By Daniel Rapaport
Francesco Molinari had glory within his grasp as he made the uphill walk from the 11th green to the 12th tee at Augusta National. It was April 14, 2019, the final round of the Masters, and he held a two-shot lead over a who’s who of the game’s elite. Having won the Open Championship just nine months earlier, where he stared down Tiger Woods at Carnoustie, and going 5-0 for the victorious European Ryder Cup team a few months after that, more than a few believed the Italian was the best golfer on the planet.

And then he fanned an 8-iron into Rae’s Creek, made a double bogey and nothing was the same.

Molinari would make another double at 15 and finish in a tie for fifth, fading quickly as Woods surged to victory. The next week he missed the cut at the RBC Heritage, physically and emotionally drained. Turns out, it was a sign of what was to come. Molinari did not post a top-10 finish in any of his next 21 starts, a barren stretch that saw him fall from No. 7 in the World Ranking to outside the top 100. After missing four of five cuts to start 2020, he put the clubs away for eight months as he moved his family from London, where they’d lived for 11 years, to Los Angeles.

Settled and re-energized in a new home, the 38-year-old posted his first top-10 since that Augusta National collapse at last month’s American Express, then followed it up with another at the Farmers Insurance Open. While finishing 59th at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, he should feel good about his chances at this week’s Genesis Invitational, given that Molinari recently joined Riviera Country Club, the host venue, and has been practicing out of there all winter.

Golf Digest caught up with the Molinari at Pebble Beach (before he hit that surprising sculled tee shot during the third round) to discuss the Augusta heartbreak, the slump since, the trans-Atlantic move and much more.

What were those days like after Augusta? Did that take a toll on you?
To be honest, looking back now, there were a few things that were starting to creep in technically [with my swing]. Obviously, in any sport it’s hard to take when you lose like that. But I think most of the issues were not so much strictly related to that [final round], it was more just I lost some of the mechanical things that made me play so well in 2018 and early 2019. It took some time to figure them out.

You had back-to-back top-10s last month after a brutal 2020. What’s changed? What’s clicking?
Well, I’ve been practicing and focusing way more on golf. Last year, I was focusing at the beginning of the year but just not playing well. Then, March to September, really didn’t do much at all.

Because of the move? The body?
The body was healthy enough. Just the move, the general situation. I didn’t want really to spend any time thinking about golf. There were other things going on. Getting the family settled over here, finding a spot where we could all be reasonably happy. That took a while. And then the three events I played last fall [MC at Shriners, T-15 at Houston, MC at the Masters], there was no expectation because the prep was minimal. It was just to get back in the swing of things so the beginning of this year was not such an alien thing, to be back out on tour.

Why did you decide on Southern California? What was behind the move?
Two years ago, we were really close to moving there. We had schools sorted for the kids [he and his wife Valentina have two children, Tommaso and Emma], we were looking at houses and then just, we had some other family issues back home. So we couldn’t do it at the time. It’s simply the place where we’ve been in the States where both my wife and I feel at home. In some ways, it reminds us of some parts of Italy. And obviously the weather is good enough to practice year-round.

Andrew Redington
Molinari poses with wife Valentina and their children during the Par 3 Contest prior to the 2019 Masters.

You joined Riviera. What’s that been like?
Lucky enough to join there in October/November, around that time. Everyone has been great. Todd [Yoshitake], the director of golf, [and his staff], they’ve all been great. Met a few members, played a few games with them. I’ve been around the course a few times. Starting to figure it out. It’s one of those courses that I like, but I just haven’t played well in the event in the past.

There aren’t many PGA Tour pros hanging around Southern California. Usually Arizona or South Florida. Does that not bother you, not having other guys around?
Yes, you could argue that it’d be better to play with some of the guys, but Patrick Rodgers has been there. We’ve played together a couple of times. Patrick Cantlay, during the winter, spends some time there. I’ve played with them. And then there’s a few decent players that are Riviera members. Los Angeles Country Club, there are good players. We play two of them, best ball against me, and it gets pretty competitive.

Still working with Dennis Pugh?
Yeah, yeah, we are. He can’t travel at the moment [he’s based in the U.K.], but I send him videos, we talk. It would have been a lot harder to make the same move without FaceTime.

You’ve spoken about the motivation that it takes to get to the top and that you were struggling a little bit with summoning the drive to be great. Is that fire back?
From that point of view, it was really important to take a break. If anything good is coming out of the pandemic, it’s that I was able to take that break last year. If it was a normal year, I probably wouldn’t have done it. I think just being away from it sometimes is the best way to make you understand how much you miss it, how much you want it, how much you want more wins and to play well again. That definitely helped a lot motivation wise.

When you’re struggling like you were, do you ever watch videos of your past triumphs? Like, the final round at Carnoustie or Ryder Cup highlights?
To be honest, no. Last year was very weird for anyone, but for me especially from a professional point of view. There were times in August where I haven’t played for months, and I’m like, Am I ever going to go back to doing it? Then I felt like I still wanted to do it, still wanted to give it a proper go. Took it a while to figure that stuff out.

David Cannon
Molinari’s best days on the course came in 2018, when he won the Open Championship at Carnoustie and a few months later went 5-0 for the victorious European Ryder Cup team (shown).

Will moving to the U.S. change your schedule? Will you still be trying to play the European Tour as well?
It’ll change a little. We’ll go back to Europe when the kids have school holidays, so we’ll spend the summer there. I’ll probably play a few in Europe there, which I normally didn’t do. I normally just played the back end of the season there, but yeah, my intention is still to play both tours as long as I can.

Is the game starting to feel easy again?
I’m having fun. It’s nice to have Fooch [Mark Fulcher, formerly Justin Rose’s caddie] on the bag. He tested positive [at Pebble Beach], so he’s quaranting in a hotel room, but great to have him. He’s a great character to have around, and obviously loads of experience, but I think he wants to prove something, too. There’s a good energy in the team, and I’m really looking forward to the year.

This being a Ryder Cup year, and given the incredible experience you had in 2018, is that extra motivation to figure it out this year?
Yeah. Obviously for everyone, it is. To be honest, I’m so far back now without playing last year that I haven’t even looked where I’m at [he’s 65th on the European points list and 54th on the World points list]. I’ve got a long, long way in front of me, but hopefully I’ll play well enough. But yeah, at the moment, a long way down the line. I can’t deny, obviously I’d love to be there.

The post Francesco Molinari hopes being one of Riviera’s newest members will come in handy at the Genesis Invitational appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By John Huggan
Look closely and you’ll spot him. Not front and centre. But Denis Pugh will be there on the range at Royal Portrush next week, most likely standing quietly nearby as the defending Open champion, Francesco Molinari, hits shots. Pugh might step forward now and then and offer a few quiet words to the man he calls “my best work.” But there will be no preening or posturing for any watching cameras. It will be all business—quiet and efficient.

That has forever been the way of things for Pugh, who is perhaps the most low-profile high-profile swing coach in the world of golf today. Which is odd. A glance at Pugh’s history reveals a host of well-known names and, even more significantly, a wide variety of swings and personalities that have graced the international game over the past three decades or so. As well as Molinari, Pugh has at various times guided the likes of Frank Nobilo, Colin Montgomerie, Ross Fisher, Peter O’Malley, Greg Turner, Wayne Riley, Mike Harwood and Peter Fowler to success around the globe.

Surprisingly, as far as Pugh’s coaching is concerned, O’Malley’s is the name that is perhaps the most significant on that list. Over the course of a more than 30-year professional career, the Australian is most famous for three things: playing the last five holes on the Kings Course at Gleneagles in seven under par to win the 1992 Scottish Open; defeating Tiger Woods in the first round at the 2002 World Match Play Championship; and ball-striking that is legendary for its quality and consistency.

“No one in the history of golf has missed more 10-foot birdie putts than Pom [O’Malley’s nickname on tour],” his friend and compatriot Mike Clayton once said, simultaneously paying tribute to O’Malley’s tee-to-green play and revealing the fatal flaw in his game.

More glibly, Molinari has been labelled “Pom with a putter.” The pair share strikingly similar stocky builds and a propensity for full-swing consistency. So did O’Malley help prepare Pugh for the work he has done with the first Italian to win a major championship?

Yes and no. Times have changed, as, by necessity, has Pugh’s teaching, something that leaves the 64-year-old native of Essex, England, more than a little ambivalent.

“Pro golfers who don’t hit the ball 300 yards or so through the air are not competitive today,” he says. “Part of Francesco’s pre-round warm-up is to blast three balls as hard as he can. Is that good for his game? Yes, for the game as it is now. But it isn’t the game I grew up with.

“It was different before. No one has ever hit the centre of the clubface more often than Pom. Or found the middle of more fairways. If Pom was playing the regular tour now, he would have gone for power more than accuracy. He would have had to do that to survive. And that’s the difference. Francesco was prepared to risk all in the search for more power. Because that’s all that counts these days.”

As a player, Pugh never reached such heights—or lengths. His career highlight was winning a mini-tour event in the United States against “a good field.” A self-confessed short-hitting, wild driver who hit too many iron shots fat, he was tour standard with a wedge in his hands and occasionally had enough gumption to hole the odd putt.

“But I couldn’t hit the ball at all,” he says. “I was able to pre-qualify regularly—maybe 50 percent of the time. And when I did that, I would make the cut maybe 50 percent of the time. That might be good enough to make a living these days, but it wasn’t back then. I wasn’t good enough to do well, but I wasn’t bad enough to stop.”

He did though, in 1979, when legendary coach Phil Ritson bluntly told him he didn’t have what it takes to be a great player, but he did have what it takes to be a good coach. A few years later, Pugh was working with David Leadbetter as his fellow Englishman was making Nick Faldo great rather than good. And a few years after that, Pugh was making his own way.

“When Faldo won the Open in 1987, David became the star name in coaching terms, and that helped me because I was best placed to explain what David was all about,” Pugh says. “I was one of the few people in the U.K. who knew how to analyze a swing on video. Anyway, David was hot and I was associated with him. And I knew how to work a video camera. On those things, I built a career.”

RELATED: How Royal Portrush got a second chance at hosting an Open Championship

In time, more and more tour players took themselves to see Pugh, many of them from Down Under. One, Turner, was rescued from the edge of the abyss, his game an 18-handicap mix of tops and shanks before Pugh entered his life. Nobilo, now a mainstay of Golf Channel’s coverage, was another.

“I went to Denis as part of a search for improvement,” says the New Zealander. “I was questioning what causes what. And he was also a little anti-establishment, which suited me. We were contrarians together. And Denis was as hungry to make a name for himself as I was. He is the best coach I ever worked with. The things that changed my game the most and made me competitive, I did under his tutelage. I was with him from 1988-’89 to 1996. I played my best golf under him. My swing was technically sound. And a lot of people liked it. He made me believe in myself. He preached three things: posture, positioning and plane. That described my swing perfectly. It worked well under pressure, and I could fix it when it went wrong.”

All of which is in complete contrast to Pugh’s most famous student, pre-Molinari. Montgomerie might be the last person in the world anyone would go to for an in-depth explanation of how the golf swing works. On the range at the K Club in Ireland, a journalist once had to explain to the eight-time European No. 1 why it was easier to fade the ball with a 3-iron rather than a 9-iron.

“Loft creates backspin, Colin, which negates sidespin.”

“Really? I never knew that.”

For Pugh, teaching such ignorance was a new and very different challenge. This was no swing re-build for Turner, or a long-term fine-tuning with Nobilo. This was a unique experience with a unique golfer, but one that proved to be mutually beneficial.

“Monty made me better at what I do,” Pugh says. “Learning to coach in chaos was interesting. He taught me to be adaptable. Day to day, I never knew which Monty was going to appear. Or in what circumstances I would be teaching him. He fired me 19 times over 12 years. He re-hired me 19 times, too. He made me more multi-dimensional. There is one way for every player, but no one way for every player.

“Working with Monty was always interesting, but over time he basically cost me the rest of my ‘stable,’ with one or two exceptions,” Pugh says. “The other players didn’t like that Monty was sucking up their time with me. He expected full-time attention.”

Ross Kinnaird/Getty Images
Pugh’s work with an intense student like Montgomerie helped him become a better instructor even if it cost him clients.

That was to prove even more impossible for Pugh, whose life changed forever on Saturday, Sept. 18, 1999. Arriving back from picking up pizzas for the family lunch—son Robert was 12, daughter Victoria, 10—Pugh saw an ambulance in his driveway. Pugh’s wife, Lesley, had suffered a massive heart attack during his brief absence. Two days later, after being told there was no sign of brain activity, Pugh made the agonizing decision to turn off her life-support machine. She was 43.

“It took me about 18 months to get to the stage where I could talk about it without crying,” says Pugh, who married again in 2003, and commutes between London and Munich to be with Nettie, a Supreme Court judge in Germany. “Even now at certain times, I get tearful if I think about it. I can still get upset. But I don’t like to look backward. I prefer to live in the present and look forward to the future. I was always a bit that way, but now I’m totally that way. I’m not comforted by my memories; I just feel an enormous sadness, thinking about what could have been.”

After Lesley’s passing, Pugh stopped travelling on tour, gave up his occasional appearances on Sky Sports television coverage and took a club professional job at The Wisley Club near London. Apart from the occasional visit from Monty or Pom, that was his working life, the rest devoted to bringing up his two children.

“I look back now and know how much my mum’s death affected his life,” Robert says. “It was obviously a devastating blow for all of us, but a huge thing for my dad. As a kid, I didn’t see that as much as I do now. Before that, I had never had a cooked meal from my dad. But that became an everyday thing. He learned how to cook. He did all the washing and the ironing. He became both parents, even as he had a career, too. I’m amazed by how much he did, really.

“He was always there when my sister and I needed him,” Robert says. “We were always his first priority. I will always be grateful for all that he did for us. He’s been a great dad. And he still loves golf, even if he claims he doesn’t. He’s always talking about it. He’s always trying to get better. And he spends too much time on Twitter.”

Indeed, the elder Pugh—who refuses to give swing tips on social media—is a prolific Tweeter, his vehemently pro-remain views on the U.K.’s imminent exit from the European Community (Brexit) taking up much character space amid the golf stuff.

“Cliched thinking is everywhere,” he says with a smile and a shake of the head. “And when it comes to both politics and golf, many people don’t want to know because they already think they know. It’s better to think the lie than be told the truth.”

David Cannon/Getty Images
Edoardo (left) and Francesco Molinari (right) have enjoyed their time working with Pugh.

And so to Molinari, who has worked with Pugh since he—along with older brother Edoardo—was part of the Italian amateur team coached by the Englishman. It has been an unusually long and uninterrupted relationship in a world where the inclination of the player is so often to look elsewhere when things are perhaps not going exactly to plan.

“I am obviously biased,” Francesco says, “but I think Denis has great knowledge. He has a great way of working—not too intense or invasive. For me, he always had a long-term picture in his head. Little by little, he has made me better. In the beginning, I didn’t realize what he was doing. But I matured enough to see where we were going. Our secret is that his message has never gotten old. Denis is always researching and updating his ideas. So the message has changed and evolved.

“Denis is a lot more driven and ambitious than people realise, just because he is generally happy and smiling,” Molinari says. “But he is similar to me—and this is why we get on so well—in that we both have a huge drive to get better. Without shouting about it. When it is time, we work very hard.”

One of those times will be this week. On that range at Royal Portrush. Watch them carefully.

The post The Open 2019: The most low-profile high-profile swing coach in golf appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By John Huggan
Links golf being what it is—a game of constant adjustment—it is not surprising to hear that many of the 156 competitors gathered at an unusually fast-running Carnoustie for the 147th Open Championship are fiddling with their swings and shots and clubs on the range. As a result, at least two of the European Tour’s leading instructors, Pete Cowen and Denis Pugh, has been busier than usual these last few days.

“Just about every player I work with has changed his wedges,” says Cowen, fresh off a session with South Africa’s Branden Grace. “They’ve all gone to clubs with virtually no bounce. The ground is so firm that makes sense. And many of them have added a 2-iron at the expense of a hybrid.

“There is so much run to be had. Which is not always a good thing. How far shots are travelling depends a lot on the first bounce. You can hit an upslope or a downslope and the difference between the two can be massive. You might be left with 200 yards in, or 90 yards, depending on where the ball lands.

To specifically address this, Cowen has been working with some players on bringing down the height of their shots. But he warns that flighting the ball lower can be “a bit of overkill.”

“On a links course with a bit of wind about, you should never hit a full shot,” Cowen said. “So we’ve been working more on picking the right shot at the right time more than pure swing technique.”

As for Pugh and his star pupils, Francesco Molinari and Ross Fisher, the view is a little different. Molinari, the recent winner of the Quicken Loans Championship, is focusing on shaping his tee shots more than normal.

“Francesco usually tries to hit pretty straight shots, but here he needs to get more curve on the ball,” Pugh said. “The wind is enough to make the fairways, which are already quite narrow, even narrower. Especially when you are talking about a cross-wind. If the fairway is, say, 40 yards wide, hitting down the middle gives you only 20 yards either side. Starting the ball on one side or the other doubles that amount.

“Generally speaking, he is going to let the wind do the work on his tee shots, then he’ll take over on the second shots. He has the ‘Monty Fade,’ what we call his ‘30-30’ shot. That’s 30 wins and £30 million. We don’t have a name for the draw yet. Any suggestions welcome.”

Molinari and Pugh are working on shaping shots in preparation for the wind. (Andrew Redington)

Where there is more consensus is in the area of how aggressive players can be off the tee. While some will surely start cautiously with irons, Pugh can see most switching to the driver by Day 2 in an attempt to either hoist themselves into contention or make the cut.

“I think the really long hitters will hit drivers almost everywhere,” seconded Cowen. “If they find a bad spot, they’ll just play for the middle of the green and move on. If they hit the fairway, they will be in great position to make a birdie. And if the top players are all doing that, anyone else is going to be behind the eight-ball if they don’t do the same.”

RELATED: Carnoustie course tour

Cowen admits this isn’t the “real” Carnoustie, so picking out scores is tricky. He thinks, however, that somebody could shoot a 63 on any given day. “I can see a range of scoring through the field,” he said. “But no one knows what the winning score is going to be. I’m not sure how the bookies are going to work out their odds.”

There is but one caveat to the “bomb and find it” theory. As Pugh says, you still have to find it.

“And when you do find it, shaping a shot into the greens—and getting close to the flag—is not easy,” he said. “If you do play conservatively, you can end up playing 3-iron, 3-iron to a par 4. That’s difficult, too.”

In contrast to Cowen, Pugh doesn’t believe we’re in for particularly low scores. “This is not going to be a birdie-fest,” Pugh said. “Pars are going to be valuable commodities. The R&A will tuck the pins. The course is just how they would want it. … They will set-up the course so that, if the wind blows, it will be tough. If it doesn’t, the players will shoot low.”

Ideal really.

The post The Open 2018: How a pair of instructors are preparing their tour pros for the challenge of Carnoustie appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.