Now she gets set to embark on another pursuit: radio show host.

Tuesday night on SiriusXM PGA Tour Radio, Sorenstam, 52, debuts a new program titled “Annika.” Alongside her co-host, husband Mike McGee, Sorenstam will take calls from listeners, discuss her experiences in golf and business, provide instruction tips and break down today’s game and players on the men’s and women’s tours.

“I am really looking forward to hosting the show with Mike,” she said. “We will discuss the latest happenings in golf, including women’s, amateur and junior golf. We look forward to having guests join us and to talking about what the listeners want as the phone lines will be open. Of course, we will also touch on our Foundation and family.”

The program is scheduled to air twice a month, and the launch coincides well with one of the more memorable moments of Sorenstam’s playing career. Later this month, Sorenstam celebrates the 20th anniversary of when she competed against men’s professionals at the Bank of America Colonial.

Annika Sorenstam is joined by her husband Mike McGee and her children Ava and William after winning the 2021 U.S. Senior Women’s Open Championship. Rich Schultz

This isn’t the first time Sorenstam has had a program on SiriusXM. In 2014, along with former Golf Digest writer Ron Sirak, she co-hosted “The Annika Hour.”

The opportunity to offer commentary about the game is something that seems particularly appealing at this moment in time. “It’s an exciting time in the golf world, especially in women’s golf. Look at the great ratings the Chevron Championship got. That is fantastic.”

The post Mic’d Up: Annika Sorenstam to debut new golf-talk program on SiriusXM Radio appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

Weiskopf and Harrington join Sandra Palmer, Beverly Hanson, Johnny Farrell and the seven remaining co-founders of the LPGA not already in the Hall of Fame: Alice Bauer, Bettye Danoff, Helen Detweiler, Helen Hicks, Opal Hill, Shirley Spork and Sally Sessions.

Harrington, 51, is a three-time major winner and six-time Ryder Cup player for Europe before moving into the senior phase of his competitive career. The Irishman won back-to-back Open Championships in 2007 and 2008, when he also won the PGA Championship.

Of Harrington’s 21 professional victories, 15 came on the European tour and six on the PGA Tour. The Dublin native also captained the European team at the 2021 Ryder Cup at Whistling Straits. Last year, Harrington won four times on the PGA Tour Champions including the Senior US Open.

Harrington plays part-time on the DP World and PGA tours and made the cut at the Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill last week. He tied for fourth place at the 2021 PGA Championship at Kiawah Island.

“This is very exciting, obviously a huge honour,” Harrington said. “It’s somewhat humbling. At this stage of my life, it gives me some validation to what I’ve done in golf. Brings back a flood of memories. This is a deep-down satisfaction, and I’m very proud to be included with the players before me. Seeing your name beside the names that I’ve looked up to as a boy and young golfer, it’s very nice. Everybody on the ballot deserves to be there. It’s unfortunate that everyone can’t be in, but it’s great to be included in the Class of 2024.”

Weiskopf won 16 times on the PGA Tour, although his most famous victory was the 1973 Open Championship at Royal Troon, where he defeated Neil Coles and Jonny Miller by three shots. Miller had won the US Open a month prior to the Open at Troon. Weiskopf died in August 2022 at age 79.

Sandra Palmer during tournament play circa 1977. She was on the LPGA from 1964-1997. Focus On Sport

Palmer, 79, won two majors in her career, including the 1975 US Women’s Open, among 19 LPGA victories. She also claimed LPGA Player of the Year honours in 1975. Palmer collected 28 total professional victories and won twice in Japan.

“I’m overcome with emotion and very grateful,” Palmer said. “It gives me an opportunity to thank the people that have helped me along the way. I just couldn’t believe it when I got the call, this is my sixth time to be nominated. What an incredible group of women that I played with over the years. It’s one of those times that you sit down and your whole career comes before you. I think about the people along the way that I’d like to thank.”

Among Farrell’s 22 PGA Tour wins was the 1928 U.S. Open at Olympia Fields near Chicago, when he defeated Bobby Jones by just a single shot in a 36-hole playoff.

Hanson won the US Women’s Amateur in 1950 and went on to win three majors, including the 1955 Women’s PGA Championship among her 17 LPGA wins. In 1958, she was the leading money earner and won the LPGA’s Vare Trophy for having the lowest scoring average for the year. She died in 2014 at age 89.

In 1950, the LPGA was founded by 13 original LPGA players. Bauer, Danoff, Dettweiler, Hicks, Hill, Sessions and Spork join Patty Berg (1974 inductee), Marlene Bauer Hagge (2022), Louise Suggs (1979), Babe Zaharias (1974), Marilynn Smith (2006 Inductee) and Betty Jameson (1998) in the Hall of Fame.

“We owe the LPGA’s long and illustrious history to the dedicated efforts and incredible commitment of our 13 Founders,” LPGA Commissioner Mollie Marcoux Samaan said. “Their leadership created the most successful women’s sports organizations in the world, and they made it possible for women to pursue golf as a passion and as a career.”

The other finalists were Peter Dawson, Jim Furyk, Butch Harmon, Cristie Kerr, Dottie Pepper and Jay Sigel.

The 2024 World Golf Hall of Fame induction ceremony will be June 10, 2024 in the Village of Pinehurst, North Carolina. The US Open will be held at Pinehurst No. 2 later that week and the new Hall of Fame Museum and USGA Pinehurst campus will both be opening.

The post Tom Weiskopf, Padraig Harrington, LPGA founders lead list of 2024 Hall of Fame inductees appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

We’ve seen JT absolutely take apart everyone from random Twitter trolls to a Hall-of-Fame broadcaster like Johnny Miller. No one is safe from his retorts. And that includes Bryson DeChambeau.

But the fellow major champ apparently forgot that on Tuesday when he took a little jab at Justin after the 14-time PGA Tour winner posted a series of workout videos. All JT was trying to do was give his trainer, Kolby Wayne, a little love.

 

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OK, and to show everyone he’s been hitting the gym hard. We get it, Justin. You work out.

But Bryson had to needle him by asking, “180 ballspeed yet?” And yes, we get it, Bryson, you have high ballspeed. Anyway, Thomas might not hit a golf ball as fast, but he fired back pretty quick with this:

 

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Boom. Roasted. We may be heading toward the off-season, but JT is clearly still in mid-season social media form.

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By Daniel Rapaport
A trio of Hall of Fame golfers—Annika Sorenstam, Babe Didrikson Zaharias and Gary Player—will receive the United States’ highest civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, on Thursday from President Donald Trump.

W.L. Pate Jr., president of the Babe Zaharias Foundation, is expected to accept the medal in honour of Zaharias, who died in 1956.

The medal is described as a recognition of “an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavours.” Only four other golfers have received it: Arnold Palmer (2004), Jack Nicklaus (2005), Charlie Sifford (2014) and Tiger Woods (2019). Trump awarded Woods with the medal shortly after he won the 2019 Masters.

The White House announced in March that Sorenstam and Player would receive the honour, but Zaharias is a new addition.

Sorenstam, 50, dominated women’s golf from the mid-1990s through the mid-2000s. The Swede amassed 72 official LPGA Tour wins, including 10 majors, and was named player of the year a record eight times. She stepped away from playing full-time professional golf in 2008 and has since focused on philanthropic and business pursuits.

Zaharias is widely considered one of the finest athletes ever, having won gold medals in the 80-meter hurdles and javelin throw at the 1932 Olympics—all before she took up golf in 1935, at the age of 24, then became perhaps the greatest woman’s golfer in history. Like Sorenstam, she won 10 major championships and completed the Grand Slam in 1950, winning all three women’s majors at the time. She holds the distinction as the only woman ever to make a cut in a PGA Tour event, which she did three times.

Known as the “Black Knight” for his penchant for wearing all black, Player was one-third of golf’s “Big Three” alongside Nicklaus and Palmer. The South African is one of five players ever to complete the career Grand Slam by winning all four men’s majors, and he is the only non-American to have done so. He won 160 tournaments worldwide, including nine majors, and since his retirement he has remained an active presence in the game. He has designed over 400 golf courses worldwide and is the founder of the Player Foundation, which seeks to provide underprivileged children with access to education.

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The 84-year-old Hall of Fame champion has played golf on six of the seven continents, won nine regular and nine senior majors and has flown more than 15 million miles since the start of his professional career in 1953. He’s also played with every great player since Hogan, which makes his evaluation of the relative merits of champions across the decades especially informed.

That meant that a recent casual encounter with a young South African pro ended up inflaming Player—and inspiring him to get out his pencil. “He said to me, ‘When you were playing, there were only 25 players you had to beat,’ “ Player said. “I thought to myself, ‘How do I explain it to this guy?’ So I started to make out a list of all the great players I played with through the years beyond the ones everyone knows about, like Nicklaus and Palmer and Watson and Trevino. Mike Souchak. Julius Boros. Sandy Lyle. Gene Littler. So many of them have almost been forgotten! They’re as good as any of the guys today, and if you gave them modern equipment?”

Player’s list ended up with more than 80 names on it—including players who won 53 majors. He says he doesn’t diminish the skills it takes to win on tour today, but laments how some of the subtle expertise required to win tournaments in the 1950s, 60s and 70s have been lost. “Let’s face it. They basically play the Super Bowl every week now—courses maintained in perfection, with ideal putting surfaces and bunkers that have all been raked by the same machine,” Player says. “Playing in Johannesburg is just like playing in Philadelphia. At the average event in the 1960s, most courses were common Bermuda. If you had a morning time, the dew on the grass forced you to play a completely different shot. If you had a 7-iron distance, you needed to hit a 5-iron and chip it, or the shot would sail on you and fly 20 yards over the green.

“I had to become a good bunker player because I had to play under so many different conditions, even on the same course. Nothing was the same. You had to figure it all out, and that skill is getting lost. The ball goes 50 yards longer now, so the emphasis is all on power and not on the mental test as it should be. Phil Mickelson has a 64-degree wedge. You take a swing, and the ball comes out. You used to have to manufacture that yourself.”

We asked Player to comment on a series of photographs showing both some of the “forgotten” (and not-so-forgotten) players he listed, including himself, and he offered the timeless instruction advice he accumulated through the years from players like Ben Hogan. Animated and sharp, he spent more than an hour on this endeavour. “A million words, all for a one-second movement!”

Too flat? Actually not, says Ben Hogan

Player: “I hear players say they get stuck on the inside. I played with Hogan during my first American tournament, at Seminole. We were waiting, and he said, “Congratulations on your tournament win in England.” I responded that pros over there told me my swing was too flat.

“Hogan said, ‘You can’t be too flat as long as your hands are under the shaft. Your rotation of the body squares the club up. Your hands follow the rotation of your body. When you come from the inside, you feel like you’re hitting the inside of the ball.’ Hogan called it flatness through the ball. Trevino did the same thing.”

Practice unique lies, and practice often

“Being good from the bunker isn’t magic. It’s work. I’d practice from 6:30 to 8 in the morning, and I wouldn’t leave until I holed five bunker shots. I spent so much time just practising.

“Whenever I played majors, I was never scared to go in the sand, because I had seen it all before. Stand wide, and don’t use your legs beyond a natural reaction. Set the club early and get the club to the ball early. Don’t go deep. Skim the sand. Light the match. One thing I always notice is that every weekend golfer is always short. Out of the bunker? Short. Putt? Short. Get it past the flag!”

The importance of a long swing

“What I wouldn’t give to put the club there today. I’m shooting mostly par now, but my swing is probably four feet shorter. I can’t understand people who say, “Shorten your swing.” There have only been a few superstars—which to me means winning six majors. Every superstar has a long backswing. I always carried a heavy weighted club, and I swung it all those years. I still have it. Even though DJ’s backswing is shut—which I’m against—he’s an athlete. He’s a strong as can be, and because he makes that long backswing, he has time to get it back. I like a full backswing. My mouth waters terribly when I think about it.”

One of Hogan’s many secrets

“Look at Jack Nicklaus coming from the inside. His left arm is outside of his right arm. I was blessed that Hogan mentioned a few things to me. I only met one man who knew it from A-Z. A few knew it from A-Y. But one A-Z, and that was Hogan. I was lucky to listen to what he said. That’s why I won so many majors. He said you have to rotate your body, and then the club comes on the ball the same way. Now, I have the most anti-hook swing, and it was what Hogan told me when I was young. I just couldn’t figure it out completely until I was 70.”

Arnie’s blessing was also a curse

“This is why he was so great driver of the ball. Sensational 1-iron player. Terrible bunker player, because of his shut face. If I could have played bunker shots for him, he would have won 15 more times, and he would have won the Grand Slam. He stayed with the ball. It’s the opposite of sucking your hands across the ball. The path starts down on the inside, and you hit the inside of the ball and stay on the line. I’ll tell you, watch a guy like Moe Norman, nobody could hit the ball better. Stay on the line. He stayed over the ball, and the club is right on line with an extended right arm.”

One of the most underrated swings of all time

“Such a wonderful transition! If I was going to tell the average person to copy somebody’s swing, it would be Boros’. And before you say it’s more complicated than that, I tried it before, coaching. There was a player in South Africa, and a friend asked me if I’d help him. I worked on his mind, his diet, his exercise and his swing over the course of a week, and I told him it was going to take him two months to really get it. Three days later, he went out and won the tournament. You have to have exceptional talent. And you have to have the right fundamentals.”

An appreciation of Johnny Miller’s swing

Peter Dazeley

“Johnny Miller had one of the best backswings I ever saw. I never saw a person hit the flag out of the cup as much. He said he got muscle-bound from working on his land. That’s crap. I worked on a farm my whole life, and I’ve kept myself fit for 70 years. He got the yips.”

RELATED: Breaking 70 at Eighty

What we can learn from the great putters

“When I listen to guys on the Golf Channel and I hear the commentators says it was a bad putt because he jabbed it, I don’t know what to think. It’s debatable if it was Tiger or Bobby Locke who was the best putter ever. Locke? He was a jabber. Casper? Big jabber. Casper had his hands fixed, and he chopped it. Look at Snedeker. Take out the unnecessary movement. The average player? There’s so much movement in the putting stroke, they’re a spaghetti wobbler. It’s still a good eye and great feel—putting and the mind win golf tournaments.”

The post Gary Player explains why his generation’s tour players deserve more respect appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By John Strege
It won’t be known for a while, but if the Mitsubishi Electric Championship at Hualalai is a harbinger of the PGA Tour Champions’ season ahead, it will be a memorable one.

Four World Golf Hall of Famers were tied for the lead at one point on the back nine at Hualalai Golf Club on the Big Island of Hawaii on Saturday, but it was an interloper, Miguel Angel Jimenez, who emerged the victor in a playoff with Ernie Els and Fred Couples.

Jimenez, 56, holed a 12-foot birdie putt on the second playoff hole to win the event for the second time.

Early on the back nine, Els, Couples, Bernhard Langer and Retief Goosen, all World Golf Hall of Famers, were tied for the lead at 12-under. Goosen was first to bow out by running out of holes and tied for fourth. Langer was next to go when his tee shot at the par-3 17th got caught in the wind and drifted left and onto the lava. He eventually made a double-bogey there and bogeyed the 18th to fall to a tie for sixth.

Couples faltered on the first playoff hole when he missed a three-foot putt for par, leaving Jimenez and Els the last men standing.

Els, perhaps, came up one day short. Senior events — other than the senior majors — are 54-hole affairs and as such are more a sprint than a marathon. He nervously stumbled in his first round, shooting a 72, which put him eight shots back of the lead.

“From the first day it was pretty disappointing,” Els said. “I was almost last in the field. Then I got myself back up and played some really good golf. Disappointing obviously. I would have loved to got it through, but I had a couple of chances, didn’t quite get the right speed or the right line.”

Els played his way into contention with consecutive 65s on the weekend to get into a playoff with Couples and the interloper, Jimenez, who is not in the World Golf Hall of Fame. Many would argue, however, that he is a Hall of Famer of some sorts, given his popularity and renown in golf circles as the most interesting man in the world.

Jimenez, who shot a final-round 68 for a 54-hole total of 14-under par 202, caught a huge break on the par-3 17th. His tee shot went left and bounded off the lava and back into a bunker from which he was able to save par.

“I was very, very lucky there,” he said.

The PGA Tour Champions was fortunate, too, to open its season with a show featuring a star-studded cast.

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By Tom Callahan
Dan Jenkins, the Hall of Fame golf writer and Golf Digest Writer-at-Large, died Thursday night, March 7, at 90. His longtime colleague, Golf Digest Contributing Editor Tom Callahan, writes this tribute.

When his grandmother found an old typewriter in the attic, only child Dan Jenkins of Texas became a writer.

Word for word, he typed the war dispatches and sports columns from the Fort Worth papers, pretending to be a newspaperman. But, eventually, he changed the words, giving them an edge, his own edge.

An aunt named Inez owned a drugstore, a repository of dreams. Luxuriating in the store’s delicious aromas, Dan set up camp at the out-of-town newspapers stack. For a while, his favourite lead was by Damon Runyon from an account of Chicago mobster Al Capone’s tax-evasion trial: “Al Capone was quietly dressed when he arrived at the courthouse this morning except for a hat of pearly white, emblematic, no doubt, of purity.”

Jenkins also admired James Thurber’s take on one of Ohio State’s athletic stars, Chic Harley: “If you never saw Harley run with a football, words cannot describe. It wasn’t like [Red] Grange or [Tom] Harmon or anybody else. It was kind of a cross between music and cannon fire, and it brought your heart up under your ears.”

But in time Jenkins switched his allegiance to this opener from John Lardner: “Stanley Ketchel [the middleweight boxing champion] was 24 years old when he was fatally shot in the back by the common-law husband of the lady who was cooking his breakfast.”

“That, in a sentence,” Dan always said, “is the great American novel.” And it had to be “lady.”

Jenkins was a solid player in his own right.

His father was a scratch golfer, but it was Aunt Inez who presented Jenkins his original set of clubs, ladies’ clubs: 2-, 5-, 7- and 9-irons, a spoon (3-wood) and a putter. At age 12, he reached the first of 232 major championships, the 1941 U.S. Open at Colonial Country Club. It was magical. Dan had never beheld bentgrass greens before. They looked like Ireland (or at least what he thought Ireland should look like). His home course, nine-hole Katy Lake, didn’t even have sand greens. They were made of dark-brown cottonseed hulls, oiled down or they’d blow away, requiring raking before putting.

There’s a black-and-white photograph from a practice round at the ’41 Open. It features Byron Nelson, Gene Sarazen, Tommy Armour and defending champion Lawson Little (once “the best amateur golfer who wasn’t Bobby Jones”) walking a fairway in the foreground. In the background, wearing a striped polo shirt and white duck trousers with a ticket lashed to his belt, Boy Jenkins is trailing them. (This is the only documented proof that he was ever actually on the golf course during a major, where he would spend most of his time raconteuring on the verandas and out-writing everybody in the press rooms.)

A mischievous caption, ballooning from Sarazen’s lips, says, “If that little kid behind us grows up to be a golf writer, this game is in big trouble.”

• • •

For the Paschal (High) Pantherette, he wrote a parody of the local sportswriters. Someone sent it to Blackie Sherrod, the nut-brown, task-mastering, Cherokee-blooded sports editor of the Fort Worth Press, who would paint the battlefield at Little Bighorn in red splashes of horrible realism but with the Goodyear blimp floating overhead. Blackie hired Jenkins while he was still in high school and sent him on to Texas Christian University (to letter in golf) with a byline.

Blackie’s Boys—all of whom became eminences—included Gary Cartwright, Jerre R. Todd and Bud Shrake, who like Dan was destined for Sports Illustrated, best-seller lists and screenwriting credits. Bud and Dan joined in occasional collaborations and were inseparable friends.

Sherrod pointed his young staff to the files of stylish writers, such as Red Smith, and once again Jenkins broke in as an imitator. Henry McLemore, covering the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, wrote, “It is now Thursday. The Olympic marathon was run on Tuesday, and I am still waiting for the Americans to finish.” So Dan kicked off a high school football story this way: “It is now Monday. Birdville played Handley on Friday night, and I’m still waiting for Bubba Dean Stanley to complete a pass.”

Jenkins admiration for Hogan started when he first covered the local golfer for the Fort Worth newspaper and lasted a lifetime.

But pretty soon, just like before, he found his own words, his own voice. It was a blend of prairie-twang and ranch-hand nasalness softened by and cultivated with a surprising lilt of sophistication. He was willing to be funny, but only if it was true.

“Missouri’s Dan Devine looked like a man who just learned that his disease was incurable. He was leaning against a table in the silent gloom of his locker room, a towel around his neck, a paper cup of water in his hand, whip-dog tired, and his large brown eyes fixed vacantly on a lot of things that could have happened.”

Sherrod called Jenkins “a news dog” and “the most effortless writer I’ve ever known. The most confident, too. Most writers, they’re insecure to the point of hiding under the bed. Dan always had the attitude of a competent athlete—and he was a good athlete. Golf. Basketball. Pool. I think he could’ve roped buffaloes. Nothing in the world spooked Dan except snakes. Just a picture of a reptile would crater him. We spent a lot of time rolling snake photos into his typewriter. He’d come sailing in, smoking his 19th cigarette of the morning and drinking his 12th Coke. When he rolled his typewriter carriage, out would jump this hideous rattler. And Dan would beat and thresh and fall down in wastebaskets. Then he’d sigh and sit down and, once he quit trembling, write you the best 800 newspaper words you ever read.

“If every college football team had a linebacker like Dick Butkus, all fullbacks would soon be three feet tall and sing soprano.”

Dan’s inaugural and eternal hero (along with Texas footballers Doak Walker and Bobby Layne) was Ben Hogan, his local assignment on the golf beat. They played some 40 rounds together, often just the two of them. “I’d be watching him practice,” Jenkins said, “and he’d say, ‘Let’s go.’

“In 1956, Ben called me up and said, ‘I want you in a foursome for an exhibition at Colonial benefiting the Olympic Games.’ I said, ‘OK, I guess, but there must be somebody better than me.’ ‘No, I want you,’ he said. I worked half a day at the paper, came out, didn’t even have a golf shirt, wore a dress shirt, rolled up the sleeves, changed my shoes, didn’t hit a practice ball, got to the first tee, and 5,000 people were waiting. Now, what do you do? Somehow I got off a decent drive into the fairway, and proceeded to top a 3-wood 50 yards—it was a par 5—then topped another 3-wood, then topped a 5-iron. All I wanted to do was dig a hole and bury myself in the ground forever. As I was walking to the next shot, still 100 yards from the green, Hogan came up beside me and said, ‘You could probably swing faster if you tried hard enough.’ I slowed it down, got calm, and shot 76. He shot his usual 67. That’s the Hogan I knew.”

Ben gave him other tips, some of them incomprehensible, like “always over-club downwind.” Famously, Hogan was said to harbour a “secret,” but Jenkins reckoned the real secret was just practice. Dan was an uncommonly fine putter, and Hogan volunteered to tutor him for six months in the rest of the shots if he wanted to take a crack at the U.S. Amateur. When Jenkins told Ben he was already doing what he always wanted to do, Hogan didn’t really understand. But the gruff nod of trust he tossed Dan that day never left Dan’s heart.

So when a slightly younger writer and friend would say, “Yeah, that Hogan must have been awfully good; some weeks he beat both Jay Hebert and Lionel Hebert,” Dan would just smile tolerantly, secure in his conviction that he knew more than anybody else about golf.

Dan never threw over Hogan, but he moved over to Arnold Palmer with ease, cued by gentleman Marine Jay Hebert (pronounced A-Bear), whom Dan asked one morning, “What are on the list of qualities helping Ken Venturi become the next great golfer?”

Hebert answered, “Venturi’s not the next great golfer. Arnold Palmer is.”

Arnold Palmer? Dan thought. The guy who can’t keep his shirttail in? The guy who thinks he can drive a ball through a tree trunk? “Why him?”

“Because he’s longer than most of us,” Hebert said, “and he makes six birdies a round. He also makes six bogeys, but one of these days he’s going to eliminate the bogeys.”

“He did,” Jenkins said, “and the sports world became a more exciting place.”

Along with his loud, lovable friend, Bob Drum of the Pittsburgh Press—right to Palmer’s face between the third and fourth rounds of the 1960 Open—Jenkins belittled anyone’s chances of coming from seven strokes and 14 players behind. But when Palmer drove the par-4 first green at Cherry Hills and went out in 30, here came Drum and Jenkins on the dead run to the 10th tee. Relieving Jenkins of a Coca-Cola and a pack of Winstons, Arnie said, “Fancy meeting you guys here.”

Jenkins could say things pretty quickly, too, if he wanted. (“I don’t suppose anybody’s ever enjoyed being who they are more than Arnold enjoyed being Arnold Palmer.”) But Dan caught Palmer best at the close of his exquisitely titled book, The Dogged Victims of Inexorable Fate when he wrote: “This is true, I think. He is the most immeasurable of all golf champions. But this is not entirely because of all that he has won, or because of that mysterious fury with which he has managed to rally himself. It is partly because of the nobility he has brought to losing. And more than anything, it is true because of the pure, unmixed joy he has brought to trying. He has been, after all, the doggedest victim of us all.”

• • •

Like every Texan, Dan loved college football as well, though his first novel, 1972 wildfire Semi-Tough, was set in the National Football League. (“I always knew,” Jenkins said, “that someday I was going to write a book called Semi-Tough.”) Dandy Don Meredith, the ex-Cowboy quarterback who made a foil of Howard Cosell on “Monday Night Football,” appeared to have memorized every passage, sprinkling Billy Clyde Puckett references throughout his conversation (confusing Cosell).

“What I love about Jenkins,” Meredith said, “is he takes himself funny but the games serious.”

Jenkins held the classified combination to all the sainted college coaches, like Darrell Royal of the University of Texas and Paul (Bear) Bryant of Alabama, mainly because Dan was preternaturally resistant to soft soap and had a nose that twitched automatically at any odour of the bull. “You see that helmet over there?” Bryant told him in the Bear’s office at Tuscaloosa. “That’s Lee Roy Jordan’s helmet. He was the greatest hitter I ever had. You look at that helmet real close, you’ll see on there the colour of every team we played. A little orange for Tennessee, a little maroon for Mississippi State …”

“C’mon, Bear,” Dan interrupted, “who’s the artist who painted it? I know you all wash the helmets after every game.”

“Goddammit,” Bryant exclaimed, “it works on recruits!”

Dan Jenkins inside the new press centre at the Masters during the final round of the 2017 tournament in Augusta, Ga. (Dom Furore)

Texas Christian head coach Gary Patterson said, “Dan can be my biggest critic, but that’s all right because he loves TCU. There might be somebody out there who knows a lot of football, but I don’t think there’s anybody out there who knows as much about the history, not only of TCU but of all college football, as what Dan Jenkins does.” After the Horned Frogs won the 2011 Rose Bowl to complete a perfect season, Dan was shocked to receive a championship ring engraved Jenkins. The press box at TCU’s Amon G. Carter stadium also bears his name.

Old Baltimore Colts special teamer Alex Hawkins, known as Captain Who? (“Gentlemen, this is Captain Unitas, Captain Marchetti and … ”) had mounted on his living-room wall framed photographs of Johnny Unitas, Gino Marchetti, Alan Ameche, Lenny Moore, Art Donovan … and Jenkins, smoking a cigarette in front of P.J. Clarke’s in New York. “What’s Jenkins doing there?” a visitor asked with a chuckle. “I don’t know,” Hawkins said. “I guess because just looking at him makes me happy.”

After his transfer to Sports Illustrated (and, in the normal course of prosperity, Park Avenue, don’t you know), Dan threw much of his Scotch-and-water trade to Elaine’s (directions to the bathroom: take a right at Michael Caine) and Toots Shor’s (“the joint is quieter without the proprietor”), but Clarke’s was his home field. It was in Clarke’s where Howard Da Silva poured drinks for Ray Milland in the movie “The Lost Weekend,” and where, according to legend, with a publishing windfall, Jenkins bought a house in Maui over the telephone. “That’s not exactly true,” Bud Shrake said, “but it’s not completely false, either.”

Shrake and Jenkins had the same refined sense of mischief. “We’ve hired a new ringside photographer [for a championship fight at the Garden],” they told fabled SI managing editor Andre Laguerre. “Who?” Laguerre asked. “Frank Sinatra!”

Bud and Dan co-wrote a screenplay for Eddie Murphy’s “Beverly Hills Cop II” but were fired because it was too funny. “You know,” Jenkins told the producer, “that’s kind of what we were shooting for.” “You don’t have to be funny,” the man said. “Eddie be funny.” For the next 20 years, the co-conspirators looked across rooms at each other, pronounced “Eddie be funny” and howled.

Just behind golf and college football, Jenkins loved the movies (he was practically first in line to worship Meryl Streep). The film he prized the most, even above “Casablanca,” was “The Americanization of Emily,” which would be more surprising if everyone associated with that picture, from writer Paddy Chayefsky to actors James Garner, Julie Andrews, Melvyn Douglas and James Coburn, didn’t consider it their proudest work.

Throughout “Emily,” people keep telling Garner’s character, “The balloon’s going up any day now,” referring to D-Day. “What balloon?” he always answers absently. But when a sportswriter came upon Garner in the Bel-Air Country Club grill, and said to him, “The balloon’s going up any day now,” Garner replied delightedly, “You’re a friend of Jenkins.”

Garner claimed to have supplied Dan the title for his 1981 novel Baja Oklahoma. Jenkins and pal Willie Nelson co-wrote a song for that movie, though they were never in the same room. Nelson just took the lyrics out of Dan’s book and put them to music. Sitting next to a casting director as a line of secondary ingénues streamed past, Dan said, “I vote for her,” and she got the part. Julia Roberts.

Jenkins’ 10 Stages of Drunkenness also came from Baja, popping up at Runyon’s in New York and on the walls of grog shops all across the country (plus at least one pub in the U.K.) The last two stages, nine and 10, “invisible” and “bulletproof,” were inspired by a friend of Dan’s who careened into Clarke’s one evening accompanied by a lovely-adorable not his wife or even his daughter (though she could have been). He thinks he’s invisible. No, bulletproof.

Dan’s wife was a TCU homecoming queen, June Jenkins, never June, always June Jenkins, as in “June Jenkins says hello.” Both of them had false starts in the marriage department, but then they spent almost 60 years together getting it absolutely right. There might have been a husband somewhere who loved his wife as much as Dan Jenkins loved June Jenkins, but it’s hard to imagine. As you probably know, there are chasms that come with money and Hollywood, and Dan tiptoed up to a few, but June Jenkins always saved him.

Anyway, according to the daughter among their three children, Dan’s early image of casual depravity and serial off-handedness had little basis in fact. Though never seeming to be working was an essential illusion in the sportswriting game, Sally Jenkins knew her father to be a man of “deceptive sobriety,” “veiled attentiveness to family” and a “sly conscientiousness at his work.”

She was the one who followed him into the breach, to Sports Illustrated, then the Washington Post, where for 18 years she has written a lyrical column with a Jenkins edge. Under the email heading Term Themes, Dan took to shooting her best columns, meaning just about all of them, to a colleague (probably more than one colleague). “Read Sally Jenkins today,” he’d say, “and try not to laugh or cry. I couldn’t.”

Sally, Marty and Danny were his heroes.

Dan with his children Sally and Marty. Dom Furore

• • •

Presumably owing to Semi-Tough’s notoriety as a book, a Burt Reynolds movie and nearly a David Merrick Broadway musical, Sports Illustrated removed Dan from college football and relocated him in the NFL, a colossal blunder. Like a large slice of pro football’s audience, Dan needed an economic interest to suffer the games. And the more he bet, the more prominent the officials, the “Zebras,” became in his narratives. Inevitably Dan clashed with a new managing editor, Gil Rogin, who was not Andre Laguerre, and in 1985 Jenkins came to Golf Digest.

It was probably just as well. SI had become heavily populated with Dan Jenkins impersonators, some of them 2 and 3 degrees removed. Curry Kirkpatrick was trying to do Jenkins. Barry McDermott was trying to do Curry Kirkpatrick trying to do Jenkins. The problem, of course, was there was only one Jenkins.

“If you want to put golf back on the front pages again and you don’t have a Bobby Jones or a Francis Ouimet handy, here’s what you do: You send an ageing Jack Nicklaus out in the last round of the Masters and let him kill more foreigners than a general named Eisenhower.”

Dan always rooted for the best stories, which usually meant the best players (the real reason he loved Hogan might have been that Ben once saved him from having to write about Masters runner-up Skee Riegel), though some of golf’s journeymen, the ones with wit and perspicacity, like Ed Sneed, became trusted sources. Dave Marr, a PGA champion but not an all-time great, was Dan’s No. 1 draft choice for dinner.

As truthfully tough as Jenkins could be in print, he had a heart. Settling into a steamy Medinah press tent under a killer Monday deadline, he had just begun to bang out the dull tale of Lou Graham’s playoff victory over John Mahaffey in the 1975 Open when tapped on the shoulder, Jenkins spun around to find Graham’s wife, Patsy. “Be nice, Dan,” she beseeched him softly. “He’s really a good guy.” So charmed was Jenkins, he left out a voice he had overheard in the gallery, whispering, “Where does Lou Graham get all those faded shirts?”

Tiger Woods didn’t want to know Jenkins. “We have nothing to gain,” agent Mark Steinberg said, the dumbest thing any agent ever said. During the 2006 Open Championship at Hoylake, Woods’ second-most-amazing tour de force, coach Hank Haney was staying at the Golf Digest house. Every night, after hitting balls post-round, Tiger dropped Haney off and never came in. Perhaps just that squandered opportunity of a beer with Jenkins, or at least the astonishing cluelessness it represented, was the real first cough by Ali MacGraw in “Love Story” (as it preceded Tiger’s come-from-ahead loss to Y.E. Yang in the 2009 PGA). At Woods’ peak, Jenkins wrote, “Only two things can stop him: injury or a bad marriage.” Birdie, and birdie.

Presidents of the United States did want to know Jenkins, particularly George Herbert Walker Bush, Dan’s sometime golfing partner. Whenever the presidential helicopter overflew a course, Bush telephoned Jenkins for a rundown. George and “Bar,” June Jenkins and Dan, stayed in each others’ homes. Dan called Camp David “my favourite hotel.” Driving Jenkins around in a golf cart there one daybreak, “41” (as Bush signed his letters to Dan) said, “See that porch bench in front of Holly Cabin? You might want to sit on it for a minute. That’s where Roosevelt and Churchill planned the D-Day invasion.”

When Jenkins sent Bush a friend’s book, the president wrote the author a note of thanks that began, “Any friend of Dan Jenkins … has to be investigated by the Secret Service.”

Dan’s final tally of majors would be 63 U.S. Opens, 45 Open Championships, 56 PGAs and 68 Masters, which, as he said, “is a lot of peach cobbler no matter how you slice it.” In his 80s, he reinvented himself as “The Ancient Twitterer,” which made sense. Dan was always faster on the draw than 140 characters. Thirty years apart, he thought Greg Norman looked “like the guy they always send after James Bond,” and Danny Willett looked “like a guy who could have driven the getaway car for Bonnie and Clyde.”

Giving up essays for tweets left him more time to talk writing with the young writers who queued up at his desk in the press rooms, saying stumbling things like “I’ve always wanted to be like you.” To which he might reply, “Hungover?” But then he’d answer seriously and at whatever length they preferred:

Dom Furore

“My advice doesn’t change with electricity,” he said. “Be accurate first, then entertain if it comes naturally. Never sell out a fact for a gag. Your job is to inform above all else. Know what to leave out. Don’t try to force-feed an anecdote if it doesn’t fit your piece, no matter how much it amuses you. Save it for another time. Have a conviction about what you cover. Read all the good writers that came before you and made the profession worth being part of—Lardner, Smith, Runyon, etc. Don’t just cover a beat, care-take it. Keep in mind you know more about the subject than your readers or editors. You’re close to it, they aren’t. I think I can say in all honesty that I’ve never written a sentence I didn’t believe, even if it happened to be funny.”

In 2012, Jenkins became the first living sportswriter of three (Bernard Darwin of The Times of London and Herbert Warren Wind of The New Yorker the others) to be stuffed and mounted at the World Golf Hall of Fame. “I’d follow [fellow Fort Worthers] Hogan and Nelson anywhere,” he said. “I went back and looked up everybody who’s in it and did some statistics. It turns out that I have known 95 of these people when they were living. I’ve written stories about 73 of them. I’ve had cocktails and drinks with 47 of them. And I played golf with 24 of them.”

During the Oakmont Open of 2016, as Arnold Palmer was failing but too considerate not to receive a sportswriter in his Latrobe office, Arnold said, “Before we start, let me ask you something. How’s Dan?”

One by one then, of course, Jenkins began to lose his friends.

In 2009, at 77, Bud Shrake.

Term Themes: “Bud drifted downriver at 2:45 this morning. His son Ben, a great kid, was with him at the end. He took part of my life with him. We’d been close since junior high school. But I’ll catch up with him one of these days—and we’ll be laughing at something. Bud will be buried next to [former Texas governor] Ann Richards in Austin state cemetery. Bud and Ann, who were great old Austin friends, and the last loves of each others’ lives, had arranged it a long time ago.”

(Once, Bud sneaked a news-magazine guy past a press secretary into the statehouse for dinner with Gov. Richards. “How do I refer to Bud in my story,” the man asked her during dessert. She looked at Shrake, smiled and said, “Just call him an iconoclast.”)

In 2016, at 96, Blackie Sherrod.

“My teacher,” Term Themes emailed. “Yours, too, Simon, whether you know it or not. I think you do know it. [Because I did all the driving at British Opens, he renamed me Simon after an earlier chauffeur.] I had Blackie. You had Red [Smith]. We shared them both, though, didn’t we? And Jim Murray. And Furman Bisher. Weren’t we lucky?”

Finally, on Thursday night, March 7, 2019, at 90, His Ownself.

He long ago picked out the exit music: Vera Lynn singing “We’ll meet again.” As for the carving on his stone, while he supposed he should go with something Oscar Wilde-ish like “Ah, now for the greatest adventure of them all,” the inscription he floated at the Hall was more his style: “I knew this would happen.”

What it was, was great.

Dead solid perfect.

Eddie be funny.

A news dog.

Best In Show.

The post His Ownself: Dan Jenkins, 1928-2019 appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Alex Myers
On Thursday, I embark to Charlottesville, Va., for the 25th annual (my 18th) HGGA Championship, AKA my annual buddies trip. It’s a new location for my favourite five days of the year, but one that will undoubtedly yield good times and mediocre golf from the gang. Oh, and some serious competition. We take winning our green jacket pretty seriously, and as the current holder of the coveted coat, I’ll do everything in my power to keep from having to slip it on someone else’s shoulders come Monday afternoon. Conversely, my wife wouldn’t mind seeing that thing out of our living room — where it’s displayed prominently — for good.

In any event, with this BIG event on the horizon, Sam Weinman and Keely Levins joined me to discuss what makes a good buddies golf trip and offer some words of wisdom for making your excursions even better. We also chatted about a busy week in golf in which Bubba Watson added to a potential Hall of Fame resume, Bryson DeChambeau got wrapped up in an odd rules controversy, a new favourite golfer emerged in an unlikely place, and we saw a lot of Greg Norman. Literally. Anyway, please have a listen:

https://soundcloud.com/user-96678684/upgrading-your-golf-trip-bubba-watson-as-hall-of-famer-and-bryson-dechambeaus-secret-weapon

The post Golf trip tips, Bubba Watson’s Hall of Fame credentials, and Bryson DeChambeau’s compass controversy appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

They are also enjoying each other more than ever.

“I love that were paired together,” Mickelson said Tuesday from the Players Championship, where he and Woods, along with Rickie Fowler, will be grouped for the first two rounds at TPC Sawgrass. “I think it’s really fun.”

Woods concurred.

“We don’t really do this very often, unfortunately,” he said of playing with Lefty. “For me to be able to play with a person I’ve gone against for over two decades, it’s a lot of fun.”

Many in and around the Mickelson and Woods camps, including the two men themselves, say the dynamic between them was never quite as frosty as it was made out to be during their prime. That’s only partially true.

For the better part of 20 years, Woods and Mickelson were the faces of golf. With no disrespect to the other actors — Vijay Singh, Ernie Els, David Duval — they were bit players in this drama. No one loomed as large as Mickelson in terms of personality, resume and talent.

Tiger and Phil have played nearly three dozen times together in PGA Tour events. (Andrew Redington)

When Woods turned pro in 1996, the elder Mickelson had already won nine times on the PGA Tour. He’d also said in so many words that Woods wouldn’t dominate the way he had as an amateur. Incendiary comments they weren’t, but it angered Woods anyway, according to one insider. Others say that Tiger also viewed Mickelson as the biggest threat to his throne and that only fueled the animus.

There were other moments, too. Like Mickelson’s infamous line in a 2003 magazine interview about Tiger using “inferior” equipment, and the eye roll from Woods after Mickelson went OB during an ill-fated four-ball pairing by Captain Hal Sutton in the opening session of the 2004 Ryder Cup. Another insider told of an off-colour joke about Mickelson that Woods had gotten caught telling. And in 2007, Mickelson began working with swing coach Butch Harmon, who had worked with Woods early in his career. Mickelson went on to win the Players shortly thereafter.

And on it went.

On went Woods, too, racking up titles and setting records. But the two rarely went head to head. On the rare occasions they did, Woods outplayed Mickelson more often than not, especially in the beginning. It was something Tiger took particular enjoyment in.

Of those duels, none was more memorable than their 2005 final-round showdown at Doral. Mickelson was coming off his best season, which included a breakthrough at the Masters, and he had arrived in form. Woods, meanwhile, had spent a year overhauling his swing with Hank Haney and hadn’t won a major since the 2002 U.S. Open. Mickelson had a two-stroke lead going into the last day but Woods shot 66 to Mickelson’s 69 to win by one.

It hasn’t always gone Woods’ way, though, especially in more recent times.

In 2012, Mickelson shot a final-round 64 to dust Woods by 11 shots on his way to winning the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am. In their most recent pairing, in the first two rounds of the 2014 PGA Championship at Valhalla, Mickelson was a dozen strokes better.

Of the 35 times Mickelson and Woods have played together, however, their scoring averages are remarkably close—Woods 69.93, Mickelson 70.06—and Woods has shot the lower score 16 times, just once more than Mickelson.

“We’ve always had a mutual respect over the years, and I’ve always appreciated what he’s done for the game of golf,” Mickelson said Tuesday. “Fifteen years ago my record against him sucked, and now it’s OK. I’m doing better as time has gone on.”

So is the relationship between the two.

“I think [it] has certainly gotten a lot closer to me being a vice-captain the last couple teams and sitting there and having very long conversations with him about things,” Woods said. “When I was trying to deal with the nerve in my back and trying to come back and trying to play and I wasn’t very good, he always texted me some very encouraging words.”

Andrew Redington/Getty Images

Among them, according to Woods, were chipping tips from Mickelson when Woods was dealing with the yips in early 2015. Imagine that.

Then, at this year’s Masters, the two played a practice round together for the first time since 2001.

“Both are late in their careers and they’ve softened,” says Haney. “They’re both at different stages in life.”

Clearly.

Still, some things never change.

“As I look at the cover of the newspaper and the pairing is on there and the excitement that’s been going on around here, it gets me thinking, why don’t we just bypass all the ancillary stuff of a tournament and just go head-to-head and just have kind of a high-stakes, winner-take-all match?” Mickelson reasoned. “Now, I don’t know if he wants a piece of me, but I just think it would be something that would be really fun for us to do.”

Woods’ response?

“I’m definitely not against that,” he said. “We’ll play for whatever makes him uncomfortable.”

The post Rivals Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, together again, in perfect harmony … maybe appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

David McSweeney of noobnorm.com has produced another staggering breakdown that illustrates how dominant Woods has been throughout his two-plus decades on the PGA Tour. In November, he came up with a chart that compared Woods’ earnings per shot for his career vs. the earnings per shot of the tour’s top 10 earners in 2017. And now he’s back with this cool map:

To be exact, Woods has earned $19,981,868 in Florida, or about 20 percent of the $100 million he’s made in the U.S. Ohio ($16,335,145) ranks second on the list and California comes in third ($16,057,684), followed by Georgia (those four green jackets help) at $13,372,311. Of course, if you count the two $10 million bonuses Woods pocketed for winning the FedEx Cup in Atlanta, the Peach State would jump to No. 1.      

It comes as no surprise that Woods’ record remains remarkable when broken down like this. We’ve previously talked about how he would qualify for the World Golf Hall of Fame in four different states alone. And Florida, California, Ohio and Georgia are logical spots for Tiger to clean up based on the PGA Tour events held there. Still, the stats are staggering.

Related: How Tiger Woods’ stats this season stack up to the PGA Tour’s leaders

For instance, Woods’ combined earnings in only those top four states ($65,747,008) would place him slightly behind Jim Furyk for THIRD on the tour’s all-time list. There are only 92 other golfers who have earned at least $16 million for their careers while Tiger has done that in three different states. And how about the fact that Woods has made more money in Florida than David Duval made anywhere in the U.S. during his career?

These numbers are pretty darn impressive. And if Woods remains healthy, he’s only going to add them.

The post This map breaking down how much money Tiger Woods has earned in each state is staggering appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.