Max Adler

We're set to award the most remarkable feats from all golfers in 2024

USGA CEO Mike Whan on infighting, the ball rollback, paying amateurs and the issue that keeps him up at night

Like dating apps, golf collectives land tee times for users with various understandings.

Rafael Nadal may be the leader in the clubhouse, but there's a bounty of strong cross-sport athletes.

Dare we say everything in the golf world is starting to make sense? A horse named Dornoch won the Belmont Stakes, and a week later a hoss named DeChambeau wins by a nose over another favorite down the stretch at Pinehurst. We felt this was coming. Four weeks ago, 36 hours after Bryson DeChambeau left Kentucky drained from a thrilling Sunday 65 and runner-up finish to Xander Schauffele at the PGA Championship, he welcomed a Golf Digest production crew into his under-construction Dallas home with…

Where is the best golf town in America? At first the mind wanders southerly, looking for clusters of famous or at least very good courses with warm weather. But that’s a narrow approach. Maybe a better consideration is, where would you raise your children if you were hellbent on cultivating within them your love for the game? A properly golf-obsessed mom or dad can do that anywhere, of course, but it’s easier if there’s a village. We should be able to find places in this country where the whole…

We’re coming on three decades since Tiger Woods started shaking the world on its axis and inspiring kids in every neighborhood, and golf’s still as white as ever. The number of Black pros at the highest level can be counted on one hand, and the elite amateur and college ranks don’t look much different. Several noble organizations have done great work introducing golf to kids who otherwise would not ever grip a club, but as far as keeping them in the game long enough to develop the skills and pas…

This May I’m missing my 20-year college reunion to play in a four-day event celebrating the 25th anniversary of Bandon Dunes, at Bandon Dunes. If only more of life’s decisions were this kind of hard. I equate it with choosing music or no music on the golf course. Either way, I’m going to have a great time, though it’s possible my choice could disappoint or even offend a friend. In college, I took an art class, and there was a paint-splattered stereo at the back of the studio. With enthusiasm, I…

To meet the world with nothing but the shirt on your back is foolish.

I first met Stephen Malbon 10 years ago at golf’s annual PGA Merchandise Show in Orlando. I had attended enough of them to know the unofficial dress code for men: navy blazer, tie, khakis and the most deceptively comfortable dress shoes you could find for traipsing the harshly carpeted miles between appointments on the convention floor. Always on Friday, the final day, when the foot traffic thins considerably from its midweek peak of like 31,000 as folks cut out early to play golf and/or fly hom…

AUGUSTA, Ga.,—Automatic acridity toward anything different is what you might expect on social media, but under the Big Tree at Augusta National words are chosen more carefully. Many golf agents and business leaders were reluctant to assign a dollar value to a Thursday afternoon tee time alongside Tiger Woods, but nodded knowingly. Some wizened green jackets recalled the roomy, high-waisted silhouettes of favorite past champions like Byron Nelson and Ben Hogan and Claude Harmon, not that these me…

Eleven years and a thousand swing thoughts ago, I qualified for the national amateur. Here’s where I played to get ready

The only thing better than building your own golf course is building one with your best friend. Better still is when money isn’t really a concern because you’ve both won low-net and gross in the game of life. Irving Azoff dropped out of the University of Illinois in 1970 because it would’ve been financially reckless not to transfer his robust booking business of fraternity bands (among them REO Speedwagon) to Los Angeles. He would run Ticketmaster and later be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall…

The other day I heard a somewhat disturbing story from a golf coach. He was at a PGA Jr. League event, which, as you know, is that innovative and excellent program modeled after Little League baseball in which teams of kids wearing individually numbered “golf jerseys” compete against other towns in a scramble format. This past season had a record 71,000 participants, yet another recent golf stat with a great spin rate. Anyway, after winning a match, a boy pantomimed shooting an arrow into the sk…

As a golfer, I’m not scared by the thin end of a limb, so I’ll say it here: No rock band has a greater collective golf IQ than Umphrey’s McGee. Five of six band members are avid. They first performed together while students at the University of Notre Dame in 1998, and in the 2023 documentary “Frame X Frame: A celebration of 25 years of making music and the next best show,” an early group golf photo pops from a montage depicting about what you would expect: sex, drugs, bars, travel, inspiration,…

In an untidy London dwelling, a 33-year-old considered the stumps that were his legs and poured himself another whiskey. He hadn’t been outside in days. Eleven years later, in May 2023, this same man was atop Mount Everest. If not for the treacherous weather on the way up, his plan was to hit a golf ball. How did Hari Budha Magar climb out of depression and to the top of the world? It sounds ridiculous to suggest golf had much to do with it—compared to mountaineering the stakes are so low that e…

Four rounds in a week is probably the breaking point for a married couple with divergent enthusiasm toward golf.

A conversation with ChatGPT shows how realistic artificial intelligence has become in talking golf.

How would this end? At this point, the most holes Bo had ever played was two.

Split at the Root: Our Editorial Director breaks down the real war happening in golf.