry, but if he wanted to use the nearest point of relief on the right side, he had to go closer. I then found that point. I then told him we weren’t actually going to drop the ball, applying the unplayable rule—that would have meant asking him to climb on top of the Titleist truck and drop there. I wasn’t going to do that. [Laughs.] roger bathurst: That would have been a bit undignified. john paramor: I wanted to expedite play, so I told him to drop to the side, at the nearest point to the truck. That would have left the truck’s flag in the way. So he got relief from that, too. And at that point he dropped within one club-length. If we had gone a stage further, he could have also taken relief from the metal barriers around the range. But that would have taken him to the left, where he didn’t want to go. So we only dealt with taking relief from the equipment trucks and the associated flag. Jordan was clear that was the best deal he was going to get. jr jones: In the studio at the time, Johnny [Miller] was asking if he had considered going back to the tee—Rule 28-a. johnny miller (on the air): Well, I hope he

can pull this off, but in my mind, he should have gone back to the tee for sure. jr jones : Doing what he was doing, one errant shot was going to cost Jordan the championship. johnny miller (after the Open): He’s got a blind shot with gorse on both sides, and if he’d have hit that shot left or right from over by those trucks, he might still be playing that hole.

HOW TO MAKE A BEAUTIFUL BOGEY

gutter credit tk

michael greller : While Jordan was going

through all the back and forth with the officials, it gave me time to really dial in that number [yardage]. No, there was no sixthgrade math that I applied there [Greller is a former grade-school math teacher], it was more basic caddie logic. Long is absolutely no good—you’re in the gorse bushes dropping again. Short was a better miss. So when Jordan said, “I think it’s 270 front,” my alarms went off because I thought it was about 240, 230. That’s a pretty significant difference.

Again, I knew long was out of play. So at that point it became a tug of war: Can I convince him to hit the 3-iron versus a 3-wood?

The last thing that put me over the edge was, he said, “I think it’s about 75 yards to the top of the dune,” and he wanted me to climb up to give him an idea of where he was hitting it. So I actually counted my paces up that dune. Granted, it wasn’t spot-on accurate, but it was about 50 yards.

I remember thinking, He’s already giving it too much just in this first little chunk, so it made me that much more confident that it was a little bit shorter than he thought.

I fudged on the line a little. I stood a little more left of where I thought the pin was, because left was better than right. So when he hit that shot, he thinks he’s hit it short right, and it ended up being right on line. peter jacobsen : It looked like he hit that 3-iron fat. You could see shoulders slumped.

Like, What am I doing? jordan spieth: (on his third shot, after taking the penalty for the drop): I hit it a little off the toe, and it was going probably five, six yards right of where I was looking. david bonsall: I picked up his 3-wood, and he was off like a gazelle up the hill. johnny miller: He ran all the way up and down that deep dune, and I almost think doing that reset his body and his brain. Doing that was like a shock to his system and got him going. It snapped him out of whatever funk he was in. david feherty: There’s always one shot that turns out to be the tipping point, that turns someone around. And he says to himself, I’m tired of playing like this. I think I’ll play like that instead. So when he hit that shot over the Alps, he’d had enough.

Photograph by First Lastname

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matt kuchar: For a minute it looked like it

david bonsall: As they walked off the 13th

was going to be really bad, like it was going to be in the hay rather than the green. But it kind of skips right through a bunker. john wood: We saw it land, and we thought it would be a difficult up and down, but for Jordan, I think he gets that ball up and down six out of 10 times. matt kuchar: Still a really tricky shot. He had a massive mound to work over and around. john wood : Jordan didn’t even go to his ball, he went straight to Matt on the green. matt kuchar : He says, “Hey, sorry about that.” I said, “Hey, no big deal. Completely understand.” jordan spieth : He’s so great. I think he could see I was legitimately very concerned, because I knew if I were in his shoes, that would have been very frustrating. david feherty : I don’t think the wait hurt Matt, necessarily, but it seemed to help Jordan. He turned it around physically and emotionally, but it started in his head. Somehow, he let go of whatever was bothering him. wayne riley : Spieth’s ball was on a downslope, and he had to chip over the corner of a bunker. He could easily have chunked it into the bunker. He could have knifed it to where Kuchar was in two. The crowd went perfectly silent as he hit it, so I heard the clip. He clipped it with no divot. It was the most gorgeous sound. michael greller : I think that’s the greatest up-and-down of his career. Up the slope, down the slope, then had to make an eightfooter to save bogey. jordan spieth: I wasn’t even thinking it was for bogey or anything, it was more, This is to get up and down. michael greller: When he made that putt, I remember thinking, This is going to be the most fun that you’re ever going to have caddieing. I knew that this was going to be just an absolute blast to the finish line—a total peace, and just buckle up. And I sensed it in him.

I could just feel it in how he was breathing, the words that he said. peter jacobsen : Felt like a 12 or a 13, but he walks off with a 5 [to fall one stroke behind Kuchar, who two-putted for par]. This is what separates great players like Jordan Spieth and Nicklaus and Tiger, Palmer, Faldo, Trevino from everyone else—they take a bad situation like that and turn it into a positive. nick faldo: A 5 wasn’t very harmful—it was a tough hole, and he might have made a 5 from the fairway, for all we know. matt kuchar: I thought for sure I was going to have a two-shot lead, but as it played out, I had a one-shot lead. I still thought, Jordan is not playing very well. I’ve got a one-shot lead. I might not be at my best, but I’m playing consistent enough golf to be able to make a steady push from here on in.

green, I was standing at the back of the television tower. Jordan and Michael were noticeably pumped up. “We’re only one down,” one of them said. And, as Jordan passed, he shook my hand and said, “Thank you for all your help with that.” That shows tremendous composure for such a young man. Then he goes on to play five of the best holes you will ever see.

“AFTER I MADE THE EAGLE [AT THE 15TH HOLE], I THOUGHT, HIT THE GREEN IN REGULATION ON THE NEXT HOLE; THEY MIGHT GO IN FROM ANYWHERE NOW.” —jordan spieth wayne riley: All of a sudden, Spieth seemed to press his belly button and say, “I’m a different person now.” It was like what Tiger used to do. Spieth reached another gear, but he was grinding through the lower gears for a long time before he got there.

By the time Spieth holed for a bogey, I had walked off to the 14th tee. There were two toilets at the top of the hill for players.

There was a wooden fence around them.

Kuchar was walking in as I was walking out.

It was just the two of us. He actually looked at me and asked, “How you doing?” I told him I was all right. But I was thinking, How the hell are you doing? It was a bizarre moment.

I couldn’t tell if he was just nervous or not nervous at all. He could easily have been excused for walking straight by me and totally blanking. But he asked me a question as if we were passing in the street. Pretty weird. His inherent niceness came through, more than him being in any kind of zone. john paramor: I told David Rickman that I proposed to speak to both players, tell them I wasn’t going to put them on the clock but that they had lost time, so anything they could do to make that up would be much month july 2018 2017| |golf golfdigest.com digest india

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appreciated. I did that as they walked off the 14th tee. Jordan actually went for a quick bathroom break, so I told Matt first. His caddie at first thought I was going to tell him they were being timed. They were actually 22 minutes over the guideline when they finished the 13th. They took 17 minutes longer than they were supposed to on the hole. About 12 to 14 minutes of that were taken up by the time between Jordan finding his ball and hitting his next shot. roger maltbie : So we’re at the next hole, the 3 par. matt kuchar: That back pin on 14 is tough to attack. You typically know long over greens is not a good place to be. jordan spieth : Kooch had hit a shot and

“TO HAVE A ONE‑SHOT LEAD WITH FIVE TO PLAY, AND BIRDIE TWO OUT OF THE NEXT FOUR, AND YOU’RE DOWN TWO? THAT DOESN’T USUALLY HAPPEN.” —john wood kind of bailed out a little. I thought, OK, I’m 1 down. If my opportunities are inside of him, this is match play to a T at this point. If I’m closer than he is, then I’m going to have more chances to win holes, and that’s probably go‑ ing to lead to winning more holes. michael greller : Jordan hit a 6‑iron 195 and immediately picked the tee up. When he does that, you know it’s all over it. matt kuchar: And he nearly makes it. peter jacobsen : He goes from making a bogey at 13 to almost making a hole‑in‑one [the birdie giving Spieth a share of the lead].

That’s a reset you would not expect. Prob‑ ably 99 percent of golf pros could not get it back together like that. matt kuchar: Remarkable. Absolutely a tes‑ tament to the player he is, to the mentality he

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has. It just completely switched. So now we’re even with four to go. Still a great spot to be. roger maltbie : The next hole, the 5 par, Jordan gets it up on the green [in two]. matt kuchar: I hit a good drive, then a good 3‑wood into a greenside bunker. I figure my chance of getting up and down is pretty good out of this bunker. I go ahead and hit it up there to two feet and figure we’ll be square with three to go. But he hoops it from 50 [for eagle to take a one‑stroke lead]. nick faldo: Astonishing. You are either four feet short or three feet to the right on that putt, and he holes it. roger maltbie: I told Feherty walking up to the next hole, did not use it on the air, but I said, “You know, it’s a little‑known fact that God had two sons; it just took the other one a little longer to come back.” matt kuchar: And you go, Well, I wasn’t ex‑ pecting that, but, all right, I’m 1 down with three to go. Still excited about my chances.

So stuff happens. michael greller: It kind of took me by sur‑ prise when I saw Jordan point at the ball and say, “Go get that!” I must have skipped to the hole to grab it, I was so excited. You can see me in the background—I laughed out loud when that putt went in. You know, Jordan has a history of making big‑time putts of length. jordan spieth : They did a great job with the facilities at Birkdale, and they had a full gym with TVs that were constantly playing old Open Championships. In the old days, the caddies would just grab the ball out of the hole. I don’t know why that stuck in the back of my head. It would have come across better if I was like, “Hey, please go get that,” but instead it was “Go get that!” and with a real serious look on my face.

After I made the eagle, I thought, Hit the green in regulation on the next hole; they might go in from anywhere now. . . .

Those three‑footers [earlier in the day] were 10‑footers to me. And all of a sudden, the lid came off, and the 30‑footers were two‑foot‑ ers to me. I don’t know why I can’t make it a little more boring sometimes. roger maltbie: And then Jordan goes to 16, and he knocks that one in from 20 or 30 feet [for another birdie]. Amazing. jordan spieth: My biggest regret from that day was, I don’t think I celebrated accord‑ ingly on 15 and 16 on the putts. I felt like they deserved fist pumps, screams. I didn’t do either on either one. These are like perfect Tiger uppercut situations, and I’m not taking advantage. cameron mccormick: He said the putt on 16 was more difficult than the putt he had to hit on 15, and the reason for that, it was going uphill and back downhill. It was a putt where a player says, If I hit it too hard, because of the slope, it will go the downhill side and keep going across the hole.

matt kuchar: So I’m 2 down with two to go, still in this thing, even though Jordan has put on this amazing run. You kind of under‑ stand, if you play long enough, you have to expect your opponent to pull out the miracu‑ lous. And you’re playing the best players in the world. You really expect these guys to do something great. roger maltbie: We get to 17, another 5 par. jordan spieth: I hit a drive a little right, and I could have laid [the second shot] way back or I could have gone over the bunkers and short of the other cross bunker. Another decision where Michael’s trained: He steps in and says, “We don’t need to do this. Kooch is over in the left rough. He’s already laid up. You can lay back and go ahead and hit the green from there. Worst case, make a 5. This [going for the green in two] brings in trouble.”

I said, “This lie and this distance, this is a safer shot in my opinion that gets me in a better position.” And it went way farther than I thought it was going to go, because if I hit that left at all, it was in those horrible pot bunkers 70 yards from the hole with no chance—probably 90 yards from the hole from there to the back pin. But when I hit it and it carried that bunker, it was on a great line, and it was 100 percent that second shot that set up that entire hole. It was probably the most underrated shot of that day—there or the birdie I made on 5 that at least got me on the board. But that one set me up where I could just pitch it up the green. matt kuchar : I hit a wedge [third shot] to probably 20 feet. And he’s just short of the green in two with a long pitch shot, not an easy pitch. You could tell right when he hit it, it was perfect. It lands on the lower tier, skips up to the second tier, and goes six feet past. And that’s a 10 out of 10. jordan spieth: It had been raining a little bit, so there’s that dew on the ground that allows the ball to skid. It makes that shot a lot easier. matt kuchar: So here I’m knowing that to have a chance, I’ve got to make it. I go ahead and make it and think, This has got to be a little more pressure on Jordan. roger maltbie : And you go, OK, now, we could go to 18, which is a hell of a hole with a one‑shot lead. But Jordan pours it right on top of him [maintaining the two‑stroke lead]. matt kuchar: He does what Jordan does. michael greller : He called that the best stroke he had of the week, just put a perfect stroke on it, right in the gut. roger maltbie : You’ve got to be kidding me—he’s five under par [for four holes] after falling off the map. He somehow flipped the whole thing around. Unbelievable. john wood : To have a one‑shot lead with five to play, and birdie two out of the next four, and you’re down two? That doesn’t usu‑ ally happen.

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spot. If it goes a few more yards, it’s in a great spot in the fairway with wedge in our hand.

But it got caught up in the fescue. So we’re just trying to figure out how to make a 3 at that point and see if Jordan would make a 5. matt kuchar: Jordan has hit it on the front of the green, but he’s 45 feet, 50 feet away. If I make a birdie, I’ve still got a chance. And I hit it in the bunker, and I thought, Not the worst place. I’ve made bunker shots before. Then I got up and saw it was plugged. I knew my chances had pretty much gone away. And that was the first time I thought, Shoot, it’s not going to happen. Fully crushed.

•••

gutter credit tk

Kuchar then gets a surprise: His wife, Sybi, and young sons Cameron and Carson appear

david feherty : I said on the telecast that Kuchar has to wait for Jordan to fall asleep and then hit him with a 2‑by‑4. jr jones: Johnny Miller must have seen just about everything there is to see in golf, but he was out of his chair. tommy roy: We had a building that’s like a broadcast center, like we have at the Olym‑ pics. It was absolutely rocking on those final few holes. Everyone was going nuts. johnny miller : The fact he birdied the tough 14th, the par 3 that nobody was bird‑ ieing, and then he eagles 15, birdies 16 and 17 . . . that might be the top‑three best finishes down the stretch in a major [with Nicklaus’ back‑nine 30 in his 1986 Masters victory at age 46 and Tom Watson’s 65‑65 to beat Nick‑ laus’ 65‑66 in the final two rounds of the 1977 Open at Turnberry]. john wood (after being asked if Spieth’s per‑ formance was the best stretch of holes he’d ever seen): That would imply that I saw it. I quit watching once he made the eagle putt.

I know when Jordan gets hot from this dis‑ tance, it can get ugly for his competitor, and sure enough, it did. michael greller : I felt like at the start of that round he needed a lot of encourage‑ Photograph by First Lastname

ment, just needed somebody to breathe confidence into him, so I was able to do that. And then, toward the end of the round, after 13, it was just stay out of the way—I mean literally. It was the easiest cad‑ die job I’ve ever had, those last five holes.

I mean, I did nothing. Smile, laugh and fist pump. All the work from a caddie perspec‑ tive went into the first 13 holes on that round. david feherty : I have never seen anyone fix themselves like that since Tiger Woods in the Masters [in 1997, when Woods shot 40‑30 in the opening round before winning by 12 shots]. I was surprised Jordan could walk up to the tee at 18 with the size of his balls.

A DAD’S LAMENT matt kuchar : Two down with one to go is not an enviable spot, but I think if I can make birdie, 18 is bogeyable for him. Not out of it. john wood: I don’t think a two‑shot swing is a miracle on the last hole in a major. Jor‑ dan hit an iron off the tee, in the left side of the fairway. So he’s clean. For us to have a chance, he has to make a bogey from there.

So we took an aggressive play off the tee, tried to hit driver and didn’t end up in a great

“MY KIDS, TEARS WERE STREAMING DOWN. . . . THERE WAS A BIT OF A CRUSHING FEELING AS A PARENT, KNOWING I WASN’T ABLE TO COME THROUGH AND BE THE HERO.” —matt kuchar after flying in to see the finish.

••• matt kuchar: It was amazing. I didn’t know

they were there until I shook Jordan’s hand and was walking off the green. My kids, tears were streaming down, faces all red. You al‑ ways want to bring joy to your kids’ lives. Mak‑ ing a child smile is a great thing. I never want to see them cry, and being the one they’re crying about. There was a bit of a crushing feeling as a parent, knowing I wasn’t able to come through and be the hero, the dad that you want to be. I think dads fit a bit of a Su‑ perman role in your kids’ eyes. When you’re of a certain age, your dad is your protector, month july 2018 2017| |golf golfdigest.com digest india

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he comes through for you, makes you proud.

And to not come through, it was tough.

I certainly wanted to do it for myself, but to have the kids there to see it, that makes it every bit more special. It’s still a tough one that it didn’t happen, but I definitely hold my head high. And in that dad role, I try to use a lot of situations as learning situations.

The thing about sports is that you have to learn to figure out how to deal with defeat.

You won’t win every time. And I was trying to make sure the kids understood that. Life’s a lot of times about how you continue moving on from those. You have ones that you win and ones that you don’t. And sometimes somebody gets the best of you.

“I FIGURE EVERY GREAT PLAYER HAS HAD A RUNNER-UP OR MULTIPLE RUNNER-UP FINISHES IN MAJORS AND HAD GUYS SNAG A MAJOR CHAMPIONSHIP AWAY. I FEEL LIKE MY CAREER HAS BEEN A LOT OF STEPPINGSTONES.” —matt kuchar jordan spieth : I walked up and saw his

family hugging him. . . . I see that, and I thought to myself, Man, put this in perspective. . . . I was very emotional [after losing the 2016 Masters], and my dad was the guy who came up and was able to calm me. wayne riley: At the end I was standing close to Justin Thomas and Rickie Fowler. I was maybe five feet from them. They both looked really happy for their friend. But in different ways. I could see happiness in Rickie for his friend—but an envy in his eyes. You could see him wondering, When am I going to do this? Justin didn’t have that look. He had the look of someone who knew this was going to happen for him. And of course it has. Rickie

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is starting to try too hard and not letting it happen. Now it’s going to be interesting to see how Justin and Jordan push each other in the majors. Rickie could go either way.

He’s hoping it’s going to happen rather than knowing it is going to happen. Which is a shame. He has everything it takes to make it happen. john wood: As much as I love Jordan and Michael, I didn’t want to go back out and see the ceremony at that point—it was going to hurt too much. matt kuchar : I figure every great player has had a runner-up or multiple runnerup finishes in majors and had guys snag a major championship away. I feel like my career has been a lot of steppingstones. I did OK as a junior and in college. And then moved on to amateur and did OK, and won some nice events on the PGA Tour, and then won some bigger events on the PGA Tour.

Hoping the next step is a major championship. And now to be fully in contention at a major championship, maybe that’s kind of the next step before I do end up coming through and winning one. roger maltbie: When we all get back to the TV compound after it’s over, we’re looking at each other: “Did you ever see anything like that?” “Never seen anything like that in my life. Never.” Nobody could see it possibly happening, but it did. And it was the damnedest thing you ever saw. Golf history is rife with stories about comebacks and falling apart and this and that, but nothing that I can recall to this extreme had I ever seen. wayne riley : I went to the range the next morning and stood next to Jordan’s divot. All you could see from there was sky. He was so far off line. And the shot he hit was brilliant.

The risk was incredible. It could have gone anywhere, never to be seen again. But to get it to where he did was amazing.

A CADDIE’S CONFESSION

After the claret-jug ceremony, Spieth met with the media. “We’re going to skip the first 12 holes, right?” he said, prompting laughter.

Asked if he has an unusually strong grasp of the rules, Spieth drew more laughs: “No, I’ve just hit it in a lot of places before.”

••• michael greller : Jordan told me to come

fly back with him that night with a bunch of the guys, so that was fun to get my first taste out of the claret jug. zach johnson : Yeah, it does a good job of holding liquid. jordan spieth: The last few years we’ve gotten a group of NetJets guys together to get a plane back. If you get enough guys, you end up splitting it. It’s cheaper than flying firstclass on a commercial flight because we use up only a couple hours and NetJets hooks us

up. In 2015, Zach wins, and he’s on the flight.

So we obviously have to wait, but then the deal was, if anyone wins, they have to cover the whole flight. So we got a free flight from Zach. We all got together to do it again—I had to pay for the flight.

I think I slept for two hours after I got back to Dallas before I woke up, texted Michael because he had come with me to my house. He was going to go back to Seattle later that day. I said, “Can you sleep?” He said no. I said, “Do you want to watch it?” michael greller: I’ve never done that with him in any post victory, watched the final round. I’ve never even watched one myself; I just don’t do it. So it was neat to share stories back and forth. jordan spieth: It was interesting seeing it from the public perspective versus less than 24 hours, having experienced it. We could remember everything we were saying to each other. We could hear what they were saying on the telecast, and it was just kind of funny to compare. michael greller: I confessed to him that I’d told a little lie [in addition to fudging on the line at the 13th hole]. I’d told him a story on No. 4, the par 3, when he was just lacking the confidence that he normally has. I reminded him that a couple of weeks earlier, he’d been golfing with and hanging out with Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps, Russell Wilson, a couple other guys. I said, “You know, these guys see that same confidence in you that they have, and they’re the greatest in their sport.” I said, “You’re too young to remember this, but in ’98, when MJ hit this iconic shot over Bryon Russell [for the clinching shot in the NBA Finals], everybody remembers that shot, but nobody remembers the six shots he missed before that.” I said, “He wasn’t afraid to take the dagger at the end of the game, and he nailed it.”

I was trying to draw an analogy to “Hey, no one’s going to remember these first few holes, they’re going to remember how you finish.” This was walking off No. 4. I confessed to him when we were watching the replay, “I’ve got to be honest with you, Jordan, I have no clue if MJ missed the six shots before that— it just sounded really good!” He said, “That’s funny you said that, because when you were telling that story, I was thinking, If I’m Scottie Pippen, I’m really pissed off that he’s jacking up shots at the end of the game.” j o r da n s p i e t h : Unfortunately, I’ve proven that if I’m anywhere near the lead or in the lead, there’s likely to be some kind of a very entertaining situation that takes place. Whether good or bad for me, it’s entertaining for the people.

I guess that’s a good thing, as long as you come out on top more than you fail.

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what fresh hell awaits at carnoustie’s finish?

FEEL THE BUR N ▶ Welcome back to Carnoustie’s Barry Burn. Emphasis on burn. ▶ When the Open Championship returns to Scotland July 19-22, every competitor will have to negotiate the snaking ribbon of water that has bitten winners and losers alike. ▶ The last time the Open was played here, in 2007, Padraig Harrington hit two balls into the narrow burn on the 499-yard, par-4 72nd hole—and he won, but only after a dramatic up-anddown for a double-bogey 6 that forced a playoff with Sergio Garcia. ▶ Eight years earlier, Jean Van de Velde blew a threeshot lead with a triple-bogey-7 tragicomedy at 18 and lost a playoff. ▶ Today, Carnoustie is actually 19 yards shorter than it was in 2007, in part to make room for a grandstand behind the first tee, but at 7,402 yards and par 71, it lives up to its other name: Carnasty.

T E L E V I S I O N ( A L L T I M E S E A ST E R N )

July 19 1:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., Golf Channel July 20 1:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., Golf Channel July 21 4:30-7 a.m., Golf Channel; 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., NBC July 22 4:30-7 a.m., Golf Channel; 7 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., NBC

86 golf digest india | july 2018

2O18PEN PA S T C H A M P I O N S AT C A R N O U S T I E

angus, scotl and 2007 1999 1975 1968 1953 1937 1931

Padraig Harrington* 277 Paul Lawrie* 290 Tom Watson* 279 Gary Player 289 Ben Hogan 282 Henry Cotton 290 Tommy Armour 296

* w o n pl ayo f f 2 0 0 7 L E A D E R B OA R D

Padraig Harrington 69-73-68-67—277 Sergio Garcia 65-71-68-73—277 Andres Romero 71-70-70-67—278 Ernie Els 72-70-68-69—279 Richard Green 72-73-70-64—279 P L AYO F F O N H O L E S 1, 16, 17 AND 18

Harrington Garcia

3-3-4-5—15 5-3-4-4—16

OTHERS OF NOTE

T-12 Justin Rose 75-70-67-70—282 T-12 Tiger Woods 69-74-69-70—282 Phil Mickelson 71-77 (missed cut) S C O R EC A R D

Darren Carroll/Getty Images

hole

yards

par

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

396 4 461 4 350 4 415 4 412 4 580 5 410 4 187 3 474 4

out

3,685 36

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

465 4 382 4 503 4 175 3 513 5 472 4 248 3 460 4 499 4

in

3,717 35

total

7,402 71

FUTURE OPEN VENUES

2019 Royal Portrush 2020 Royal St. George’s 2021 Old Course at St. Andrews t he b ar ry b ur n on t h e 17t h a n d 18t h h o l e s . stats at 18 i n 2007: 17 b i rdi es , 209 pa rs , 172 b o geys , 44 d o ub les a n d 10 “ ot h e r s .”

Play Your Best Tee to Green by Butch Harmon

Finding the Fairway Distance without control isn’t worth much hen you’re hitting an approach shot, the yardage to the green immediately points you to a particular club. From 150 yards, you might think, That’s my 6-iron. From 180, Gimme the 5-wood. You base those selections on the thousands of shots you’ve hit with those clubs. Better yet, think in terms of averages. Maybe you’ve crushed a few 7-irons 150—or even did it routinely 20 years ago—but the way you hit it now on average is the info you should use.

If you’re like most golfers, that logic disappears when you get on the tee of a par 4 or 5.

Your main concern becomes hitting the ball as far as you can,

W

and that means taking a rip with the driver. Maybe you’ll opt for a fairway wood or hybrid, but when you do, I bet you try to hit those clubs all-out, too. The only thing worse than spraying one with a driver is taking a safer club and doing the same.

The good news is, if you’re

88 golf digest india | july 2018

savvy enough to leave the driver in the bag sometimes, you’re halfway there. Now you just have to get yourself to play the club you pick to the distance you normally hit it. If your 3-hybrid goes 190 yards, try to hit it 190 yards—not 250.

To stay smooth, it’s good to have a reminder. Hold your finish until the ball lands, like I’m doing in this photo. If it’s tough for you to stay in balance, you’re swinging too hard.

Remember why you picked that club: You don’t need driver distance; you need control.

Here’s a good image to use when you’re playing for position off the tee: Pretend you’re on a par 3. Picture the driving zone as a green. Most fairways are wider than most greens, so if you “hit the green,” you’re on the short grass. At the very least, you’ll avoid big misses.

So pick your target, commit to it, and play your normal shot with that club. Trust me, you’ll have a lot more fun playing this game from the fairway. butch harmon is based at Rio Secco Golf Club, Henderson, Nev.

beware the myth of the hybrid ▶ With a hybrid, most amateurs try to sweep the ball.

The club might look like a fairway wood, but you should play it like a middle iron. That means striking down on the ball and even taking a little divot. Here’s a drill I use with my students. Hit some hybrid shots where you start with the clubhead a couple inches off the ground (left). You’ll instinctively hit down and through the ball to catch it solid—and you’ll groove the right impact.

Photographs by Dom Furore

Golf Made Easy by David Leadbetter Play Your Best

Banish the Banana Ball A different way to turn a slice into a draw

T

another great setup hack ▶ Why do you miss putts from short distances? It often comes from too much body movement during the stroke. This usually alters the orientation of the putterface at impact, sending the ball off line. The shoulders and arms have to move to swing the putter, but everything else should be as motionless as possible. Here are a couple of great ways to stay still when you hit these makable putts.

The first is to stare down at the ground under the ball like you have X-ray vision. When you hit the putt and the ball starts rolling toward the hole, you should still be staring at that spot on the ground. This first tip is great if you have a bad habit of looking up too soon to see if the ball’s rolling into the cup.

The second one quiets the lower body. When you set up over the ball, feel like you have a beach ball between your knees. Sense the pressure on the outside of your feet. Lock your legs in this position, and then just rock your upper torso back and through.

—with ron kaspriske david leadbetter, a Golf Digest Teaching Professional, runs 32 academies worldwide.

Photographs by J.D. Cuban at the Concession Golf Club, Bradenton, Fla.

TIMM L AHAN

he physics of a slice is uncomplicated.

It happens because your club strikes the ball with the face pointing open in relation to the swing’s path. For right-handers, that means the clubface is pointing right of the path at impact—that’s it. What’s not so simple is the psychology behind why so many golfers struggle to prevent the ball from peeling off to the right of the target.

I’ll skip my Freudian analysis of why you slice. Instead, here’s an unconventional, yet simple fix.

It, too, is rooted in psychology.

The next time you address the ball, I want you to stand so your body is aligned noticeably left of the target like I am here (if you’re a lefty, aim right). This is known as an open stance. I know, I know. It’s the same term I used for the clubface’s position when you slice the ball. But now open means aligned left, not right. Don’t be confused by that. Just focus on setting up left of your target.

So how does this fix a slice?

I bet you’re thinking this would exacerbate the problem, because it’s easier to hit the ball with an open face from this position. That might be true to a point, but here comes the psychology: You might be surprised to discover that as you reach the top of the backswing, it encourages you to swing down more to the right of the target.

In other words: aim left, swing right. It’s a game of opposites.

And if you can get the club moving in that direction, the better your chance the clubface will be pointing left (closed) of the swing’s path at impact. When that happens, the ball will curve in the opposite direction of the slice—a draw! Even if you don’t quite swing in-to-out with the face closed, any reduction in the amount the face is open in relation to the path will straighten your slice, possibly turning it into a fade—also a desirable shot shape.

You’ll hit it farther and straighter—all because you made one adjustment that gave you the feeling you had plenty of room to swing in-to-out.

Play Your Best Swing Sequence

Comeback Kid If Tiger Woods is going to win again, the key might be what he’s doing here by ron kaspriske

t the conclusion of this year’s Wells Fargo Championship, having competed in seven PGA Tour events, Tiger Woods ranked 206th on tour in fairway accuracy (51 percent). Early-season performances like at the Farmers Insurance Open, where he hit only 17 fairways in four rounds, contributed a lot to his ranking and aren’t indicative of what he should expect going forward, says Golf Digest 50 Best Teacher David Leadbetter.

90 golf digest india | july 2018

A

“That’s why these photos taken early in the season are very interesting,” Leadbetter says. “There’s a lot to like here, but it was probably to be expected that it would take Tiger a few tournaments until he could trust this swing and feel comfortable with his new process. The more tournaments Tiger has played, the more comfortable he has

started to look, hitting more fairways. Even the wild ones have plenty of power. And if you want to know why I think his driving numbers will improve, there is one thing in particular that stands out as the key to his future success.”

Before Leadbetter reveals what that one thing is, he offers a history lesson. Ben Hogan was a great player before and after a near-fatal car accident in 1949.

But it’s not hard to determine on which side of his career he

“He’s moving better than I’ve seen in quite a while.

His swing looks more graceful.” —David Leadbetter

enjoyed more success. Hogan won six of his nine major championships after the car crash.

“Prior to the accident, Hogan had a fairly long swing with very aggressive lower-body motion and hip rotation,” Leadbetter says. “After the accident, his injuries prompted him to instinctively calm down his leg action and shorten his swing, which

made it more efficient, repetitive and gave him supreme control over his shotmaking.”

Similarly, Woods has had to adjust his swing to cope with a multitude of injuries and, most recently, surgery that fused vertebrae in his lower back. If he can stick with the changes seen here, his driving will be much more reliable, Leadbetter says.

“The biggest thing to note is his transition from backswing to downswing. It’s much quieter than it used to be. He has elimi-

nated the violent move into the ball. There’s not a big sinking of the knees and then a stand-up look coming into impact. He’s maintaining his height much better, and that gives him room to powerfully release the club.

Woods’ swing looks a lot more in sync with great rhythm.”

And by rhythm, Leadbetter says he doesn’t mean Woods is

swinging his driver slower than he did before the surgery. In fact, his driver clubhead speed is one of the fastest on tour (121 miles per hour on average). Rhythm means the flow in which he transitions from backswing to downswing.

The key move, the one amateurs should strive to copy, Leadbetter says, is letting speed build as it approaches the ball and swinging the club fastest through impact. By quieting excessive lower-body motion, Photographs by Dom Furore

Play Your Best Swing Sequence

Woods has more stability in his swing, giving him greater balance. Woods appears to start down slower than in the past but then really whips the club through the hitting area. If you look at this view of his driver swing above, take note how loaded he is as he completes the backswing. He then makes a simple move back to his left side and the arms drop, so he can deliver the full force of his arms and hands into the ball without getting stuck, Leadbetter says.

“Stuck is the feeling Tiger complained of frequently when he would get his arms trapped behind his body,” he says. “Here, Tiger has plenty of room for his arms to accelerate into the ball.

See how his right arm is really giving the ball a whack and is crossing over the left in the follow-through. His arms and club are fully extended, and he

92 golf digest india | july 2018

finishes in a relaxed position.

There’s no stress on the body.”

In the past, Woods’ finish often had a “manufactured” or offbalance look, Leadbetter says, as a result of trying to square the club with an out-of-sync swing.

Another facet of Woods’ swing to copy is the way he takes the club back, Leadbetter says.

Woods keeps the club in front of his torso, and the clubhead stays outside the path of his hands and close to the target line.

“It’s a great one-piece mo-

tion—the chest, arms and club are all moving back together with plenty of width,” he says.

This move encourages the body to coil, not just turn, with the shoulders rotating on a slightly tilted axis. If you make a flat turn, the tendency is to drag the club inside the target line and then re-route it on a steep, out-to-in path into the ball.

Woods’ driver swing speed is 8 miles per hour faster than the PGA Tour average of 113 mph.

Slices and pulls are the typical result, he says.

“His backswing has looked similar to this over the years, but I see a subtle and vital difference now,” Leadbetter adds.

“It appears to be more synchronized. The turning of his body and his arm swing finish almost in unison at the top. His body used to complete the turn, and then his arms would run on independently trying to catch up on the downswing.”

Whether or not it’s a side

effect of his back issues, his calmer, better synchronized backswing has a more efficient look, Leadbetter says. And the fact that Woods can swing in excess of 120 mph, but his clubshaft isn’t parallel to the ground at the top, proves that you don’t need a long, unwieldy backswing to generate real power.

Leadbetter circles back to the concept of good rhythm as the hallmark of great driving. Don’t be in such a rush to get the club back down to the ball, he says.

“I really liked what I saw of Tiger’s swing on the practice tee at the Masters, and what he’s been able to do overall since having that back-fusion surgery,” Leadbetter says, pausing for a moment before finishing with a joke. “But this is not to suggest everyone should go out and have their back fused.”

PRO-FILE tiger woods 42 / 6-1 / 185 pounds Jupiter, Fla. driver TaylorMade M3 460 (8.5 degrees) ball Bridgestone Tour BXS

Play Your Best GD Schools

10 Yards in 10 Minutes Give your tee shots an instant boost by shaun webb

94 golf digest india | july 2018

LAUNCH IT HIGHER ▶ Most amateurs hit the ball with a downward strike too low on the face, creating high spin and low launch—the worst combination for distance. You’ll immediately get longer if you hit it in the sweet spot, which is a little above the center of the face. To do that, focus on how your driver approaches the ball.

By the time your hands swing down next to your legs (above), it should feel like the driver is about to brush the grass behind the ball. This gets the club moving upward before impact— an instant power booster.

“Don’t drag the clubhead through impact.

Let it release.”

TURN THE RIGHT AMOUNT ▶ You need a good downswing sequence to transfer energy from your body and arms into the clubhead, but a big, outof-control backswing (right) ruins the ability to do that—so your backswing matters. Turn with your shoulders only as far as you can go without straining. You should feel pressure in the instep of your back foot, but not on the outside of it.

Meanwhile, your foot closest to the target will feel light on the ground. From here, a good downswing starts by pushing hard into the ground with that front foot, like stepping on the accelerator pedal of a dragster.

FREEWHEEL IT ▶ One of the misconceptions about power is that you get it by keeping your wrists hinged so the clubhead lags behind your hands through impact (left). That’s no way to generate speed. It also makes it really hard to deliver the face square and with enough loft for that high launch. Instead, let your wrists unhinge and freewheel the clubhead through impact.

It should be passing your hands as it strikes the ball. Try this drill: Mimic a backswing with your right arm only. Swing down from the top pretending like you were going to slap the ball into the fairway with the palm of that hand. You wouldn’t hit the ball with the heel of your palm. You would let your wrist unhinge abruptly, giving the ball a good smack. Put that feeling of wrist release into your downswing when you hit drives, and 10 more yards—or more—will suddenly appear.

—with matthew rudy shaun webb, a Golf Digest Best Young Teacher, directs the David Toms 265 Golf Academy in Shreveport, La.

Photographs by Dom Furore

The Golf Life The Digest

“

ANY GOLFER WORTH HIS SALT HAS TO CROSS THE SEA AND TRY TO WIN THE BRITISH OPEN.

”

point/counterpoint

TRANSLATING BRIT GOLF TO YANKEE GOLF

▶ What to call that one major played outside the United States?

▶ Connect the British term to its corresponding American one

v

open championship When it started, in 1860, there were no other Opens. So there was—and is—no need for further explanation or identification.

Former champs of all generations—from Johnny Miller to Rory McIlroy—call it the British Open.

The winner is Champion Golfer of the Year. Again, no need for any national or international recognition. It is what it is.

Technically, it won’t be played in Great Britain in 2019, but it has been all but once the previous 147 times. In that entire span, calling it the British Open has never resulted in a World War, so relax, people.

—alex myers

Next year it will be played at Royal Portrush, in Northern Ireland. That is the third nation represented on the rota. Clearly, it does not have a home country and therefore cannot be anything other than “the Open.”

—john huggan

1 tiddler

a fixed

2 foozle

b water hazard

3 cracking

c mess up

4 lose the plot

d tester

5 how’d you get on?

e collapse mid-round

6 sorted

f what’d you shoot?

7 burn

g gear

8 kit

h great shot

answers: 1. d, 2. c, 3. h, 4. e, 5. f, 6. a , 7. b, 8. g

british open It’s confusing if you don’t call it the British Open. Imagine if the Tour de France was called “The Tour”? Chaos.

how to make your course more like carnoustie ▶ Move the tees back. How far back?

Like, Thursday. ▶ Make competitors dunk their hands in ice water before each tee shot. ▶ Make the fairways so narrow people can stand on either side and shake hands. ▶ Month-old hot dogs only at the turn. ▶ Re-route the course so that 18 green is the one next to the never-ending game of Marco Polo at the pool.

96 golf digest india | july 2018

nickl aus: r&a championships/Getty imaGes • carnoustie: warren little/Getty imaGes

—JACK NICKLAUS

by sam weinman + alex myers

“

I LIKE GOING [TO AMERICA] FOR THE GOLF. . . .

AMERICA IS ONE VAST GOLF COURSE TODAY, AND IT’S ONE OF ITS BIG INDUSTRIES. — THE DUKE OF WINDSOR

”

The Best British Golf Club Traditions

you gotta fight . . . for your right . . . to party! ▶ Is your club’s Fourth of July celebration a dud? Here are five unusual ones as picked by our course-ranking panelists

duke of windsor: Bettmann/Getty imaGes • flaGs: kristina VelickoVic/Getty imaGes

Chatham, Mass.

▶ Every player receives a small American flag on the first tee. When their round equals par plus their handicap, they place their flag at the site of their ball. Players still holding their flags at the end split the pot.

carts, bikes and basically anything that moves, the club throws a food-truck extravaganza with live music. highland g. & c.c.

Indianapolis

old warson c.c. ▶ Members dress in full patriotic garb and watch, among other activities, a belly-flop contest.

forest highlands Flagstaff, Ariz.

old elm club Highland Park, Ill.

▶ In addition to a parade with golf

flights. Whoever shoots the lowest score on July 4 is crowned club champ. The winner’s putter goes on permanent display in the locker room.

▶ No official entry, no

St. Louis

▶ Kids build boats and paddles out of cardboard and duct tape to compete in the club’s Cardboard Regatta and race the length of the pool.

made in the u.s.a. or u.k.?

1 “BOGEY” 2 “BIRDIE” 3 WOOD TEES 4 GOLF SHOES 5 ELECTRIC CARTS answers: 1. u.k., 2. u.s. a ., 3. u.s. a ., 4. u.k., 5. u.s. a . (duh)

eastward ho! g.c.

5 ways to celebrate your golf freedom this independence day

disregard the 90-degree cart rule; drive diagonally at will. change your shoes—then your pants—in the parking lot. only say “nice shot” when you actually mean it. leave the rake inside the bunker when they explicitly ask you to leave it out (or vice versa). replace your divot with a divot from a different fairway.

2½-hour rule The time allocated for each segment of a match day with another club— morning foursomes, then lunch, then afternoon foursomes. the dirty pint All present contribute loose change, and the bartender mixes a commensurate 16-ounce concoction. snooker Contrary to popular belief, the British won’t play golf in any weather. A billiards table and a toasty fire make for an excellent Plan B. no tipping If you happen to lose all your cash to your opponents, you can still exit the premises with dignity.

july 2018 | golf digest india

97

Play Your Best What’s In My Bag utility club You never know when you’re going to need a small knife or similar tool, so I keep this Swiss Army knife in my bag.

family matters My daughter’s name is Azalea, as is the model of my putter, making this putter cover absolutely perfect.

good vibe on the greens Look hard and you’ll see my Masters pin from last year that I sometimes use as a ball marker.

SERGIO GARCIA age 38 FAIRWAY WOODS

story Won 2017 Masters, 33 wins worldwide major respect I’ve been fortunate with how people have treated me all around the world, especially at Augusta. But as a Masters champion, it’s a different feeling; it’s unbelievable. counter effect I’ve always counterbalanced my clubs. I used to put lead tape under the grips, but now I use weight plugs in the butt end—30 grams for woods, 20 for irons and wedges and 50 for the putter.

—with e. michael johnson

club

specs Callaway Rogue, 13.5˚, 42.5 inches, Callaway Rogue Sub Zero, 18˚, 41.625 inches, Mitsubishi Kuro Kage XT 80TX shaft A lot of players use the 3-wood as a second driver, but for me it’s almost always a second-shot club. In fact, I use my 5-wood more off the tee.

DRIVER specs Callaway Rogue Sub Zero, 9˚, 44.5 inches, Mitsubishi Kuro Kage Dual Core 70TX shaft, C-7.5 swingweight I hit down on the ball, even with the driver, so I’ve always had high spin. I’ve tried to hit up more to optimize, but this low-spin model also helps.

WEDGES

versatile sphere I feel like I can play a greater variety of shots around the green with my Callaway Chrome Soft X.

specs Callaway Mack Daddy 4 (48˚, 54˚); Callaway Mack Daddy PM (60˚), Nippon Modus 130X shafts These are so consistent. I have the sensation that I can feel the ball more on the clubface than in the past.

yards*

driver

300

3-wood

275

5-wood

255

3-iron

230

4-iron

218

5-iron

208

6-iron

195

7-iron

180

8-iron

165

9-iron

155

pw

138

54˚

125

PUTTER specs Odyssey Toulon Azalea, 35 inches, 3.75˚ loft, SuperStroke 1.0 P grip This is a little different than the Atlanta model I won with at Valderrama in October. It’s longer heel to toe but shorter from front to back.

IRONS specs Callaway Apex Pro 16 (3-, 4-irons); Callaway Apex MB 18 (5-iron through 9-iron), Nippon Modus 130X shafts, SuperStroke S-Tech 58 round grips I played blades for a good part of my career, so it feels so good to go back to them for my middle and short irons.

60˚ 108 * carry distance

98 golf digest india | july 2018

Photographs by Dom Furore

garcia: andrew dieb/icon SportSwire via getty imageS • Headcover courteSy of garcia

lives Borriol, Spain

Closeout

The New Kid When Tom Watson ruled the Open om watson, Carnoustie Golf Links, July 13, 1975. He’s just off the course, having won the first of his five Open Championships, this one by a stroke over Jack Newton in an 18-hole playoff. The unruly hair, wing-collar shirt and tweed driving cap convey a golf-first purity. In his face, there’s pride and satisfaction. The golf he’d played was a coming-out party for the Watson imprimaturs he became known for. It included a 20-footer for birdie, struck frightfully firm, to tie on the final hole of regulation. In the playoff, he chipped in for eagle on the 14th to take the lead by a stroke. At 25, Watson already had a game that was powerful, creative and adaptable to any condition.

Other Watson signatures took hold that week. He played briskly, chased after bad bounces, grinned throughout a cold Sunday downpour and insisted that Newton join him in clutching the claret jug. Golf never had a better sportsman, and only a few played it better. —guy yocom

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18 Holes with Asheesh Mohta

‘I Named My Daughter After Annika Sorenstam’

When he isn’t analyzing real estate investments across residential, commercial and hospitality sectors, Asheesh Mohta — Managing Director, Head of Acquisitions India, Blackstone Real Estate — is likely to be on the golf course, if not already travelling or trekking.

An avid golfer, Mohta has participated in numerous events such as Volvo World Golf Challenge and World Corporate Golf Challenge. He celebrated his 40th birthday at Oxford Golf Resort (Pune) last year, with some of his closest golfing friends, where his wife Ritu helped organize a one-day tournament.

The adventure aficionado in him thoroughly enjoys African safaris and expeditions in the Atacama. He was in Finland not too long ago to experience the Northern Lights. Mohta has a penchant for listening to Kishore Kumar, Mohammed Rafi, et al and – thanks to daughters Anika and Myra – is getting well versed with the latest English numbers as well. Here he is, in conversation with Karthik Swaminathan.

GDI: What is your

1 home club?

The Royal Calcutta Golf Club (RCGC), Kolkata GDI: When did you start

2 playing golf?

Started relatively late, when I was about 16 years old GDI: What do you love

3 about the game?

Golf has the ability to be wildly different each day on the same course! It requires an optimum balance of mental and physical strength. And besides, I love the fact that it gets you to spend 4 hours with a group of people you enjoy being with in a stressfree environment.

GDI: Who have you played 4 golf with the most?

Have a bunch of friends in Calcutta who I regularly play with

Would have to include Tiger Woods, Annika Sorenstam (I named my daughter, Anika, after her) and probably Rory McIlroy

Tiger Woods and Sweden’s Annika Sorenstam GDI: Please describe your

10 most memorable golfing

experience.

Playing the lowest round that I have played, which was a 1-over round at Willingdon Golf Club in Mumbai GDI: Do you use any golf

11 apps on your phone?

No. I am pretty old school that way and I rely on course yardages, etc.

GDI: Your current handicap.

12 9

13 handicap.

9, this is the lowest that I have been GDI: On an average, how

14 long do you drive the ball?

About 260-270 yards

GDI: Favourite golf

6 course, both in India

and abroad.

Favourite course in India is Oxford, Pune and internationally is Black Mountain GDI: How often do you get 7 to play?

I don’t play often now-a-days.

Probably a couple of days a month GDI: Your thoughts on

8 doing business on the

108 golf digest india | july 2018

GDI: Favourite male and

9 female golfers.

GDI: Your lowest

GDI: How about your

5 dream fourball?

Ashish Mohta in action at the inaugural edition of Builders’ Cup in Bengaluru

In my view, people build acquaintances and relationships on the course which could then, subsequently, translate into business

golf course…

Probably doesn’t happen as frequently as everyone thinks.

GDI: Your favourite

15 holiday destination.

Queenstown, New Zealand GDI: Favourite dish on

16 your home course.

The samosas post the 9th hole at RCGC GDI: Mid-round

17 power snack.

Probably a bar of chocolate GDI: Favourite 19th hole

18 drink.

Fresh lime water – sweet ‘n salt!!

Total Number of pages (including cover pages) is 112 Monthly Magazine, RNI N0. HARENG/2016/66983