Issuu

THE #1 GOLF PUBLICATION

GOLFDIGESTME.COM

THE SOLHEIM CUP

BATTLE FOR EUROPE THE GULF’S FAVOURITE CHAMPION THE OPEN WINNER RYAN FOX ON HIS MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH

THE RECONSTRUCTIONIST BRIAN ROLAPP’S PLAN TO SAVE THE PGA TOUR

ASIA’S NEW POWER PLAY INSIDE THE ASIAN TOUR’S ROAD BACK TO THE PGA TOUR

SEPT 2026 AED20 KD1.7 OR2.1 SR20 BD2.1

Can the USA end a decade of hurt on foreign soil?

S E P T E M B E R

2 0 2 6

New Ground, Big Stage

Bernardus Golf only opened in 2018 — eight years on, it’s hosting the biggest week in women’s golf. Page 46

4 A Different Kind Of Drama Ryan Fox’s Open win and Europe braces for the Solheim Cup. BY THOMAS WOODGATE

the starter

Golf’s greatest played without regrets.

22 Swing Analysis Brooke Henderson.

35 Sharper Edges TaylorMade Hi-Toe 5.

BY JERRY TARDE

BY DAVE ALLEN

BY THOMAS WOODGATE

24 Stripe It Off The Deck Make your 3-wood a real long-range weapon.

36 When A Hypercar Builder Turns To Golf Bugatti and Honma golf clubs.

BY MICHAEL KOLAR

BY THOMAS WOODGATE

26 Try Aaron Rai’s Simple Tip To Make More Putts

37 The Truth About Dirty Grooves

BY LUKE KERR-DINEEN

BY MIKE STACHURA

27 How To Control Distance From The Bunkers.

38 What’s in My Bag Sahith Theegala.

features

6 A New Chapter For Camiral Camiral launches a community and wildlife foundation.

46 New Ground, Old Rivalry Two rookie captains, first-time Dutch venue, and Europe defending home soil since 2015.

BY THOMAS WOODGATE

BY JOSHUA BALL

voices 8 The Undercover Pro Why we let tour players freak out.

50 Ryan Fox Ryan Fox on his historic Open win, family legacy, and love for the Gulf.

WITH JOEL BEALL

10 Journeys PGA Tour rookie Ben James. WITH KEELY LEVINS

54 Cho Minn Thant Asian Tour’s Cho Minn Thant on LIV fallout and a renewed DP World Tour path.

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY BY BERNARDUS GOLF

BY JOSHUA BALL

12 Paying Dues Should my club build a short course? BY PAUL SULLIVAN

16 Quick 9 with... General Abdullah Al Hashmi. WITH THOMAS WOODGATE

18 We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Mulligans COVER ILLUSTRATED BY CLARKWIN CRUZ

BY JORDAN DEMPSEY

BY MILES BUCKERIDGE

28 This wrist position at the top is more popular than ever. BY RON KASPRISKE

29 Johnny Miller’s Advice on Overcoming the Yips

where to play 40 An Axe To Grind A major transformation will have Medinah No. 3 looking unrecognizable to most. BY DEREK DUNCAN

BY RON KASPRISKE

56 The Reconstructionist From the Civil War to football to golf, PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp thinks history rhymes. BY JOEL BEALL

how to play

what to play

44 Blank Canvas What rising renovation costs mean for your golf course.

30 Titleist GTS Drivers

BY DEREK DUNCAN

BY PETER MORRICE

20 Master Your Wedge Play

32 Hot List Extra Why all the buzz about fairway woods?

BY GARY DE GRANDHOMME

BY MIKE STACHURA

the me club 64 Club News A gallery of some of the local winners in the amateur circuit. SEPTEMBER 2026

GOLFDIGESTME.COM 3

E D I T O R’S

LETTER

editor-in- chief Obaid Humaid Al Tayer managing partner & group editor Ian Fairservice chief commercial officer Anthony Milne group content director Thomas Woodgate thomas.woodgate@motivate.ae art director Clarkwin N. Cruz

A different kind of drama From a 39-year-old’s Claret Jug redemption to a golf course that didn’t exist eight years ago hosting the biggest week in women’s golf. BY THOMAS WOODGATE

his month’s issue arrives fresh off one of the great scenes in modern major championship golf, and we make no apology for leading with it. Ryan Fox’s win at Royal Birkdale wasn’t just a first major at 39 – it was a 12-foot birdie putt on the 18th that turned a tied85th opening round into the lowest final round in men’s major history, and the first New Zealand Open champion in 63 years. We sat down with Fox in the immediate afterglow, and what struck us most wasn’t the golf, it was the perspective. A man carrying serious sporting lineage – his father held an All Blacks scoring record for decades, his grandfather captained New Zealand at cricket – who still talks about “not being prepared to put up with what comes with the dream” as the real test of winning it. There’s also a proper regional angle here that our readers will appreciate: Fox has been vocal for years about what this part of the world has done for his career, and he doesn’t hold back on naming his favourite courses across the Gulf. It’s essential reading for anyone who’s followed his rise. Elsewhere, we turn our attention to the Netherlands, where the Solheim Cup lands for the first time this September – and where two rookie captains, Anna Nordqvist and Angela Stanford, will be tested as much as their players. Bernardus Golf didn’t exist as a golf course eight years ago – now,

GOLFDIGESTME.COM

SEPTEMBER 2026

it’s hosting the 20th edition of one of the sport’s fiercest rivalries. Our preview digs into the pairings puzzle both captains must solve, the rookies being asked to perform like veterans, and the one genuine mystery hanging over Team USA’s chances – whether Angel Yin, sidelined for much of the summer, will be fit enough to make the difference. Given the Americans haven’t won on European soil since 2015, this piece is essential context before a ball is struck. We also bring you the latest on how the LPGA Tour is reshaping itself heading into 2026 – worth a read for anyone tracking where the women’s game goes from here. Between two majors, a maiden Cup on new ground, and a tour recalibrating its future, this is a month where the stories are as compelling off the course as on it. Until next month – may your putts drop when it matters most.

sales manager Abdel Djeebet abdel.djeebet@motivate.ae gener al manager - production S. Sunil Kumar production manager Binu Purandaran assistant production manager Venita Pinto t h e g o l f d i g e s t p u b l i c at i o n s editor-in- chief Jerry Tarde senior director, business development & partnerships Greg Chatzinoff international editor Ju Kuang Tan golf digest usa editor-in- chief Jerry Tarde gener al manager Chris Reynolds editorial director Max Adler executive editor Peter Morrice managing editors Stephen Hennessey, Ryan Herrington, Jonathan Wall chief designer David Schlow pl aying editors Collin Morikawa, Jordan Spieth

head office Media One Tower, PO Box 2331, Dubai, UAE Tel: +971 4 427 3000; Fax: +971 4 428 2266

dubai media cit y SD 2-94, 2nd Floor, Building 2, Dubai, UAE Tel: +971 4 390 3550; Fax +971 4 390 4845 Email: motivate@motivate.ae

abu dhabi 14th Floor, Office 1406, Makeen Tower, 9th Street, Al Zahiyah, PO Box 43072, Abu Dhabi, UAE Tel: +971 2 677 2005; Fax: +971 2 657 3401 Email: motivate-adh@motivate.ae

saudi ar abia Regus Offices No. 455 - 456, 4th Floor, Hamad Tower, King Fahad Road, Al Olaya, Riyadh, KSA Tel: +966 11 834 3595 / +966 11 834 3596 Email: motivate@motivate.ae

london Motivate Publishing Ltd, Acre House, 11/15 William Road, London, NW1 3ER, UK Email: motivateuk@motivate.ae Golf Digest and How to play, what to play, where to play are registered trademarks of Warner Bros. Discovery. Copyright © 2024 Discovery Golf Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A. Published by Warner Bros. Discovery. Principal office: Golf Digest, 230 Park Avenue South, New York, NY, 10003. Warner Bros/Discovery Luis Silberwasser, Chairman & CEO TNT Sports; Gunnar Wiedenfels, Chief Financial Officer. Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y., and at additional mailing offices.

golfdigestme.com thomas.woodgate@motivate.ae @golfdigestme

/GolfDigestME PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID CANNON/GETTY IMAGES

Play More, Pay Less SPECIAL UAE GOLF RATES FOR EGF MEMBERS!

JA THE RESORT GOLF COURSE, DUBAI, UAE

Benefits:

• Official EGF Handicap (GHIN), recognised worldwide • Discounted green fees at all UAE golf clubs • Play in events/competitions and receive awards • Third party and property damage golfer’s insurance

egfgolf.ae

the starter

A new chapter for Camiral Spain’s no.1 golf resort launches a foundation to support local communities and wildlife ahead of the 2031 Ryder Cup

AMIRAL , the five-star resort an hour north of Barcelona, has launched Fundació Camiral, a foundation built around education, sport and conservation as part of its legacy commitment to the 2031 Ryder Cup. Working with the Impulsa Foundation, Camiral is funding scholarships and mentoring for young people in the neighbouring towns of Caldes de Malavella, Sils and Vilobí, helping open doors to further education and employment. On the course, complimentary lessons at the PGA National Academy continue to introduce local schoolchildren to golf, with pathways into the game and the wider hospitality industry. The resort’s environmental credentials run deeper still: since 2015, its grounds have been managed in partnership with Conservation of Natural Ecosystems, following European Green Deal biodiversity principles. The result is a 540-hectare estate now home to 130 bird species, alongside otters, fire salamanders and western barn owls – a genuine sanctuary as much as a golf resort. –THOMAS WOODGATE

GOLFDIGESTME.COM

SEPTEMBER 2026

PHOTOGRAPH BY STEVE CARR

THE

UNDERCOVER

PRO

Letting Pros Freak Out Caddies who stand up for themselves help nobody

GOLFDIGESTME.COM

SEPTEMBER 2026

ILLUSTRATIONS BY BRIAN AJHAR

Joaquin niem a n n got hit with a two-stroke penalty for “serious misconduct” at the U.S. Open this year for throwing a club. The coverage treated it like a character revelation, that Niemann was hotheaded, immature and couldn’t handle the major stage. I’ve been looping on tour for a long time, and my reaction when I saw the clip? Hey, at least he got it out. After an opening 78, Niemann rebounded incredibly with a 65 in round 2 and ultimately finished T-7. About five years back, my player was going through a rough stretch mentally. He had a lot of tight finishes that didn’t go his way, bad breaks, good putts that didn’t drop, the whole miserable cycle, and his sports psychologist gave him a technique. When the frustration was building and he needed to release it without an audience, he should step into a porta-potty and let it out— scream, whatever he needed. Then come back out and reset. It worked mostly. A few tournaments in, it became part of his routine. I’d see him duck in somewhere, hear some muffled noise I chose not to think about too hard, and he’d come back out looking about 15 pounds lighter—fine by me. One afternoon, my guy goes to the porta-potty set down behind the tee box as usual. A minute later, a volunteer comes speed-walking up toward me with the expression of a man who has seen something he wasn’t prepared for and waves me over. This old-timer says my player needs me and to “bring a towel.” I walk back to find my player behind the porta-potty, khaki pants soaked from the waist down in bluegreen sanitizing gel. He’d put his fist through the hand sanitizer dispenser mounted on the wall. We played the rest of the round not looking our best. That ended the bathroom breaks. The main thing people get wrong about on-course anger is assuming it belongs to a certain type of player. Every player on tour loses it at some point. The difference is the TV coverage. When Scottie Scheffler mutters something under his breath or gestures wildly after a lipped-out putt, everybody sees it. Even in the smartphone era where anything can be captured at

any second, the tour players who aren’t big stars, which is to say most, operate in darkness. There’s an art to letting out frustration. Cursing is the most efficient tool in the bag. You hit a bad shot, you say something sharp, and you walk. It’s over. The words carry the heat out of your body in a way that silence never quite does. Thirty seconds later you’re standing over your next shot with a cleaner head than the guy who bit his lip and swallowed it. The best caddies learn to read the difference between the curse that ends something and the one that starts something. They sound almost identical, but they lead to very different next shots. Another thing I’ve noticed over the years that doesn’t get talked about enough: The angriest moments on a golf course almost never follow bad golf

‘Blaming me was easier than confronting the doubt in his own swing. You absorb it, let it pass and get back to work.’ but good. A player gets through 11 holes in six under. He’s in a rhythm, the ball is going where he’s aiming, and something starts to harden in his chest—an assumption that this is just how today works. He’s been playing well, and he’ll keep playing well. The round has a momentum that feels like it belongs to him. Then he pulls a 9-iron into the bunker on a hole that has birdie all over it. His mind goes sideways, not because the shot was catastrophic, but because his expectations had quietly outrun reality. The hot-hand fallacy— the belief that playing well recently means you’ll keep playing well—is probably the single biggest source of on-course blow-ups. The player isn’t just reacting to a bad shot. He’s reacting to the gap between what he assumed was coming and what showed up. Late in a good round, that gap can be enormous.

Suppressed anger is more dangerous to a golf game than expressed anger. It carries the weight the original incident never deserved. I’ve watched players bogey four straight holes because they never properly processed the one bad break that started it. I know what that looks like from inside the ropes, the player who has mentally checked out of the round. When a bad shot is gone, the only thing left to decide is what you bring to the next one. Some players figure that out early, but some never do. That’s why I don’t think a golfer briefly making a fool of himself is a bad thing, especially if it saves the round. As a caddie, sometimes the anger comes our way. You hand over the wrong club, or you misread a yardage, or the player just needs somewhere to put his pissed-off feeling, and you’re the closest thing available. A lot of times it’s completely unjust; the read was right, the yardage was right, he just hit a bad shot, and the emotion rolls downhill. You learn to take it, not because you’re a pushover, but because pushing back in the middle of a round helps exactly nobody. One year at Mayakoba, I got chewed out for not flagging the carry over a bunker before a tee shot. I didn’t mention it because, under any normal execution, we were covering it by 30 yards. We were only in that conversation because of an incredibly poor tee shot. He knew it, too, but blaming me was easier than confronting the doubt in his own swing. You absorb it, let it pass and get back to work. The caddies who can’t do that don’t last long out here. None of this is an argument for chaos. There’s a line of behaviour, and it matters. Your frustration cannot touch other players. If your temper is landing in the sightline of someone trying to hit on the next tee, you’ve gone too far. It can’t damage the course, and it absolutely cannot go anywhere near the gallery. What we’re talking about—the sharp word, the club that gets slammed into the turf, the controlled release— lives well inside those limits. Niemann’s throw was marginal. I’ve seen far worse go unpenalised. The line must exist, and I get why officials hold it. —WITH JOEL BEALL SEPTEMBER 2026

GOLFDIGESTME.COM 9

JOURNEYS

BEN JAMES PGA TOUR AGE: 23 FROM: MILFORD, CONN.

GOLFDIGESTME.COM

SEPTEMBER 2026

Ben James: ‘I was never tempted to move south’ WITH KEELY LEVINS

y grandfather got my dad into the game at a young age. Neither played competitively, but they both became single-digit handicaps and loved it. I had plastic clubs when I was 3. I grew up playing at Great River Golf Club, a semi-private course in Milford, Conn., where my grandfather worked as a starter. I’d stay at the practice area, and he’d come check on me. I started taking lessons from the pro, Tom Rosati, before I was in kindergarten and still work with him. When I was 4, we went to Pinehurst for a family vacation. The U.S. Kids World Championships happened to be going on. My dad asked if I could play, and we learned you have to qualify. I’m sure I threw a fit. The next year, I started playing tournaments. It was fun to travel around the state and play against other kids. We went back to Pinehurst and finished at the bottom of my division. We kept trying each year, then when I was 10, I won it. I thought maybe I could be good at this, maybe I could play in college. It was so fulfilling because I knew how much work I’d put in, and how much effort it was for my dad to take time off work, drive me all the way to North Carolina and be on the bag for me. ●●●

The travel became more serious for AJGA tournaments. The courses were great, the competition was so strong; it really is a tour for juniors. I loved it. I went to a private high school, Hamden Hall Country Day, where the teachers were supportive of my travel and doing schoolwork on the road. ●●●

Most people see being a golfer in New England as a disadvantage. I get it. Many top juniors I knew moved to Florida for the winter or spent significant time there. I never moved south and was never tempted to. I liked my life and friends. I played basketball and loved having a team around me, which was a nice break from being alone on the golf course. Our family would go south for spring break occasionally, but PHOTOGRAPH BY STEVE CRAFT

that was it. I think my game benefited. I learned how to play in the wind, rain and cold. ●●●

A few towns north was an old indoor tennis facility converted into a golf practice area called Fore Seasons. They just turfed the whole thing. There was a section for hitting full shots into a net, a putting green and a sand pit for bunker shots. It was $10 for the day. As a teenager, we’d get the guys together and go hit balls for hours and hours. ●●●

My freshman year of high school, I went through a huge growth spurt. My swing looked and felt funny. I was playing in a tournament and knew a coach from UVA was watching. I shot 79, then 66. Coach Sargent gave me an offer the next day. He saw how I compressed the ball and the variety of shots I could hit, and also that I had the gear to go low. Academics are important to my parents, and Virginia not being too far from home was a bonus. It was an obvious yes. I didn’t even visit. I verbally committed myself as a freshman and officially signed my junior year. ●●●

At UVA, our practice was structured the exact opposite of how most juniors think to practice. Each day we’d hit balls for only 45 minutes and then spend over two hours in the wedge and short-game areas. Practicing that way with a group of great players, that’s what really gets you scoring. I won seven times and had 35 top-10 finishes.

●●●

My final stretch of college tournaments was intense. I was at the top of the PGA Tour U rankings and staying there would guarantee a tour card for one year. Every tournament felt like a job interview. Dr. Bob Rotella directed the psychology department at UVA for years and still comes to see the golf team twice a semester, so that was a nice contact to have during this period. ●●●

Dr. Bob and I talked about how there’s so little you actually control in golf. It’s a game that forces you to lose all the time. To play for a long time, you have to have some fun with it. That helps you get into that carefree mindset where you’re swinging well. Easier said than done, of course, but for me, embracing randomness has helped. I’ve hit terrible shots that ended up in great spots; I’ve hit great shots that ended up in terrible spots. If you can accept the uncertainty, you can try as hard as you possibly can while still not getting in your own way by taking it too seriously. ●●●

I earned my card and was a legit tour pro the day after I graduated. I led at the RBC, my debut. Battling in that familiar northeastern wind, I had a solid T-23 at the U.S. Open at Shinnecock. The Travelers Championship was also like a home game. My family’s been out a lot my first year, but going forward I’ll be more by myself. I’ve got a good crew to hang with. Jackson Koivun, Luke Clanton, Nick Dunlap, Gordon Sargent and I have known each other since AJGA. ●●●

I’m not a goal setter because I don’t want to limit myself to anything. I still like coming back to Connecticut, hanging out at Great River because it’s important to me to be whatever kind of mentor I can for the junior golfers there. But I am a tour pro, so I’ve finally caved and have a place in Florida now, too. SEPTEMBER 2026

GOLFDIGESTME.COM 11

PAYING

DUES

Nine was an oddity. No price was ever disclosed for its construction, though Shady Oaks co s t $ 3.5 million to build when a car cost $2,000—and $11 million to restore in 2020. Short courses had historical connections to short courses in Great Britain like the Children’s Course at North Berwick, but in the post-war American golf boom, they weren’t anyone’s focus. Today, we’re living through a revival for interesting short courses, and the number of holes—6, 9, 12, 13—doesn’t matter so much as the experience. The Preserve at Bandon Dunes, designed by Crenshaw and his partner, Bill Coore, is 13 holes with great views and one of the most coveted short course tee times in America. At $125 for a peak-summer green fee, it’s also one of the most expensive. The resort doubled-down by opening the 19-hole Shorty’s course in 2024. In the past five years, 41 short courses have opened in the United States, mostly at private clubs and resorts. Meanwhile, oldschool “executive” par-3 courses have suffered. The National Golf Foundation reports more than 800 closed between 2004 and 2024, a 20 percent decrease. These closures charged an average of $15 per round. If you’re lucky to play, say, one of the three new short courses Gil Hanse has designed (The Cradle at Pinehurst, The Barefoot 9 at Ohoopee Match Club or the short course at Ladera), it’s easy to get swept up in the zeitgeist. Returning enamored, a golfer might wonder, Is it worth it for my home club to build a short course? “If you’re building completely on sand, say nine holes, you could do it for $750,000,” Hanse says. “If you want to construct USGA greens and full-size golf holes, you’re in the $2 million to $3 million range. Or you could go nuts and put in SubAir and PrecisionAire systems, and you’re looking at, on the high end, $4 million.” But before the money, the first question to ask, Hanse says, is What is a club trying to achieve with the land? Does SCALING DOWN

Forty-one short courses opened in the U.S. in the past five years.

the Texas retail visionary, was Should My building Shady Oaks Country Club Build a Club, he started with the “Little Nine,” which sits completely within the routShort Course? ing of the main course. At just 1,200 WHEN MARVIN LEONARD,

BY PAUL SULLIVAN

GOLFDIGESTME.COM

SEPTEMBER 2026

yards, a mix of par 3s and short par 4s, it was built for children and beginners while Robert Trent Jones, Sr. worked on the main course. A year after the Little Nine opened, in 1958, its undulating terrain became the preferred practice area for Ben Hogan. “I watched Mr. Hogan practice out there,” Ben Crenshaw says. “It was peaceful and solemn, and no one would bother him. He was a bit of a loner.” At the time, a course like the Little

ILLUSTRATIONS BY BRIAN AJHAR

THE EXTRAORDINARY JOURNEY OF

Cat STevens

READ HIS BESTSELLING AUTOBIOGRAPHY THAT’S MAKING WAVES AROUND THE WORLD A v A i l A b l e At A l l m A j o r b o o k s t o r e s A n d o n b o o k s A r A b i A . c o m

www.motivatemedia.com

MOTIVATEBOOKS

MOTIVATE_BOOKS

MOTIVATEBOOKS

DUES

it want to use the course for juniors to free up the main course? Does it want to use it for practice? Is it for just a little bonus golf? (The latter is what Chechessee Creek Club is doing across the street from its main Coore-Crenshaw design.) “At Ladera, it was a more traditional nine-hole course where the ninth green is also the short-game area,” Hanse says. “At High Grove, we were in the 12-hole category because that’s how the land set up, and it also gave us cross-country options for drivable par 4s. We did a very small version at Ohoopee with the Barefoot 9. It’s like [the basketball game] H.O.R.S.E. You drop balls, pick a space, and say ‘here to there.’” The Creek Club in Locust Valley, N.Y., is an old-line private club hard against the Long Island Sound with a FOR EVERYONE The Cradle Gatsby-esque view at Pinehurst of Greenwich, Conn. opened in across the water. 2017 and Designed by C.B. measures just Macdonald in the 789 yards.

GOLFDIGESTME.COM

SEPTEMBER 2026

Before the money, the first question to ask, Hanse says, is What is a club trying to achieve with the land? 1920s, it was restored by Hanse in 2017. As part of that work, the club wanted to rethink the driving range, which was too small. In the process of clearing out brush, trees and bringing in 30,000 cubic feet of fill to expand the practice area, Hanse suggested adding greens—but not just any greens. The club went with five famous template holes—Short, Punchbowl, Redan, Biarritz and Eden—to mirror the greens on the course. The area is used on Sunday afternoons by families and during tournaments as a fun add-on. The rest of the time members use it as a regular range.

“We had the benefit of having this land already,” says Colin Hannaway, a Creek member who was a club liaison to Hanse. The practice area redo cost slightly over $1 million, and each year adds an additional $20,000 to $30,000 to the maintenance budget. “We maintain the range like we do the golf course,” Hannaway says. Clubs that add short courses, which are by default unique assets, fund them in unique ways. At Deerwood Country Club, a residential golf community in Jacksonville, the members voted to add the short course to give themselves a place to play during the yearlong renovation of the main course. Since it was golf-centric, the club financed The Approach through member donations rather than a club-wide assessment. “We had 30 donations from a few hundred dollars up to $30,000,” says Thayer Kern, general manager. Then, “One family contributed $50,000 for the naming rights.” The Approach Presented by the Eiras Family is six holes in what used to be the driving range. “Supporting the club, knowing our name would be up there, that legacy was important for my kids and for us,” says Erin Eiras, a local businesswoman who grew up at the club. She is also using her name on the course to promote more access for female members. While short courses are en vogue today, they have a history of being a curse. The same year Shady Oaks opened the Little Nine, Cliff Roberts, co-founder of Augusta National, teamed up with the architect George Cobb to build Augusta’s par-3 course, the most famous short course in America. In 1987, Crenshaw was in contention to win the par-3 contest. “I had a good round going,” he said. “I was one stroke back on nine.” Knowing that a winner had never gone on to win the Masters, his father found him and scolded him, “Son, what are you doing. Hit it in the water!” Two-time Masters champ Crenshaw won that Par-3 contest with a score of 5-under, three shots better than his T-4 finish that year.

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF PINEHURST

PAYING

LAST CHANCE TO VOTE DEADLINE: SEPTEMBER 25 VOTE HERE

BEST LADIES’ DAY

BEST LADIES’ NIGHT

BEST HAPPY HOUR

FIND OUT MORE

BEST LIVE MUSIC VENUE

BEST RESTAURANT BAR

BEST COCKTAIL BAR

FOR EVENT SPONSORSHIP, TABLE BOOKINGS AND GENERAL ENQUIRIES

violeta.popescu@motivate.ae | pamela.bayram@motivate.ae | ali.mohammad@motivate.ae

WhatsOn.ae Sponsors

WhatsOnDubai

Beverage Partner

Audio Visual Partner

#WONightlifeAwards

Vote Processing Partner

Presented By

INTERVIEW

Quick 9 with... General Abdullah Al Hashmi As he marks one year as President of the Emirates Golf Federation, General Abdullah reflects on legacy, growth and why the title itself has never really mattered to him.

ou’re about to mark one year as President of the Emirates Golf Federation. When you look back on that first 12 months, what feelings come to mind? Honestly, I can’t say the feeling is any different. My name became President of the Emirates Golf Federation, but I was doing the same thing I was doing four years before that: helping, working with the team, taking charge of the federation as general manager, really. I was trying to make sure that, working with Sheikh Fahim when he was President, we achieved our tasks. So the title, in that sense, doesn’t really matter. What matters is developing the game, developing the players, seeing our federa-

GOLFDIGESTME.COM

SEPTEMBER 2026

tion progress and climb the ladder, and building the connection with the community, the clubs and the game of golf in general. I’m not trying to make this my own legacy and live there forever. The most important thing is setting up a system that works and for the federation to keep functioning. Once you set that up in every part of the organisation, it takes a lot off your shoulders, and it means you’ve done something. The only real difference the title gives you is the ability to make a difference. ●●●

Is there a particular moment from this past year that you’re especially proud of? If there’s one thing, it happened just last week. Sheikh Fahim – our honour-

able Chairman now – paid us a surprise visit here [in Morocco, where this interview was taking place]. When he was President, he never used to come and “camp” with us like that, so it meant a great deal that he chose to spend a week with us. He said to me, “Since you’ve been on board, everybody sees the jump you have done in the federation.” I never really thought of myself that way, but hearing it from him made me very proud – I carry enormous respect for him, for everything he’s achieved. Of course, none of it would have happened without his support, the executive board’s support, the previous board’s support, and the team around me. We can feel the difference across the board: our relationship with

PHOTOGRAPH BY MARTIN DOKOUPIL/GETTY IMAGES

WITH THOMAS WOODGATE

the clubs, the national team, the connection between players and the federation, and our standing with other federations across Asia and Europe. Emirates Golf Federation being recognised well on the international stage makes a real difference, and hearing that recognition from Sheikh Fahim meant a great deal. ●●●

Golf has grown enormously across the region over the past decade. What shift stands out to you most? I can really only speak to what I’ve seen at the Emirates Golf Federation, because I’d have loved to see more happen region-wide. If there’s one thing missing, it’s public golf courses. In a place like Australia, you’ll find three or four public courses in every city, offering affordable rounds and facilities that everyone can access – that’s something the region still lacks. ●●●

And in terms of participation itself, what changes are you seeing on the ground? What I have seen, and what excites me, is more nationals of the region taking up golf. It’s happening in the UAE, and it’s a big change – over the last three or four years especially, we’ve seen far more Emiratis playing. We’ve done a good job spreading the game here and getting it recognised as part of national sport, and the Ministry recognises our federation at a high level, which has made a real difference. I’d love to see the same momentum in the wider GCC. Saudi Arabia is improving and investing, Oman too. Morocco remains the regional leader – here on the driving range on a weekend, you’ll see hundreds of kids playing golf – and that’s what we want to see replicated elsewhere. ●●●

Women’s participation has clearly become a real growth area for the federation. How are you building on that? Female participation has grown by around 60 percent over the last three years, with roughly a 35 percent increase in women now holding an official handicap. Working with the R&A, and through women’s leadership programmes we’ve implemented at federation level, we’ve seen a real shift

in participation both in clubs and in schools. Golf is “cool” for women now, which is a fantastic thing to see. Practically, we run women’s series events, par-3 formats, and give women places in club opens with tournaments split across different handicap categories – so they’re playing against strong players but still competing within their own bracket, with prizes for their category so nobody feels left out. We also get women playing alongside their children in junior tournaments; it becomes a real social occasion, with the whole family out at the club. That’s one of the best ways to build the wider golf community – get everybody involved, not just in the game itself, but in what comes after it, too.

I’d love to see more UAE kids playing the game. The reason I love it so much is that it’s a game of discipline. It gets your mind into the game in a way no other sport quite does. ●●●

The federation’s mandate spans everything from grassroots junior programmes to elite performance. How do you balance investment across that whole spectrum? [Laughs] That’s Kieran’s [Pratt, Director of Operations] nightmare – I keep tasking him, that’s why he’s got no hair left! When I joined the federation around five years ago, we had maybe 25 to 30 tournaments a season. Now we’re running over 100 – full events every weekend, and often midweek too: junior events, ladies’ events, big events, small events, elite level, feeders, and feeders-to-feeders all the way up to the main tours. Then you have high-profile competitions like the UAE Cup, which in its second year delivered 380 WAGR points, making it one of the highest-ranked amateur events anywhere, attracting top players from around the world.

●●●

With so much going on across the calendar, how important is the wider community in making all of that possible? It’s a huge amount of coordination, and we lean heavily on volunteers – people in the UAE who simply love the game. That’s one way we get the community genuinely involved with the federation. We don’t want people to see us as just a government entity; we’re trying to make this the people’s federation. It’s going to take time, and it isn’t easy, but it’s doable. ●●●

If you look two or three years ahead, what would success look like to you? To have my own academy – a public one – with thousands of kids playing golf. I’d love to see more UAE kids playing the game. The reason I love it so much is that it’s a game of discipline. It gets your mind into the game in a way no other sport quite does. You spend hours on the driving range, on the course, and it takes you away from all the other distractions – good and bad – in the community, the culture, wherever you are. It protects kids, and it takes them to a different level of mindset and discipline. I’d love to see more of that. ●●●

Away from the boardroom, what’s your go-to course when you get the chance to play for yourself? In the UAE, I probably played about 20 rounds all last year – that’s it. But Morocco is my summer home, and when I’m here I try to make up for it. I play almost every day except Monday. It’s peace of mind, more than anything. It doesn’t really matter which course, as long as I get to play. I brought my wife and kids out here recently, and my granddaughter – she’s seven – rode with me in the cart for a few holes for the first time. Afterwards she said, “Now I know why Granddad loves to play golf.” I asked her why, and she said, “This is so peaceful.” It really does take you away from the office, the stress, any pressure or obligation. You’re still thinking about the shots – good ones, bad ones – but the green space brings real peace to the heart and mind. SEPTEMBER 2026

GOLFDIGESTME.COM 17

THE

O N E’S

GOOD

‘We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Mulligans’ Golf’s greatest played without regrets BY JERRY TARDE

Golf history is usually made not over a whole career but with a single shot or decision. Both good and bad, a golfer’s life can often be defined by “what might have been.” If only real golf had mulligans, do-overs, second chances. 18

GOLFDIGESTME.COM

SEPTEMBER 2026

The best example for those of us of a certain age was the 8-iron second shot to the 72nd green at Turnberry in 2009 struck by—egad!—a 59-year-old Tom Watson. It hit a hard spot, bounded over the green, and Tom took three from the edge that kept him from winning a sixth

Open Championship. My esteemed colleague Jaime Diaz argues it wasn’t the 8-iron he needed the mulligan on but the decision to putt the long one. “Out of fear, he putted it,” says Diaz, “when he should have trusted his great chipping and popped up a little wedge.” An up-and-down would have galvanised a generation of gray heads forever. Historically, one of golf ’s greatest misses has to be Sam Snead’s second on the par-5 final hole at Philadelphia Country Club in the 1939 U.S. Open going for the green in two thinking he needed a birdie to win and making a triple-bogey 8, when a pitch-out par would have taken the title. Four-times a runner-up, Snead never won the Open.

Or maybe it was Arnold Palmer ’s seven-foot par putt he left short on the 71st hole at Olympic in the 1966 Open for the greatest collapse of his or anyone’s career (leading by seven strokes with nine holes to play). Romantics might say it was Ben Hogan’s third shot to the 71st hole at Cherry Hills that spun back into the water, but it gave a charging Arnie the 1960 U.S. Open, and that was even a better story. In modern times, Jean Van de Velde botched the 18th hole at Carnoustie in the 1999 Open when he tried to get on in regulation, though a lay-up would have won. Van de Who? You could also take your pick of Greg Norman’s approach shots flared to the right on 18 to lose a Grand Slam of majors. The last hole at Winged Foot posed a mulligan situation for two players in the 2006 U.S. Open—Phil Mickelson foozled his driver into a trash can on another fairway while Colin Montgomerie butchered his 7-iron approach, both for double bogeys, when a par would have won for either player. (Honestly, the mulligan I’d propose for Mickelson would be when he passed on the Bob Jones Award for Sportsmanship a decade ago—the only person ever to say no to the USGA’s highest honour— which seemed to signal the beginning of a downward spiral that only has accelerated since.) The most heart-breaking stroke might have been I.K. Kim’s one-foot putt she missed on the 72nd of the 2012 Kraft Nabisco (now Chevron) that cost her a major, losing in a playoff to Sun Young Yoo. Who’s counting, but Hale Irwin whiffed a two-inch tap-in in the third round of the 1983 Open at Birkdale and lost by one. Maybe Doug Sanders’ yipped two-and-a-half footer on the last hole at St. Andrews to lose the 1970 Open or Scott Hoch’s two-footer on the first playoff hole of the 1989 Masters weren’t so bad. You might say Curtis Strange was offered a mulligan in the 1985 Masters when he arrived at the 13th hole with a three-stroke lead in the final round ONE-TAKE WONDERS Bobby Jones, Annika Sorenstam, Jack Nicklaus and Mickey Wright.

and went for the green in two, coming up short in the water, and then did it again at the 15th hole, losing to Bernhard Langer by two chokes. Speaking of water balls, Jordan Spieth’s splash on the 12th hole in the 2016 Masters robbed him of back-to-back Masters at age 22 and obviously a different career trajectory. Surely 21-year-old Rory McIlroy’s hooked tee shot into the cabins on the 10th hole in the 2011 Masters would have made his Grand Slam career even grander. Shots you witness in person carry more weight, so for me I’ll never forget Langer in “the War by the Shore” at Kiawah when he missed a six-footer on the last hole to tie the match with Hale Irwin and lose the 1991 Ryder Cup, 14 1/2 to 13 1/2. Given a mulligan, I can say with certainty the German would not have missed.

The mulligan I’d propose for Mickelson would be when he passed on the Bob Jones Award for Sportsmanship. You might argue the worst miscarriage of justice was the 2017 ANA Inspiration when a TV viewer emailed to report a misplaced drop from the previous day costing Lexi Thompson a fourstroke penalty and what surely would have been her second official major. Can you get a mulligan on a rules violation? Just ask Dustin Johnson who grounded his club in a bunker he didn’t think was a bunker for a penalty that cost him the 2010 PGA at Whistling Straits. If you could use a pencil for a mulligan, Roberto De Vicenzo’s scorecard error in the 1968 Masters has to be in the photo finish. The oddest mulligan might be a wardrobe malfunction that Nancy Lopez blamed for costing her the 1977 U.S. Women’s Open (the title she never won): a broken zipper on her favorite blue shorts that was such a distraction she never could focus on her round and

finished two shots behind Hollis Stacy. Then there’s the anti-mulligan—the shot pros would NOT want to play over. One that immediately comes to mind is my old pal Jerry Pate’s 5-iron from the rough over water on the 72nd hole at Atlanta Athletic Club with a onestroke lead in the 1976 U.S. Open. The 22-year-old hit it to two feet and won by two. Among the old-timers, you’d have to include Gene Sarazen’s double-eagle “shot heard round the world” in the second Masters, or Lee Trevino’s flagstick-rattling chip-in for par on the 71st hole at Muirfield in the 1972 Open that Tony Jacklin called “daylight robbery.” The same could be said for Watson’s pitch-in at the 71st hole of the 1982 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach. Seve’s repeatedly punching the air after holing a 12-footer at the end of the 1984 Open Championship at St. Andrews became his seminal moment. But the one that’s hardest to beat in the modern era is Tiger’s miracle pitch from behind the 16th green in the 2005 Masters that became the iconic Nike commercial. It’s so indelibly marked in everyone’s mind, no further description is necessary. Augusta National has exercised more mulligans than any tournament in history, making the Masters seemingly more dramatic year after year. It all started when the first Masters in 1934 had reversed nines because the current back nine was in the low-lying areas and experienced frost delays. They switched to the current configuration in 1935. Would the Masters be the Masters if Amen Corner was the second, third and fourth holes? Would Dan Jenkins ever have said, “The Masters doesn’t begin until the back nine on Sunday”? It’s a testimony to the men, you might say, that Jack Nicklaus and Bobby Jones don’t really figure in any mulligan debate. The same could be said of Mickey Wright and Annika Sorenstam. You’d be hard-pressed to identify a single shot or decision any of them needed to play over that would have improved their storied careers. Gods have no regrets. They simply made more right decisions and hit more shots flush in the clutch than any golfers in history. In the words of a poker player, you can still hear them say, “No, thanks. I’ll play these.” SEPTEMBER 2026

GOLFDIGESTME.COM 19

E D I T E D

B Y

T H O M A S

GOLFDIGESTME.COM

SEPTEMBER 2026

W O O D G A T E

Master your wedge play Wedge play is where scorecards are won or lost, yet it’s often the most rushed part of practice. At the Tommy Fleetwood Academy at Yas Links, PGA Professional Gary De Grandhomme breaks it down into three checkpoints: set 60-70% of your weight on your lead foot and keep it there; let your chest rotate through the shot instead of flicking your hands; and commit fully through impact rather than decelerating or scooping. Power isn’t the priority here – contact and control are. Get the setup right, commit to the shot, and the rest takes care of itself.

SEPTEMBER 2026

GOLFDIGESTME.COM 21

S W ING ANALYSIS

GOLFDIGESTME.COM

SEPTEMBER 2026

AGE 28 LIVES Naples, Fla. STATS (LPGA TOUR RANK IN ‘26)

Total driving: 6th; Accuracy: 17th (74.7%); Distance: 48th (268.2 yards) NEED TO KNOW

The winningest pro golfer in Canadian history with 14 tour wins, including two majors (2016 KPMG Women’s PGA; 2022 Evian). She turned pro at 17. Grew up in Smiths Falls, Ontario, where she played hockey (goalie) from ages 8 to 14.—DAVE ALLEN

HEADSHOT BY KATE MCSHANE/GETTY IMAGES

Brooke Henderson: Stability, Steadiness and Length

1. BUILD A SOLID FOUNDATION

2. LEVERAGE YOUR SPEED

3. FIND MORE FAIRWAYS

What Henderson lacks in size (5-foot-4), she makes up for with exceptional core strength, balance and agility, says her dad and swing coach, Dave Henderson. The wide stance (heels outside shoulder-width) is something she developed playing hockey, so she would never be knocked off her skates. It might cost her a little distance, Dave says, but it helps ensure solid contact.

She used a 48-inch driver prior to 2022, when the length was capped at 46 inches. She immediately lost 17 yards with the shorter club, Dave says, so they had to find ways to gain back her length. One way is by hinging her wrists earlier on the backswing, creating additional leverage between her lead arm and clubshaft that, when released, transfers more speed at impact.

Henderson’s foot action is noticeable (the left heel is off the ground), but she doesn’t lose control of the clubface, Dave says. Just as important for accuracy is her steady head and the extension of the arms in the followthrough. Get the shaft pointing down the line like it’s chasing after the ball. “With that extension there, the ball is going straight as an arrow,” he says.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MATT TANNEHILL

SEPTEMBER 2026

GOLFDIGESTME.COM 23

RULES

Ball in Pocket? Here’s how to score it for handicap purposes BY RON KASPRISKE

OU MIGHT KNOW SOME golfers at your club or course who have a habit of raking putts that are not “gimmes.” They might even pick up their ball after a hole has been decided in match play, even though they still have some work to do to earn that bogey. Can you pencil in whatever number you want on a scorecard when your ball is in your pocket? If you’re playing by the official Rules of Handicapping, the answer is an emphatic NO. Rule 3.3 covers what to do when a hole is started but you don’t hole out. Subject to other provisions in the handicapping rules, you must record your most likely SELF EVALUATION score or net double Be honest with bogey, whichever is yourself when lower, “as appropriputting down a ate for the situation score for that pick-up hole. and depending on

GOLFDIGESTME.COM

SEPTEMBER 2026

the format of play.” What determines your most likely score? You have to follow guidelines set by the USGA. That score should be: • The number of strokes already taken to reach a position on a hole. • The number of strokes you would most likely require to complete the hole from that position. • Any penalty strokes incurred during play of the hole. You might have thought you have to take net double bogey when you pick up for handicap purposes. That’s not always true. In the case of a player who knocks it stiff on a par 3 and picks the ball up a foot or so from the cup, one stroke should be added to the score (so it’s a birdie). Any putt on the green from five feet or closer is considered made. If a ball is five to 20 yards from the

hole and you pick it up, you would add either two or three strokes to your score. It’s at your discretion but you should factor the difficulty of the hole and your skill level. Finally, if you were outside of 20 yards, add three or four strokes (again, it’s at your discretion). In most cases, you would likely be at a maximum of net double bogey—but not always. For example, a 25-handicap golfer gets two shots on the seven hardest holes, so a net double bogey on a par 4 could be an 8 and as high as a 9 on a par 5. Two other things to consider: (1) There is no limit to pick-up holes for handicap purposes provided you had a valid reason. Maybe some of the greens had damage, rendering them unputt-able. (2) If you pick up while using a format where holing out is mandatory ( “rattle-bottom”), you would be disqualified for doing so.

PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHEN DENTON

SHORTLIST ANNOUNCED VIEW HERE

FIND OUT MORE

FOR EVENT SPONSORSHIP, TABLE BOOKINGS AND GENERAL ENQUIRIES manish.chopra@motivate.ae | mario.saaiby@motivate.ae | hitesh.kumar@motivate.ae

GulfBusiness.com Sponsor

Beverage partner

GulfBusiness

Vote processing partner

PR partner

#GulfBusinessAwards

Presented by

BOTTOM

Get Laser Focused Try Aaron Rai’s simple tip to make more putts BY LUKE KERR-DINEEN

GOLFDIGESTME.COM

SEPTEMBER 2026

PGA CHAMPION AARON RAI does some quirky things, like wearing two rain gloves, putting head covers on his irons and using colourful tees. However, one thing he does on the greens is anything but peculiar and might be a reason he’s playing so well. It’s also something you can steal. En route to winning his first major in May, Rai led the PGA Championship field in strokes gained and made a 68-footer for birdie on the 17th hole on Sunday. Credit his focus for that putting performance. In addition to adding the initials of family members on his golf balls, he also draws a line all the way around them and adds a small dot in

the middle (above). The line is a common addition for alignment, but the dot is the thing you might want to copy. He stares at that tiny circle for a few seconds before taking the putter back, and that helps him make the best stroke possible. It’s a technique known as “quiet eye.” Staring at the dot calms the brain, prevents the eyes from moving around and results in a cleaner stroke. This strategy might be particularly helpful if you tend to take a peek when you hit important putts. “It keeps my head steady,” Rai says. ON THE DOT

Looking at a tiny mark on your ball can quiet your mind.

PHOTOGRAPH BY LUKE KERR-DINEEN

RATTLE

GIMME

Tap-In Sandies How to control distance from the bunkers BY JORDAN DEMPSEY

M ANY A M ATEURS ARE happy just to get out of a greenside bunker in one shot. But if you want to take your sand play to the next level and get up and down more often, you have to learn how to control the distance the ball flies. Here’s a simple technique I know will help you. Take your normal bunker setup (ball forward, weight on your front

PHOTOGRAPHS BY J.D.CUBAN

foot, shaft neutral) and make a threequarter-length backswing. Whether the pin is tucked close to you, in the middle of the green or on the far side, keep the length of your backswing the same, but vary the length of your follow-through. Pay attention to the orientation of the butt end of the club and your body at the finish. That’s how you regulate how far the ball travels. The shorter the shot, the closer the grip finishes to your lead hip; the longer the shot, the farther away. A good rule is that for greenside bunker shots 10 yards or less, the butt end of the club should finish near your hip pocket (below, left). For a medium shot of 15-to-20 yards, finish it at your rib cage (below, center). For the longest of bunker shots, finish it about

ONE

THING

shoulder height (below, right). Take a few swings outside of the bunker, visualising where the butt end of the grip is going to finish for the length of shot you’re trying to hit. Hold that finish for a few seconds, then repeat once more before stepping in to execute the shot. If you can replicate that same finish on your real swing, the ball should have the right amount of energy to finish near the hole. CHECK THE SHAFT

Focus on the butt end of the club and where it finishes.

—WITH DAVE ALLEN JORDAN DEMPSEY, one of Golf Digest’s Best Teachers in Florida, teaches at the PGA Tour Performance Center at TPC Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach.

SEPTEMBER 2026

GOLFDIGESTME.COM 27

THE

CORE

DUMBBELL EXTENSIONS (3 sets, 15 reps, brace the arm)

DUMBBELL FLEXIONS (3 sets, 15 reps, brace the arm)

This wrist position at the top is more popular than ever. Should you be doing it, too? BY RON KASPRISKE

HE LIST OF MAJOR champions who swing a golf club with their lead wrist in flexion (bowed, bent toward the palm) at the top of the swing is pretty impressive: Dustin Johnson, Jon Rahm, Jordan Spieth, Xander Schauffele, Collin Morikawa—even Arnold Palmer and Lee Trevino did it. If you wonder why so many golfers bow the lead wrist, it’s because it does a lot to square and deloft the clubface at impact without any split-second hand manipulations. It can cure a slice, boost smash factor or help breed consistency in ball-striking, says Golf Digest Teaching Professional Josh Zander. However, wrist flexion would likely be poison to golfers with a strong leadhand grip, Zander says. Those golfers already have the bias of a shut, delofted clubface, so bowing would likely produce smothered, pulled hooks. Dan Hellman, one of Golf Digest’s Best Fitness Trainers in America, says the move also can result in pain and 28

GOLFDIGESTME.COM

SEPTEMBER 2026

injuries to various parts of the arm. Elbow tendinitis, fractures to wrist bones like the hook of hamate, and tendon ruptures are among the causeand-effect issues, he says. In fact, Spieth had to have surgery for a ruptured tendon in his left wrist suffered at the 2024 British Open. Was it because he bows his left wrist as he takes the club back? Or perhaps because of his idiosyncratic followthrough where he lets his lead elbow jut toward the target, which hinders the lead wrist from fully releasing its flexed position? Maybe, maybe not. One thing is for sure, Hellman says, the human body was not designed to “repeat a position of strain over and over again.” Bowing your lead wrist is definitely a position of strain. Older golfers should be particularly careful because the risk of cartilage loss in the wrists increases with age, he says. According to the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, articular-cartilage injuries can result from a number of causes, including repetitive smaller impacts to the joint. “If you want to try bowing, I strongly suggest you perform exercises to maintain the strength, stability and mobility of the wrist and elbow joints as well as the soft tissue around them,” Hellman says (he offers four here, right). “Your wrist and elbow will thank you, and you will be less likely to miss weeks of golf waiting for your injuries to heal.”

SUPINATIONS (3 sets, 15 reps, light weight, brace the arm)

PRONATIONS (3 sets, 15 reps, light weight, brace the arm)

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOSH MCKIBLE

To Bow or Not To Bow

PHOTOGRAPH BY J.D. CUBAN

THE

Johnny Miller’s Advice on Overcoming the Yips He had them BY RON KASPRISKE

PHOTOGRAPH BY AUGUSTA NATIONAL/GETTY IMAGES

IFTY YEARS AGO, Johnny Miller won the Open Championship at Royal Birkdale, which is the host site again this year. It was his second and last major win, and soon after, it became apparent that his time as golf’s No. 1 was coming to an end—and the putting yips played a big role. Miller went three-plus seasons after Birkdale before he won again, though he did regain some form in 1981, winning twice and finishing runner-up at the Masters. During the latter part of his career, Miller tried all sorts of things to overcome the tremors in his hand that would manifest as he

attempted to strike a putt. He changed grips, postures and even resorted to long putters—one of which helped him win the 1987 AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am. Miller was a longtime contributor to Golf Digest and addressed the topic of the yips in the December 2001 issue. Here’s what he said: “You’ve no doubt heard of the ‘yips,’ the uncontrollable spasm that causes the putter to all FIRM STROKE Focus on the but jump out of your left wrist hands, sending even to help short putts careening avoid that far past the hole. The nasty yip cause of the yips has at impact.

ARCHIVES

been attributed to a loss of control of the right hand. That’s why so many players switched to the extra-long putter or have opted to putt cross-handed—they take the right hand out of the stroke. “As one who has battled the yips for years, I have a different opinion. The source of the yips is the left hand. On the forward stroke, when your nerves go haywire, your left hand stops moving forward just before the putterhead contacts the ball. When that happens, the only way the putterhead can contact the ball is for you to buckle the left wrist. Meanwhile, the right hand— the innocent party—is suddenly forced to apply extra speed because the left hand wasn’t doing its job. “The key, then, is to stop the left wrist from breaking down. This is easier said than done, but just thinking about it will help. Maintain the same left-wrist angle from start to finish, and keep the left hand moving through impact. Your short putting will improve immediately.” SEPTEMBER 2026

GOLFDIGESTME.COM 29

Titleist drivers have been the most played on the PGA Tour for the last seven years, so it was no surprise that the company’s new GTS lineup (GTS2, GTS3, GTS4) found its way into more than a third of tour bags when it debuted in March. What’s new? The driver’s body now features more composite than metal, a first in company history. The rear shell is made from a lightweight carbon fibre permeated with a polymer resin that saves as much as 30 grams. Rest assured, the classic Titleist crack still rings out at impact. In other words, expect an eighth straight year at No. 1 for No. 1.

GOLFDIGESTME.COM

SEPTEMBER 2026

E D I T E D

PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHEN DENTON

B Y

P E T E R

M O R R I C E

SEPTEMBER 2026

GOLFDIGESTME.COM 31

HOT

LIST

EXTRA

Why All the Buzz About Fairway Woods? Advances in technology, new head designs and smarter fitting have made these previously hard-to-hit clubs great choices for weekend golfers and pros like LPGA player Gaby Lopez

PHOTOGRAPH BY BRIAN SPURLOCK/ICON SPORTSWIRE VIA GETTY IMAGES

BY MIKE STACHURA

XXX GOLFDIGESTME.COM 32 GOLF DIGEST

SEPTEMBER ISSUE2026 X 2026

HOT

LIST

EXTRA

AS THE LONGEST AND LOWESTlofted club in your bag that you need to be able to hit off the turf, the fairway wood is the toughest for most golfers to launch effectively. That’s why when we pore over the data from our Hot List testing to find the fairway woods with the best launch numbers, we think there’s an eager audience of struggling golfers looking for help. Launching the ball properly with a long club can help you avoid disasters and hit more greens. In recent years, manufacturers have looked to inject more efficient power into their fairway woods with not only thinner and hotter faces but with soles that keep the mass low for a centre of gravity that optimises launch. Interestingly, these new face-flexing designs are producing more distance from shallower, lower-profile faces that help average golfers feel more confident about hitting a club without much loft from a tight fairway lie. That doesn’t mean hitting fairway woods still doesn’t require precision in your execution. One thing we’ve consistently found in recent years is our players tend to hit high-lofted fairway woods (4-, 5- and 7-woods) more consistently than traditional 15-degree 3-woods. The lesson there is perhaps it’s worth rethinking what your lowestlofted fairway wood should be. A loft like 16.5 degrees certainly will be more playable than a traditional 3-wood, especially for shots off the deck. To identify the best-launching fairway woods, we took launch monitor data from our Hot List player testing. Every shot hit during the Hot List was tracked by the Rapsodo MLM2 Pro launch monitor. We then analysed the data by normalising each club to each player’s average launch conditions with the fairway woods he or she hit. We focused not only on launch angle but also the numbers for higher apex height as well as the most playable landing angles (steep to hold greens but not so vertical that you weren’t going to get some rollout). The fairway woods that consistently delivered the most aboveaverage numbers per player across our group of 3-, 5- and 7-woods within each 34

GOLFDIGESTME.COM

SEPTEMBER 2026

model earn our highest marks as the best-launching fairway woods. (See the full list of fairway woods that made this year’s Hot List at golfdigest.com.) Here are some numbers you should think about. According to Trackman, the LPGA Tour averages with a 3- and 5-wood—which should be especially helpful to recreational golfers because LPGA players hit more fairway woods than PGA Tour players—include launch

angles of 11-12.5 degrees and spin rates in the 2,600-rpm range for 3-woods and the 4,500 range for 5-woods. Another note about the LPGA averages: Both the 3- and 5-wood numbers on Trackman show negative attack angles (about 1-1.5 degrees). In other words, the best fairway-wood players are hitting ever so slightly down on the ball. They’re not trying to sweep or hit up on these lowlofted clubs and neither should you.

HOT LIST TESTING

We tracked data on launch, spin and trajectory to evaluate fairway woods. Here are the clubs some of our testers liked best. WEI MAO, 55 14-handicap Callaway Quantum Max “It looks like it’s going to be easy to hit, and that’s exactly what happened. It was easy to get good distance, really good launch numbers. I was able to work the ball a little bit but not a tonne. It just wanted to go long and straight. Overall, really fun to hit.”

ANAND MUDALIAR, 43 6-handicap Mizuno JPX One “Easy to launch, very forgiving, low spin. I was able to actually move the ball from right to left and left to right with the 3-wood. It worked in every category, from off the tee to off the turf. This one really performs across the board.”

PETER LEE, 58 8-handicap TaylorMade Qi4D “I love the way this club looks at address—very clean, very cool and modernlooking. And, man, it’s got some power. The sound and the feel are exactly what I’m looking for, not too loud but not too muted either.”

ALEJANDRA BEDOYA, 27 6-handicap Titleist GT1 “It was very easy to repeat the same type of shot over and over again. Easy to keep a controlled ball flight. Easy to get it high in the air without losing it. Almost felt like the ball was trying to keep climbing up instead of just dropping. It’s consistent, very powerful and easy to hit.”

in association with

CLUB NEWS

opens the face for flop shots or greenside spin, where ball-to-face contact happens well away from the centre. Steeper sidewalls and sharper internal radii, made possible by the saw-milling process, increase friction at impact for more spin and control. Laser-etched micro-channels on the face also direct moisture away from the strike zone, useful on the dewier mornings that punctuate the UAE’s cooler months.

Sharper edges TaylorMade’s Hi-Toe wedge has always been the one that looks different in the bag. With the Hi-Toe 5, it now feels different, too BY THOMAS WOODGATE

PHOTOGRAPH SUPPLIED

THERE’S A REASON the HiToe line has built such a following since it first appeared: the expanded toe and full-face grooves make no attempt to blend in. The new Hi-Toe 5 keeps that visual signature, but underneath it, TaylorMade has made its most significant change to the range yet.

Grooves that go the distance The saw-milled grooves, shared with TaylorMade’s Milled Grind 5 irons and wedges, now extend from heel to toe across the entire face, rather than stopping short of the toe as on previous models. That matters for anyone who

A grind for every lie Perhaps the more practical story here, particularly for golfers navigating both firm summer turf and softer winter greens, is the choice of five sole grinds. ATS offers all-round versatility through its four-way cambered sole. ATV pairs a concave sole with asymmetric bounce for players who favour an open face. ATX, built on three independent sole ledges, suits steeper attack angles. ATW, the widest and highest-bounce of the five, is designed for maximum forgiveness from bunkers and soft lies. ATC, the low-bounce option, rewards a shallower angle of attack on tight lies. Available in four finishes, from tour raw to aged copper, and with a full personalisation programme for those wanting initials, text or logos stamped into the sole, the Hi-Toe 5 is as much a statement piece as a scoring club. For UAE golfers whose short game has to work across two very different seasons, the range of grinds may prove the more valuable upgrade than the forging itself.

Forged for feel Every wedge in the Hi-Toe 5 family is forged from soft carbon steel, a first for the line, which previously relied on cast construction. According to Matt Bovee, TaylorMade’s senior director of product category, the switch delivers “a softer, more responsive feel at impact,” alongside the kind of manufacturing precision that helps golfers dial in distance and trajectory with more confidence. The headline features remain: the enlarged toe, the full-face grooves, a wedge unafraid to look like a scoring tool rather than a safe, symmetrical clone of the rest of the set. SEPTEMBER 2026

GOLFDIGESTME.COM 35

in association with

CLUB NEWS

When a hypercar builder turns to golf Bugatti and Honma have joined forces on a collection of clubs that trade the driving range for the workshop floor – and price tags to match BY THOMAS WOODGATE

drawing on the rear-end design of the Bugatti Tourbillon, its sole modelled on the brand’s signature tachometers. Alongside it sits the Beres Super Premium Collection, finished in Bugatti’s familiar ice-blue two-tone – the rarest 5 Star edition limited to just 20 sets worldwide.

Prices span Dhs11,750 for an entrylevel putter to Dhs264,000 for a full 5 Star set, edging out a new Corvette Stingray. For golfers, the more tempting proposition may be the performance-focused Tour World Premium line – proof that even Bugatti knows a set needs to play, not just pose.

PHOTOGRAPHS SUPPLIED

BUGATTI HAS NEVER DONE anything by halves, and its first foray into golf is no exception. Partnering with Japanese craftsman Honma, the French marque has produced a range of clubs that read more as collectible objects than sporting equipment. The centrepiece is the Super Premium Bugatti Putter, its milled head

GOLFDIGESTME.COM

SEPTEMBER 2026

YOUR

QUESTIONS

Q: ARE ANY WEDGES DESIGNED SPECIFICALLY FOR GOLFERS WHO CAN’T GET OUT OF THE SAND?

The Truth About Dirty Grooves

CLUB PHOTOGRAPH BY WARREN GOLDSWAIN/GETTY IMAGES; BUNKER PHOTOGRAPH BY OCTAVIO PASSOS/GETTY IMAGES

DOES IT REALLY MATTER IF I CLEAN MY WEDGE GROOVES BETWEEN SHOTS?

Walk down a PGA Tour range and watch what happens after every wedge shot. Before the ball even lands, there’s a towel out, a brush dragged through the grooves and a tee digging out whatever’s left. It’s one of the simplest, most effective things you can do to keep your wedges in working order. Grooves exist to channel moisture and debris away from the contact point between the clubface and the ball. That contact generates friction, and friction creates spin. Spin is what gives your wedge shots their shape, trajectory and, most importantly, their ability to stop on the green. If you pack those grooves with grass or dirt, you’re suddenly guessing how the shot will behave. A few years ago, we ran a test to find out exactly how much damage a dirty face does. We took a 60-degree wedge and a Foresight Sports GCQuad launch monitor and hit five 100-yard shots

with a clean face, CLEAN SWEEP A dirty face followed by five can rob a wedge shots after taking shot of half a divot and skipits spin. ping the brush— the exact scenario that plays out over and over for most golfers. With a clean face, we saw an average spin rate of just over 10,500 rpm, right where PGA Tour players live on a full lob wedge. With a dirty face, the spin rate plummeted to 5,759 rpm. Think about what that might mean on a pitch shot from 40 yards or a chip where you’re short-sided with no green to work with. Those are the moments when spin is the difference between a tap-in and a 15-footer. When your grooves are caked with debris, you don’t get to rely on spin, so you have to be erfect with your landing spot. That’s a tough ask for anyone, let alone a 90s-shooter trying to hit a shot that’s already a serious challenge. The solution is embarrassingly simple. A groove brush costs about $5 or $10 and clips to your bag for easy access. Two seconds for a little scrub between shots—that’s all you need to do.

The wedges on this year’s Hot List provide enough loft and bounce options that you can definitely find one that will ease your troubles in the sand. While not designed as “sand-only” wedges, Cleveland’s CBZ and TaylorMade’s Hi-Toe 4 offer wide soles that make bunker play easier. If you’re seeking more of an assist, Callaway’s CB12, Cleveland’s Smart Sole, Performance Golf’s One.1 and Ping’s BunkR are as close to foolproof as it gets. Hank Haney was involved in an earlier Callaway wedge, the Sure Out, and some of his comments still apply. “The big problem people have with the normal sand wedge is you have to open the face, and that terrifies a lot of average golfers. “The other thing is when you swing into the sand, it offers resistance. So part of the goal is to design a club where there’s very little resistance with the sand, so even somebody with very little clubhead speed can still get the ball out.” The “foolproof” wedges mentioned above are meant to be used with a square face, reducing the fear Haney described. We don’t love the idea of having a wedge for a single purpose, but we get it. Just know that some specialty wedges have fewer loft options, so they might be of limited use around the greens.

Answers by Golf Digest equipment editors Mike Stachura, E. Michael Johnson and Jonathan Wall SEPTEMBER 2026

GOLFDIGESTME.COM 37

GEAR

TOUR

What’s in My Bag Sahith Theegala

GOLFDIGESTME.COM

SEPTEMBER 2026

FORGIVENESS AND MORE

Late last year, Theegala switched from Ping’s low-spinning G440 LST to the more forgiving G440 K. The K also provides more ball speed and more consistent spin and allows him to tighten his start line closer to the fairway for his preferred fade off the tee.

CRAZY EIGHTS

QUIET, PLEASE!

TRAINING TIME

WELL WISHES

In 2024, Theegala was struggling with his 7-iron so that club is now marked as an 8. He also avoids golf balls with the number 7.

On the range, he uses the ball on this device to keep his grip locked in. The stick is a way to check alignment. PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHNNY JAFFE

SEPTEMBER 2026

This headcover is a replica of Theegala’s dog, Ivy. The real pooch is an integral part of the team and has been seen at tour events.

Theegala’s fiancée gave him these crystals for luck. The Apple AirTag ensures they don’t go missing. GOLFDIGESTME.COM 39

PRESIDENTS CUP PREVIEW

An Axe To Grind A major transformation will have Medinah No. 3 looking unrecognisable to most. BY DEREK DUNCAN

EDINA H COU N T RY Club’s No. 3 course is one of American golf’s most storied tournament venues. It has hosted three U.S. Opens, a Senior Open, PGA Championships in 1999 and 2006 (both won by Tiger Woods) and was the stage for one of the most 40

GOLFDIGESTME.COM

SEPTEMBER 2026

unlikely come-from-behind victories in the history of the Ryder Cup in 2012. When it hosts the Presidents Cup this month, Medinah will seem unrecognisable to viewers. The No. 3 course underwent a transformative remodel in 2023 and 2024 by the Australian design firm of OCM (Geoff Ogilvy, Mike

Cocking and Ashley Mead) that cleared trees, expanded and shifted fairways and greens, reshuffled the routing and introduced a series of new holes. Almost nothing is like it was before. For most of its history, Medinah No. 3, located 25 miles west of downtown Chicago, was the prototypically difficult

densely packed holes that forced players to hit prescribed, The newly positioned straight shots began par-3 17th to be viewed as a liat Medinah’s ability. The coup de revamped No. 3 course. grace was the 2019 BMW Championship where, in soft conditions, the top three scores were all at least 20 under par, led by Justin Thomas at -25. Medinah was out of step architecturally, and it was now incapable of administering the beatings that once made it fearsome. In 2023, its ranking fell to 93rd. The club realised dramatic changes were needed and were open to the dramatic suggestion by the Australian architects to fundamentally reimagine what the No. 3 course could be (Ogilvy, the 2006 U.S. Open champion at Winged Foot, is the captain for this year’s Presidents Cup International team). Their plan was to physically recreate the No. 3 property as it would have looked in 1928 when the Tom Bendelow design opened. This meant exposing the landscape with enlarged and recontoured greens with diverse hole locations, the addition of dozens of bunkers emphasising strategic placement rather than punishment of missed shots, and most importantly, new holes on the second nine. When OCM’s work was completed in 2024, Medinah No. 3 was no longer the straight-ahead monster of the Midway of yore but a breathable, complex design that brings into play a novel degree of creativity, thoughtfulness, risk assessment and short-game flexibility. At over 7,500 yards, tournament players still must be strong drivers, but if they’re errant, they now have options to recover.

sively added elm, birch, ash and maple trees by the thousands, along with a similar number of evergreens and shrubs. These grew and matured to the point that an official count prior to the 1999 PGA Championship placed the number of trees lining the fairways and greens at 4,161. To bring No. 3 closer to the early Tom Bendelow days, the design team initiated an extensive tree-removal program, especially around holes six, seven, eight and nine on the south side to reestablish the meadow character. The clearing allowed OCM to widen and relocate fairways and greens. One of the most intriguing alterations was to the par-4 sixth, a rather ordinary, straight hole that’s been turned strategically tense by shifting the entire fairway directly left against a straight out-of-bounds line defined by a split-rail fence seen in old photographs. The instinct is to give the OB wide berth, but large bunkers will snare overly conservative drives, and approach shots must be played nervously toward a deep green that’s also set hard against the fence. The par-5 seventh, formerly the 10th, also runs down a long boundary line. Though the tee shot plays away from the fence toward space that was formerly blocked by a row of trees, the fairway swings back left past two staggered bunkers short of the green where it once again connects with the out-of-bounds, giving players much to think about in attacking it with their long seconds. The openness, alternate lines of play and clawed bunker edges have revived the classical-era feel of No. 3.

TURNING BACK TIME

Every architect who has worked at Medinah from Bendelow onward, most recently Rees Jones, has had to figure out how to handle Lake Kadijah, separating the beginning and ending holes from the rest of the course. In every iteration, they’ve done it primarily by building straight-shot, shore-to-shore par 3s that fly directly over the water. Prior to OCM’s remodel, Medinah possessed three of these par 3s, vaguely similar all-carry shots into greens pushed

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF MEDINAH COUNTRY CLUB

OUT OF THE WOODS

U.S. Open-style championship course. It foiled players with small, sloping greens ringed in rough, holes that played across Lake Kadijah and narrow doglegs cloaked in trees. No. 3 epitomised the kind of demanding mid-century formula that cemented its place in every edition of our America’s 100 Greatest Courses ranking since the first list was published in 1966, frequently residing inside the top 15 or 20. Medinah’s stature began to falter as architectural tastes changed to favour courses that exhibited playability, strategic complexity and openness. Those

It’s not by accident that Medinah’s intense tree cover defined how the course played. Specimen oaks and hickories naturally populated the middle section of the No. 3 course in the 1920s, many of which remain. But the south end of the site was largely bare, adjacent to open farmland. Medinah began to enhance the landscape in the mid-1930s through a systematic planting plan that aggres-

TROUBLED WATER

SEPTEMBER 2026

GOLFDIGESTME.COM 41

PRESIDENTS CUP PREVIEW

against bulkheads on the water’s edge. Out of OCM believed bounds is there were more uncomfortably interesting ways to close at the utilise the shoreline. par-4 sixth. They kept the second hole, a strong par 3 playing southward over the lake, but they eliminated the cross-water par-3 13th, a hole that had been part of the original Bendelow routing as the 17th hole. In its place is a new par-3 13th that runs parallel to the lake shore, not over it, with the water on the right. The new 13th is a sporty 153 yards (versus the previous 245-yard hole) that can be played forward at 140 or even 120 yards if desired. It gives the course a short-iron or wedge par 3, and a par 3 that runs with the lake rather than across it. Next, the architects removed another par 3, the 17th, that crossed the lake in the same direction as the old 13th, a hole that was added prior to the 1990 U.S. Open and subsequently remodeled several times. In its place they TAKING THE HARD LINE

GOLFDIGESTME.COM

SEPTEMBER 2026

built a new par 4, the 16th, that sets up with a diagonal drive over the water to a fairway and green running along the opposite shoreline. The angled tee shot allows shorter players to choose a line that best suits their skill but tempts longer players into biting off more of the lake, especially if the tees are set forward to bring the green within driver range as they’re likely to be in the Presidents Cup. This type of diagonal hole puts the emphasis on decision-making and nerves rather than mere mathematical execution, and the pressure of the matches should induce as many explosions as birdies. A new par-3 17th crosses back over Lake Kadijah in the opposite direction and can be stretched to over 200 yards. It also plays at an angle, this time with the water on the left, to a green sitting well above the lake and bracketed by four bunkers. Those who get too aggressive with front hole locations might see their ball bound down the grassy slope toward the hazard. Situating the new 17th green in this spot places the 18th

After OCM’s work, Medinah No. 3 is no longer a straight-ahead monster of the Midway but a breathable, complex design. tees on the far side of the water, allowing OCM to create a 487-yard par-4 closing hole that’s nearly 50 yards longer than the previous version. The fairway is in the same corridor as Bendelow’s original 18th, an area that had been abandoned when the finishing hole was reoriented in the 1980s in conjunction with the new 17th. Previously, Medinah had three par 3s that all confronted Lake Kadijah head on, and one long hole that crossed it off the tee. After the OCM remodel, the course has two very different par 3s moving in opposing directions, a short, flexible par 3 that plays along

the side of the lake, a risk/reward diagonal par 4 that’s potentially drivable for long hitters, and a revamped 18th hole that’s now 50 yards longer than before. DOUBLE DARE

The diagonal, cross-water par-4 16th hole lures players into danger.

ROUTING ROULETTE Bendelow’s original routing was intriguing in the way greens and tees were grouped closely in certain key places. These tight junctions made it possible for the holes to be sequenced in different combinations, an option OCM took advantage of. Holes one through six remain numbered as they

were, but from there the order changes with the old par-5 10th now being used as the seventh, making the old 11th the new eighth and so on. The former holes 14, 15 and 16, the last being famous for Sergio Garcia’s wild swing from behind the tree and dash up the fairway during his duel with Tiger Woods in the 1999 PGA Championship, are no more. They’ve been replaced by two strong par 4s at 14 and 15 that precede the diagonal par4 16th over the lake. One final change is in store for the Presidents Cup. As has been done in previous team events at courses like Hazeltine National and Liberty National, players will begin their matches not at hole one but at Medinah’s long, downhill fifth hole. This en-

Tight junctions in Tom Bendelow’s original routing made it possible for holes to be sequenced in different combinations. sures that exciting swing holes like 16, 17 and 18 will be played as 12, 13 and 14 and will factor into each match. It also shuffles perhaps the hardest par 3, the second, snuggled tight against the water, to the 16th hole, presenting the chance for late-game heroics, or for players to choke away their matches with one swing. SEPTEMBER 2026

GOLFDIGESTME.COM 43

BLANK

CANVAS

What Rising Renovation Costs Mean for Your Golf Course BY DEREK DUNCAN

HE EXPLOSION OF GOLF’S popularity over the past six years has most everyone in the industry feeling pretty good, but when a commodity’s value skyrockets the way golf’s has, it’s hard not to wonder if it’s a bubble. This is especially true in the field of high-end golf course renovations where private clubs are buying at unprecedented rates, spending two to three times what they were just a decade ago. Prior to 2020, the most premium, wall-to-wall remodels might’ve cost $10 or $12 million, with most projects budgeted for far less. Today it’s not unusual to see price tags in the $20- to $30-million range. And it’s not only courses on our ranking of America’s 100 Greatest— second-tier clubs in major cities are also on shopping sprees, sparing no expense in the gilding of their products. It’s the Roaring ’20s, with cash flowing and architects booked out three years. This seems like a sign of strength, but not everyone is bullish on the new normal. “It’s concerning,” says architect Keith Foster, who has conducted well-regarded remodels at places like Philadelphia Cricket Club and Moraine Country Club in Dayton. “You have to ask, ‘Is it sustainable?’ ” Some of the rise in cost can be attributed to normal market forces including heightened demand, inflation on materials and the desire to shorten renovation times to five or six months (from the usual eight to 10). Irrigation alone has nearly tripled in price. Ten years ago, a state-of-the-art system was $1.5 million. Now it costs $4.5 million. All this impacts labor and pricing. But the underlying culprit of the rapid esca-

GOLFDIGESTME.COM

SEPTEMBER 2026

It’s not unusual to see price tags in the $20to $30-million range. lation is a surge of memberships willing to indulge on items that may or may not contribute to good or architecturally interesting golf. Overflowing coffers put all the extras into play: added drainage for tees and putting surfaces; hauling in material to sand-cap fairways; deluxe bunker liners and imported designer sand; laying sod instead of seeding; and state-of-the-art subsurface greens systems, to name just some. It’s the equivalent of purchasing every possible upgrade on a luxury vehicle. “Once one club does it, that’s the standard,” says Foster. “If someone spends $30 million, another course can rationalise their renovation simply by saying, ‘We spent more than they did. It must be better.’” Instead of simply doing what is necessary to improve the golf course, he says, the impulse is to just do more. These clubs might be getting what they paid for in terms of pristine turf

and immaculate-looking landscapes, but it’s hard to argue any of this is good for golf. To most people these numbers are obscene and add to a growing feeling of disparity, a sense that we’re not all playing the same game. There are also downstream effects to a small cadre of clubs effectively setting the market for all renovation work. Prices for materials, infrastructure and labor are the same for lower-budget clubs and public courses as they are for elite ones. A municipal course needing to replace an outdated irrigation system will still pay two to three times more than they would have prior to 2020. And average courses have been all but priced out when it comes to hiring a top architect to oversee what improvements they can afford. It goes without saying that clubs can do what they want with their courses. But we’d be wise to show concern about the ripple effects of these decisions, and unwise to forget the cyclical nature of the golf business. If what invariably happens to bubbles indeed happens, what is the lasting impact? Will costs revert to their pre-2020 levels? It’s unclear that’s the way the economics work. Times are good now. Maybe they’ve been too good. ILLUSTRATION BY IKO OJALA

Time to make your brand fly global.

Put your brand in front of an engaged international audience through What’s On UAE, flydubai’s curated in-flight entertainment channel.

From world-class dining and attractions to retail, real estate, and lifestyle experiences, connect with travellers while they’re discovering, planning, and making decisions. Your next customer could already be on board?

Secure Your Spot Today For enquiries: +971 4 427 3000 | omran@motivate.ae

W NE Y LR , VA I ND R OU LD GR O BY

GOLFDIGESTME.COM

SEPTEMBER 2026

A U

S D N P LA U ER ITH C H W M E T E, INS I E N IM TA ED LH THE ST T AP LV SO IN IR C SO G E DS E F KIE RE DIN E TH AN TH OO UN TAN OP L OR R N E S U R F WO O RY E GE T ND TE EN EN A YS WE EV M ET R B ND A

PHOTOGRAPHS BY GETTY IMAGES; LET

The Solheim Cup is back for its 20th edition and even for a tournament already steeped in history we’ve got a week of firsts to look forward to in September. The Netherlands is hosting for the first time, we’ve got two captains taking charge for the first time, and, as always, there are a bunch of rookies making their debuts. Can the US win in Europe for the first time since 2015? Can Sweden’s Anna Nordqvist add another chapter to her storied cup career, or will the StarSpangled Banner be flying high come Sunday? Here’s everything you should, need and might want to know about what’s coming up. THE CAPTAINS A player who needs little introduction, Nordqvist makes her bow as Europe captain having been a playing vice-captain when her side retained the trophy with a tie in 2023 and then lost it in 2024, not to mention the four outright wins. The 39-year-old has played 35 matches over the course of nine cups dating back to 2009, has a 1715-3 record, winning 18.5 points and cementing a reputation as a fearsome competitor, one well earned as a three-time major winner. Such is her current form, Nordqvist could have easily picked herself for what is being billed as a revenge mission in the Netherlands, but has opted for a mixture of youth and experience, with the likes of old heads Charley Hull and Leona Maguire alongside rookies Julia López Ramirez, Nastasia Nadaud and Mimi Rhodes. And Nordqvist will need all her concentration in a year where there is more pressure attached to the result than normal. Defeat in Virginia last time out came on the back of a 14-14 tie in Spain, and Europe have not lost on home soil since 2015, when the United States claimed a thrilling 14.5-13.5 win in Germany. According to Nordqvist, whose captaincy style is “less in your face” than some of her predeces-

JUST THE FACTS WHEN

September 11-13 WHERE

Bernardus Golf in Cromvoirt, North Brabant, the Netherlands SCORECARD

USA won 11 (8 home, 3 away), Europe won 7 (5 home, 2 away), tied 1 RECENT RESULTS

2024 USA* bt Europe 15.5-12.5 2023 Europe* drew with USA 14-14 2021 Europe bt USA* 15-13 2019 Europe* bt USA 14.5-13.5 2017 USA* bt Europe 16.5-11.5 2015 USA bt Europe* 14.5-13.5

sors, solving the pairings puzzle will be key to beating the US. “You can’t just statistically put two players together if they don’t have any chemistry,” she told reporters after being handed the captaincy. “I believe in knowing your partner. Under the gun, when you know you can trust your partner and you know how you react, I feel like you bring out the best in each other.” She will also need to outsmart her counterpart, no easy feat when it is Angela Stanford in the opposite corner. The American also knows what it takes to come out on top, having been part of the side that won at Golf Club St Leon Rot 11 years ago, and was an assistant for the third consecutive time when the US finally tasted victory again at the Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Gainesville in 2024. Stanford though is dealing with the pressure of leading a side who are defending champions, but have only won once in the past four outings, and carry the weight of expectation that comes with having some of the game’s best, including world No 1 Nelly Korda, in their ranks. Stanford, 47, has acknowledged being a bit “more old school” than winning captain Stacy Lewis, and expects to mix a healthy respect for analytics with gut instinct when it comes to plotting a first victory on foreign soil in more than a decade. “I absolutely believe in analytics — numbers don’t lie,” she told Golf.com. “We’ll definitely use data to inform our decisions, but I also trust my instincts. If something feels right or looks right, I’ll go with it.”

*denotes home team

“YOU CAN’T JUST STATISTICALLY PUT TWO PLAYERS TOGETHER IF THEY DON’T HAVE ANY CHEMISTRY.” — ANNA NORDQVIST

SEPTEMBER 2026

GOLFDIGESTME.COM 47

“Several holes can produce rapid swings in momentum, creating exciting golf and helping matches remain competitive until the closing stages.”

TEAMS TEAM EUROPE: Charley Hull (ENG), Esther Henseleit (GER), Lottie Woad (ENG), Maja Stark (SWE), Celine Boutier (FRA), Carlota Ciganda (SP), Linn Grant (SWE), Nanna Koerstz Madsen (DEN), Leona Maguire (IRL), Julia López Ramirez (SP), Nastasia Nadaud (FRA), Mimi Rhodes (ENG). Officials: Anna Nordqvist (SWE, capt), Caroline Hedwall (SWE, v/c), Mel Reid (ENG, v/c), Anne van Dam (NRL, v/c). TEAM USA: Nelly Korda, Angel Yin, Jennifer Kupcho, Yealimi Noh, Auston Kim, Lauren Coughlin, Allisen Corpuz, Andrea Lee, Alison Lee, Rose Zhang, Lindy Duncan, Megan Khang. Officials: Angela Stanford (capt), Kristy McPherson (v/c), Paula Creamer (v/c), Brittany Lang (v/c). FORMAT: The Solheim Cup follows a standard three-day matchplay format. The morning sessions on Friday and Saturday consist of four foursomes matches, while the afternoon sessions on the first two days are given over to four fourball encounters. Sunday is all about the singles, where all 24 players go head-to-head. THE VENUE Previously three flat cornfields near the village of Cromvoirt, Bernardus Golf is not just new to the Solheim Cup, it is new to the sport in general, having only opened in 2018. Still, it has achieved much in its short lifespan, hosting three Dutch Opens on the DP World Tour from 2021, and earning a reputation as one of Europe’s best courses. The Kyle Phillips-designed track has a heathland style that fittingly for its location features plenty of water. Nordqvist and Stanford have both spent plenty of time getting to know their battleground, and the latter took nine players, including Jennifer Kupcho, Auston Kim and Lauren Coughlin, for a test run. According to course superintendent Niall Robinson, we could be in for an exciting few days. The layout’s mix of “strategic balance and genuine scoring opportunities” is ideal for matchplay. In a discussion with industry publication Golf Course Architecture, he said the layout rewarded “bold decision-making without being excessively punitive, encouraging players to take on risk when the situation demands it”.

GOLFDIGESTME.COM

SEPTEMBER 2026

THE ROOKIES A golf course can offer opportunities, but it is the players who must grasp them, and Nordqvist and Stanford could both end up being judged on their captain’s picks. Nordqvist spent one on Maguire, whose 8-31 record made her almost a no-brainer to play in a fourth Solheim Cup, and then added López Ramirez, Nadaud and Rhodes. With England’s Lottie Woad making her debut after qualifying automatically, Europe will field one of its most inexperienced teams in several outings. “The rookies are not playing like rookies,” Nordqvist told Sky Sports after announcing the picks. “They will bring a great attitude and positivity. We knew coming into the year that it was going to be a little different, but different can also be good. The way these girls play, they are so fearless and they show up and they are ready.” In her second season on the LPGA Tour, but first on the Ladies European Tour, Lopez Ramirez makes her debut after impressing in a season when she was among the challengers at the Women’s Scottish Open. Nadaud, meanwhile, won last year’s season-ending Andalucia Costa del Sol Open de Espana. Of the three, Rhodes has not had the strongest of LPGA campaigns, making just nine cuts in 18 starts, but won three LET events last season and was named 2025 rookie of the year. For the US, Auston Kim will play for the first time, and she could have been the only one if Stanford had stuck with her initial belief that picking a rookie for an overseas assault on the cup was a bad idea. “I’ve actually had some conversations with past captains about this because, honestly, I didn’t want to take a rookie overseas,” Stanford told Golf Digest in July. “I did not think that an overseas Solheim Cup would be good for a rookie their first time out because it’s a different environment. But now talking to a couple of past captains, and I see where they’re coming from, these players play all over the world at a younger age, and they’re on

“I ABSOLUTELY BELIEVE IN ANALYTICS — NUMBERS DON’T LIE... BUT I ALSO TRUST MY INSTINCTS. IF SOMETHING FEELS RIGHT OR LOOKS RIGHT, I’LL GO WITH IT.” — ANGELA STANFORD

“SEVERAL HOLES CAN PRODUCE RAPID SWINGS IN MOMENTUM, CREATING EXCITING GOLF AND HELPING MATCHES REMAIN COMPETITIVE UNTIL THE CLOSING STAGES.” — NIALL ROBINSON, COURSE SUPERINTENDENT

PHOTOGRAPH BY OCTAVIO PASSOS/GETTY IMAGES

bigger stages. It seems like the game has changed a little bit in the sense where players aren’t overwhelmed by situations anymore.” As it is, Stanford added another rookie to the mix, selecting Lindy Duncan with one of her three captain’s picks. Duncan had been inline to qualify automatically, before dropping behind Alison Lee in the world rankings. At 35, Duncan is the event’s oldest first-timer since 39-year-old Nancy Scranton in 2000. Stanford opted for the experienced Rose Zhang and Megan Khang with her other picks. THE GREAT UNKNOWN It may well be that Stanford’s greatest risk isn’t in the untested, but in a battled-hardened player who had not swung a club in anger since June, until she teed it up at the FM Championship in Boston on August 27, the final LPGA event before the Tour broke for the cup. Angel Yin is in the team for her fourth Solheim Cup, and with a 5-3-1 record would be someone her captain would rely on being instrumental to victory. But the 27-year-old withdrew from the KPMG Women’s PGA due to illness and has fallen outside the world top 20. Plenty of what ifs surround the 27-year-old’s participation. How ready will she be, and even if

HOW TO WATCH In the US, live coverage will be Golf Channel, while Sky Sports holds the rights in Europe and in other parts of the world. The action will also be streamed on Peacock, while other television partners are expected to be announced closer to the time.

she is ready, will she be competitive in the cauldron of an overseas tournament. “Angel and I have been texting. She’s still evaluating her situation, and I am very confident in giving Angel all the runway that she needs,” Stanford told Golfweek. “We want Angel on the team; we want her to be there; but we have to prepare in a way that maybe she won’t be there.” THE WEIGHT OF HISTORY Europe have won three of the past four editions and seven overall since the inaugural tournament in 1990, but the US have the better overall record, winning 11 of the 19 Solheim Cups played so far. History would suggest the US are favourites to win again, if only because teams have tended to win back-to-back throughout the lifetime of the event. But the Americans have not won in Europe since 2015, and their 2024 triumph was the first since they claimed victory on home soil in 2017. Competition has tended to be tight too, aside from the 18-10 hammering the US handed out in 2013. There were three points in it two years ago, but nothing in it the year before that, while Europe won 15-13 in 2021, and 14.5-13.5 in 2019. Whether Nordqvist or Stanford feels that pressure more keenly could well decide who wins this time around.

SEPTEMBER 2026

GOLFDIGESTME.COM 49

“IT’S ALWAYS A PLEASURE TO PLAY GOLF IN THE MIDDLE EAST” Weeks on from his historic Open win at Royal Birkdale, Ryan Fox reflects on the 62 that turned his tournament around, the family legacy behind it, and why the Gulf will always feel like home

BY MILES BUCKERIDGE

Trophy wins rarely come with the level of drama and raw emotion seen in the thrilling climax of Ryan Fox’s recent Claret Jug chase. Celebrating his first career major title at 39 years old, Fox walked away from Royal Birkdale on 19 July as the 2026 Open Champion, beating Cameron Young by a single stroke after a spectacular 12-foot birdie putt on the 18th hole. Weeks on, and with the dust beginning to settle on a life-changing month, Fox sat down with Golf Digest Middle East to reflect on the win, his family legacy, and why the Gulf remains one of his favourite places to play. “It’s going to take a while to sink in,” he told us in the days after his win. “I’m incredibly proud of how it happened, how I controlled myself … I’ve never been in that situation before. I didn’t know if I had it in me.”

SIXTY-THREE YEARS IN THE MAKING

This humble perspective on life, legacy and long putts is emblematic of both Fox’s nature and his New Zealand lineage: “I’m very competitive. I obviously want to win, but you can be a good person, be personable and still be successful … I like to think New

GOLFDIGESTME.COM

SEPTEMBER 2026

HISTORY MADE

Fans packed the stands at Royal Birkdale to witness Fox’s historic final-round charge.

Zealand’s is a humble culture, if you are too arrogant, if you are too difficult, you get kicked back down to earth pretty quickly, our culture doesn’t stand for it.” Fox’s tournament got off to a slow start, with an opening round that saw him tied in 85th place. It was the third round where things really started to hit their stride, the Auckland-born powerhouse recording a course-record-tying 62-stroke outing (with nine birdies), equalling the lowest score in men’s major championship history. Fox held his nerve and that golden form for the final round, closing with a 2-under 68 to become the first New Zealand Open champion in 63 years – the first Kiwi to lift the Claret Jug since Bob Charles in 1963. Sharing some of the glory, Ryan was quick to credit his sponsors, particularly his current partner – Arena (paired since 2023). He described the Arena Middle East team, who are responsible for supporting delivery of some of the region’s biggest sporting events (including the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, Hero Dubai Desert

Classic, Saudi International, Abu Dhabi Golf Championship, Formula 1 Abu Dhabi, and the Dubai International Boat Show), as having been “great partners over the years,” adding that he’s “ended up having personal relationships with a lot of people involved.”

A FAMILY OF CHAMPIONS

This spectacular sporting success is just the latest chapter in the Fox family legacy. His father, Grant Fox MBE, wore the number 10 jersey for the All Blacks (New Zealand’s national rugby union team) and still holds the world record for most points scored in a Rugby World Cup tournament (126, recorded in 1987). Ryan’s grandfather on his mother’s side was also a sportsman of considerable note: Merv Wallace, a prolific cricketer and warmly regarded New Zealand Test match captain. With such diversity of competitive sport in the Fox family tapestry, we could have easily seen his name in headlines connected to a very different type of trophy. “From my earliest memories, I just wanted to be a sportsman,” Fox told us. “I’d kick a rugby ball around. My mum played a lot of tennis, me and dad would play table tennis. We’d play snooker … It took me a while to find out what sport. I thought it was going to be cricket originally.” The cricketing world’s loss was of course golf’s gain – a sport he approaches with his grandad’s “level-headed” demeanour and his father’s dogged competitiveness.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY TOM SHAW, STUART KERR, OISIN KENIRY/R&A/GETTY IMAGES

HOME AWAY FROM HOME

We asked Fox about how he sees this region’s growing influence on the modern world of golf: “The Middle East has been a huge player in golf since I’ve made it on the DP World Tour.” “Having multiple events each year, especially Dubai and Abu Dhabi. But, we’ve also gone to Qatar and Saudi … And then with the creation of LIV … There’s no doubt, they shook things up and had a huge impact. The Middle East is a big player in golf, and I think it will be for years to come.” And when it comes to his favourite courses in the region, Fox was equally complimentary: “I enjoy Abu Dhabi Golf Club. That was one of my first events on the DP World Tour … Yas Links, brilliant golf course, probably one of the best-conditioned courses we’ve played anywhere. There’s not a blade of grass out of place.” “I’ve always got a soft spot for the Majlis course at Emirates Golf Club. So close to the marina and that skyline, it’s a really good tournament setup … I’ve enjoyed playing Dubai Creek as well the last couple of years.” “The Middle East has always been pretty good at doing things properly, they don’t do things by halves, it’s always a pleasure to go and play golf there.”

CHAMPIONS ROAR

Fox punches the air after his 12-foot birdie putt sealed the Claret Jug.

LIFE AFTER THE CLARET JUG

In the immediate aftermath of the win, Fox withdrew from the 3M Open to celebrate his victory at home in New Zealand with wife Anneke and their two children – trading tournament golf for a hero’s welcome at Auckland Airport and, by his own admission, a well-earned meat pie. He returned to competition at the BMW Championship, the second event of the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup Playoffs, where he reflected on a whirlwind few weeks: “The last month has been a bit crazy, to be honest. Obviously, my world has changed and I’m still trying to get used to that. So it was good to get back last week. It felt like I could kind of use the golf course a little bit as my sanctuary, that I can just go back and play golf.” It’s a fittingly level-headed note from the new Champion Golfer of the Year – a reminder that for all the scrutiny and opportunity that now comes with the title, Fox’s approach to it remains as grounded as ever. “Whatever comes with it, whatever scrutiny, opportunity, pressures on my time, deep down somewhere I wanted this to happen, and I want to try to enjoy what’s coming as much as possible.” On to the next one, Mr Fox.

SEPTEMBER 2026

GOLFDIGESTME.COM 53

“ where This is we

should be” ASIAN TOUR COMMISSIONER CHO MINN THANT ON THE PIVOT FROM LIV GOLF NEGOTIATIONS TO A RENEWED PATHWAY INTO THE DP WORLD TOUR – AND, EVENTUALLY, THE PGA TOUR

•••

BY JOSHUA BALL

GOLFDIGESTME.COM

SEPTEMBER 2026

•••

Asian Tour commissioner and CEO Cho Minn Thant is discussing that future – one that took “a dramatic shift” away from renegotiating with LIV to an established road to the DPWT and “some sort of pathway” to the PGAT when it reorganises in 2028. The order of merit winner, if not exempt, earns a DPWT card for next season, with other routes through Q-school, invites and co-sanctioned events. “I think the negotiations have been very good,” Cho says. “Discussions about co-sanctioning, collaborations – commercial, event, even media teams working together. It’s a much wider discussion now.” We’re chatting in the clubhouse at Hong Kong Golf Club’s facility in Deep Water Bay, the quieter short course

PHOTOGRAPH BY IAN WALTON/ASIAN TOUR

OLF IN ASIA was once the poor relation – its tours fed scraps from European cousins, rarely acknowledged by distant family in North America. Those days are long gone. The rise of the East – commercially, culturally and otherwise – has been mirrored in growing influence on the course and in the boardroom, and in the upheaval the sport has undergone over five years. At its heart has been the relationship between LIV Golf, the Public Investment Fund and an Asian Tour that has emerged from the disruption far stronger than it was before. While an uncertain future awaits the team league that fractured the game, the Tour has returned to more established partners in the DP World Tour and PGA Tour.

some distance from the tournament venue on the other side of the city. Down below on the putting green, Taichi Kho, one of the Tour’s more recognisable faces, is doing promotion work for the city’s Open in October. Always amiable, Cho is happy to talk about the game in the region, for good and bad – though there’s been little of the latter these five years. “What’s happened these past four to five years has opened their [DPWT and PGAT] eyes, and we’re being treated a lot better than before,” Cho says. “It’s been a nice five years to elevate our tour, but we’ll be in a position where this is where we should be.”

TWO DECADES IN THE GAME Cho has been with the Tour for nearly 20 years, in charge since 2019 after three years as chief operating officer, during the alliance struck with the European Tour in 1999. After Covid uncertainty, PIF ’s US$300 million investment into the International Series and the LIV partnership changed everything. No longer the poor relation, the Tour expanded into the Middle East, North Africa, and even St Andrews.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ASIAN TOUR

GOLF’S C-SUITE From left to right: Ben Cowen, Chief Tournament and Operations Officer, DP World Tour; Christian Hardy, SVP, International, PGA TOUR; Cho Minn Thant, Commissioner & CEO, Asian Tour; Guy Kinnings, CEO, European Tour Group.

THERE’S A NEW BELIEF AMONG OUR MEMBERS THAT THEY CAN COMPETE AGAINST THE DP WORLD TOUR

“It’s opened up everyone’s eyes to global golf – there is a place for highlevel professional golf outside of America, outside of Europe,” Cho says. India and mainland China were on the schedule for later this year, before the surprise loss of funding and the pivot in a new direction.

A CHANGING TOUR Kho’s Morocco win in June, the last International Series event, came at the expense of Bubba Watson, Abraham Ancer and Branden Grace. “There’s a new belief among our members that they can compete against the DP World Tour, or any field, a lot better than before,” Cho says. “That’s also come naturally, because our membership has transformed too. We were largely Asian before – probably 20% foreign, 80% Asian – but it’s more or less 50/50 now.” Commercial interests, and the re-

gion’s “untapped potential” – from asset managers to casinos – helped seal the deal. Whether Morocco, Oman and Qatar stay on next year’s schedule is unclear, but Cho believes the work done to date will be built on. “There are going to be some countries that keep events, some that don’t… but we’re still going to have some really high-calibre events in Asia, and cosanctioned events going forward is a huge positive for us,” he says. “We still believe we’ll continue to have a strong presence in Saudi Arabia, where the relationship with Golf Saudi remains very positive. “As the domestic golf market grows in Saudi Arabia we hope to do even more business in the kingdom.”

NO REGRETS It’s easy to see the past five years as a wild ride of what-ifs – not that Cho sees it that way. There’s no regret on the path taken, or the one not; before the partnership, going it alone was seriously considered. With an International Series close to self-sustaining, and good relationships with countries and sponsors alike, there was a case for going it alone. The partnership made the most sense – commercially, for players, and “most importantly stability and longevity”. “Everyone who’s been involved with the Tour over the last five years believes it was the right thing to do – a very different proposition back then, when we knew PIF was going to fund the project long term. “How it’s turned out, or what it may turn out to be, is not what we signed up four or five years ago, hence our pivot towards the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour.” SEPTEMBER 2026

GOLFDIGESTME.COM 55

PGA TOUR CEO BRIAN ROLAPP

Photographs by Eric Ogden

by Joel Beall

FROM THE CIVIL WAR TO FOOTBALL, THE MAN PUTTING GOLF BACK TOGETHER THINKS HISTORY RHYMES

and the broadcasts that turned an already dominant sport into the last appointment viewing left in American culture. He was the commissioner-in-waiting, the heir apparent to a job that pays more, commands more attention and carries far less daily uncertainty than the one he chose instead. He left anyway, to lead a sport in the middle of an existential crisis it had largely caused itself. He is a year into the job now, and his home office in Darien, Conn., has not caught up to the change. There is no golf memorabilia save for a family trophy, “The Rolapp Cup.” The football stuff has been left out of habit rather than sentiment, the residue of someone who has spent his career being told how good he is at what he does and has decided not to believe it.

THE MISSION

The dark wood office swallows light, the only glint coming from the Emmys sitting high on a shelf above three blank televisions. Beneath the TVs, sealed in a locked glass case, is a row of footballs each signed by a Super Bowl halftime act, an entire industry’s most-watched 12 minutes gathering the dust that settles on things people have stopped explaining to houseguests. Across the room are two bookcases crowded with football chronicles— biographies of commissioners, owners and league men most fans have never heard of. There’s also a rack of general history. The politicians, adventures and battles of the centuries. Tucked into that shelf is also a battered record of Civil War volumes, one of Brian Rolapp’s favourite subjects, about a country that broke cleanly in half and then had to figure out in the years after the shooting stopped what it was supposed to become next. “History doesn’t repeat itself,” Rolapp says, quoting the line often attributed to Mark Twain, “but it often rhymes. Whatever we’re doing at the PGA Tour, it’s kind of been done before, in some respect.” Brian Rolapp left the NFL to become CEO of the PGA Tour in the summer of 2025, walking away from two decades at a league he didn’t just rise inside of but helped build. The last several years of his career there he effectively ran the NFL business—the deals, the platforms

GOLFDIGESTME.COM

SEPTEMBER 2026

Golf did not begin for Rolapp as a game he played. As a teenager, he had a job at Congressional Country Club, in Bethesda, Md., working the halfway house. He remembers the window for the caddies, for a different class of person at the same property. “We didn’t belong to a country club,” he says. “Golf, to me, was this distant, inaccessible country club sport. That’s how I first experienced it, before coming to find out it’s much more than that.” A high school star lacrosse player with bigger schools courting him like North Carolina, Colgate and Brown, he chose a smaller program in BYU because he already knew he wanted to serve a two-year church mission. “A lot of people thought it was unconventional,” he says. The mission took him to Belgium, France and Luxembourg for two years. He called his family twice a year, Mother’s Day and Christmas, before cell phones existed to complicate the discipline of it. He was assigned a companion he didn’t choose and spent nearly every hour of every day with him. “There were some awesome parts of it. There were some tough parts of it. But all of it was formative,” he says. Ages 19 through 27 set the entire trajectory of his life, he says. He came home from his mission an almost21-year-old college sophomore. Shortly after, his father died at 52. Rolapp met his wife, Cindy, not long after, married her, had his first child, and somewhere in that compressed timeframe became, in his own estimation, a person who knew what he wanted out of life at an age when most people don’t. “I think that’s kind of a rare thing,” he says, quietly enough that the sentence nearly disappears into the room. The story of how he met Cindy is the one spot in hours of conversation where Rolapp’s voice picks up, faster, lighter, a story told at enough dinner parties to have worn itself smooth. He asked her out three times. The first go-around she said no; she had to watch her nieces. The second she had to do something for her grandmother. Rolapp assumed he was being gently but obviously turned down. A mutual friend assured him otherwise; that’s just who she is, she means it all literally. The third time, he

asked if she wanted to get something to eat. Cindy said no; the Cowboys were playing the Cardinals on Monday Night Football, and she wanted to watch. She came over in sweatpants and a sweatshirt, having apparently spent zero time getting ready. His roommate told him after the game that if he didn’t ask her out again, he was an idiot. Cindy has never cared, in the years since, what Brian does for a living, not out of indifference but by a deliberate boundary. “The only thing I care about,” he says, quoting her, “is that it doesn’t consume you, that it makes you a fuller human.” They do not talk about work at home. “Around the neighborhood, I was the NFL guy,” he says. “Now I’m probably the PGA Tour guy. Everyone else tries to define you by your job. I’m lucky to have a family that doesn’t.” For a while, that boundary lived in a small, deliberate joke—for years, Rolapp’s social media bio read simply “husband of one,” a wink at both the marriage and the faith it’s built on, a devout Mormon’s version of

a punchline. It is, colleagues say, entirely on brand. Sincere enough to be meant, funny enough that nobody would mistake it for preaching. He still teaches Sunday school with Cindy, though only in the loosest sense of the word. With a room of 5- and 6-year-olds, “You’re just trying to keep them occupied and from killing each other every three minutes,” he says, laughing. There’s no professional clergy where the Rolapps worship; everybody takes a turn at every level. He’s led congregations, taught teenagers and, now, on any given Sunday, he’s on the floor with the kindergartners. “It keeps you grounded,” he says. “You’re also in a service capacity, which I think is really important.” He says it’s the best part of his week. Rolapp made himself one rule before taking the tour job: He would not play golf for work. Not because it would look bad, but because it isn’t why he was hired, and because there is simply too much to do. Golf, for Rolapp, exists almost entirely inside the boundary of family and weekend, protected territory even as the game became the center of his professional life. His own children are the only reason he plays golf again at all. He played in college but put the game away for years while commuting into New York and raising a family busy with its own weekend activities. As they got older and picked up golf themselves, he picked it back up, and found he still makes his share of doubles. “There’s no making up for it on defense in golf,” he says, but is quick to list what keeps him coming back. “You have to focus. There’s something great about that. It’s also the feeling that one good shot makes up for four bad ones.” He loves that it’s outside, that you can play your whole life, the etiquette, what the honour system teaches. He loves how accessible it is, too. “You can be six-five or five-six and still be a really good golfer,” he says. As for the aforementioned Rolapp Cup, it’s a loose scramble format forever running wherever the family happens to be. At the moment, Brian and son Will square off against the other two children, Drew and Ben. Their daughter, Catherine, has recently started playing, too, though she has not yet entered the competition. What Rolapp says he has found, playing again, is more reverence. Walking a few holes at the Memorial during a ProAm, catching up with players, he was struck—in a way he

SEPTEMBER 2026

GOLFDIGESTME.COM 59

XXX GOLFDIGESTME.COM 60 GOLF DIGEST

SEPTEMBER ISSUE2026 X 2026

Rolapp made himself one rule before taking the tour job: He would not play golf for work.

never quite was at NFL games, despite years of proximity—by how much more difficult the professional game is than television lets on. “I understand how hard golf is,” he says, “because I was out there three times this weekend playing it myself.”

A BIG RUN Rolapp’s title at the NFL was Chief Media and Business Officer. Officially, he ran league business operations; unofficially, he ran nearly everything at the NFL that wasn’t the games themselves. Media rights deals worth tens of billions of dollars went through his office along with the league’s digital strategy, built from basically nothing. When he started in 2003, the league was doing somewhere around five billion in revenue. This year, it will do roughly $23 billion. “I’m not saying I’m responsible for that,” he says, “but I was part of a hyper-growth stretch for a long time.” Steve Bornstein, the former ESPN and NFL Network chief who recruited Rolapp out of NBC in 2003, says that’s underselling it. Bornstein says that Rolapp saw where the business was shifting—toward entertainment and media consumption onto phones and into digital spaces—years before that was conventional wisdom inside a league long organised around Sunday afternoons and cable carriage fees. What made him really effective, Bornstein says, had less to do with vision than with a habit most executives eventually lose. “It’s a person that listens and doesn’t just talk,” he says. “That’s his superpower. He listens, he synthesises it, and then he asks intelligent, informed questions.” Joe Siclare, the NFL’s longtime chief financial officer of 33 years, has never revised his first impression of Rolapp—smart, fluent in the media business in a way that never had to be re-earned. What Siclare remembers most isn’t the scope of Rolapp’s job so much as how he carried it. Rolapp rarely walked into a room already convinced he had the answer; he’d arrive with a position and let the facts move it, which Siclare came to see less as indecision than as a kind of discipline. “I think people felt like they worked with him, not for him.” If there’s one knock on Rolapp that’s become anything like a running joke, he was, by wide consensus inside the NFL’s Manhattan headquarters, chronically late. “You’ve heard of the play ‘Waiting for Godot,’” Siclare says. “Some people said we should rename it ‘Waiting for Brian.’”

Bornstein has his own version of that story that cuts the other way. When Bornstein was first courting Rolapp, he invited him to his cigar club at the Top of the Sixes on Park Avenue, not realising Rolapp was a devout Mormon who neither smoked nor drank. Rolapp showed up anyway—on time—and simply endured it. “He never complained and didn’t share with me any of his beliefs, even though this was completely in contrast to them,” Bornstein says. “He was just a mensch about it.” Bornstein tells it as a story about his own poor planning, but the takeaway belongs to Rolapp as proof that the composure people now describe in boardrooms has held up just as well in places he has no business being in. Rolapp’s last stretch at the league is the clearest evidence of what all that listening and synthesising produced. In March 2021, he oversaw the long-term media agreements that locked in Amazon, CBS, ESPN/ABC, Fox and NBC as the NFL’s broadcast partners for the next decade. He helped devise and implement the move of Sunday Ticket to YouTube, ending a more than 25year run on satellite and transferring the league’s most devoted, highest-paying fans to a platform that didn’t exist when the package was created. He also led 32 Equity, the vehicle through which the league and its owners now make outside investments—one more example of building infrastructure for a business a decade before the rest of the industry admitted it needed one. Jeffrey Lurie, the Philadelphia Eagles owner who negotiated with Rolapp through two decades of league business, traces their shared success back to one of Rolapp’s single, stubborn convictions. “It’s always about the excitement of the game,” Lurie says. “The mediarights deals, the investments—those only come from having a product people actually want to watch. It’s easy to lose sight of that when you’re chasing the dollars. Brian never did. He knew if the product wasn’t right, the economics wouldn’t follow.” “You’re only as good as your team,” Rolapp says, the closest thing to a mission statement in an otherwise unsentimental accounting of his own record. That is precisely what makes his career change worth examining. Men who spend two decades succeeding inside one system rarely walk away from it at the moment of maximum leverage and usually not for an organisation in worse shape. “He was so valuable at what he did,” Lurie says, “that a lot of us, while genuinely happy for him, knew it was a devastating loss for the league.” “I loved my job. I loved the NFL,” he says. “I probably could have done it forever.” He pauses on the word forev-

SEPTEMBER 2026

GOLFDIGESTME.COM 61

er the way people do when they catch themselves nearly committing to something they no longer want. “To be honest, I was bored,” Rolapp says. It’s a strange thing to admit about two decades that included a streaming buildout from scratch, a mediarights overhaul, and the slow migration of football from broadcast television to whatever comes after it—a stretch defined by constant change. That, Rolapp says, was also the problem. The change had become routine, the crises predictable, the same kinds of meetings producing the same kinds of decisions. There was less left to be curious about. He wasn’t looking for an exit, he says, but knew one was likely coming. What Rolapp found in golf, once he studied it closely, was an opportunity in disguise, a sport whose grassroots participation and weekend viewership were, in some cases, outpacing NBA first-round playoff games even as the public narrative was one of total chaos. Some things could be better, he remembers thinking, and maybe the crisis had finally gotten everybody’s attention. That was a strong foundation to work on. Rolapp keeps a photograph in his office from a 1960s prep-school football game. It’s shot from midfield, the school’s science building fully engulfed in flames in the background, while the players kept playing, and the crowd kept watching, seemingly unbothered. It’s both a photograph and a small, framed argument. “You’ve got to get the product right,” he says. “I don’t care how good you think your business model is—if the product isn’t right, none of it matters.”

TAKING CHARGE There was no obvious playbook for Rolapp’s new task. By the time he was named PGA Tour commissioner,

the tour’s leadership had spent nearly two years locked in negotiations with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, and fans had grown exhausted by a schism that seemed indifferent to what they wanted. What Rolapp did first was talk, mostly informal and hour-long conversations with players. The format, built around three questions, was almost naively simple for a man about to reorganise a multibillion-dollar sport: What do we do well? What don’t we do well? What would you change? What he found surprised him—a locker room that turned out to be smarter and more self-aware than its reputation suggested. He met players who loved the game without reservation but were more than ready to admit the tour itself had grown stale with too many events with too little imagination. As the months passed and the tour’s Future Competition Committee—the nine-person group led by Tiger Woods charged with reimagining the schedule—began to crystallise a direction, the conversations changed. “It became more of a validation of where we were going,” Rolapp says. “Still good, but different.” This was different than the relationship he knew at the NFL, where the players’ union is collectively bargained, formal and distant by design. Golf was, at best, a fragile and personal trust between commissioner and competitors. That trust had frayed by the time Rolapp arrived, exacerbated by the tour’s surprise framework agreement with PIF in June 2023 that blindsided players who’d spent months publicly defending an institution that had been secretly negotiating with the enemy. Rolapp understood that whatever faith remained was thin, and that he wasn’t going to charm his way in. He went to work. “I think he’s a guy that just kind of gets things done,” Scottie Scheffler said earlier this year at Bay Hill. “I met him last year at one of the playoff events. We sat down, and it was just, like, just getting right into it. He started

THE NEW PGA TOUR COMING IN 2028 The PGA Tour spent roughly nine months studying the sport's structural problems. The solution starts in 2028, as the tour will look fundamentally different with two co-existing series, real promotion and relegation, a reimagined postseason and a schedule built around cities the tour has mostly ignored. The specificity of schedules, DP World Tour eligibility and the developmental tiers is all still being written. Here are the key points of the framework. • The Championship Series and the Challenger Series will share a calendar and nothing else—separate fields, separate purses, separate points systems. The top tier will be smaller and richer, playing 23 or 24 events from February 62

GOLFDIGESTME.COM

SEPTEMBER 2026

through August with fields capped at 120 golfers and a $20-million purse floor. Majors, the Players, the postseason, Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup anchor this schedule; the rest is being rebuilt around big markets in Boston, Denver, New York, Seattle and Washington, D.C. Sponsor exemptions, the mechanism that let title sponsors slot in preferred players regardless of form, are no more. • At season’s end, 90 golfers on the Championship Series keep a card while 20 are promoted from below. Finish 91st or worse, and you're down to a "last chance" fall series which will be four to six events offering one final shot before a player is sent down to the Challenger Series.

• Championship Series members cannot play Challenger Series events. No more stars cherry-picking soft fields. • The Challenger Series is 20-plus events with 144-player fields and a $4-million floor, played at familiar tour venues. Win twice in a season and a player is elevated to the Championship Series. • The season-ending Tour Championship moves to match play, rotates through new venues, and carries relegation stakes, a real departure from the 72-hole strokeplay tournament at East Lake that has closed out the season for years.

asking questions, and we started talking. It was like no nonsense—like, we’ve got an hour, let’s make the most of this hour. I loved it.” “I clearly didn’t know a lot of things: how the tour worked, how the sport was set up, what was on the players’ minds,” Rolapp says. “But it’s also part of my leadership style. I’ve always believed humility and selfawareness are underrated leadership attributes because they let somebody know what they don’t know. When you lose sight of that, that’s when leaders get in trouble, or they surround themselves with people who tell them what they want to hear, the classic yes men.” For someone considered an outsider to the sport’s po-

litical matrix, Rolapp has spurred change in a relatively short window. The urgency he keeps returning to has a catchphrase inside tour headquarters, “Only the paranoid survive,” a line Rolapp borrowed from Andy Grove, the former Intel chief executive. It’s a philosophy he carried from his NFL years, where he liked to remind his team that someone in Midtown Manhattan in 1975 had once declared baseball America’s pastime now and forever. (Nowadays Monday Night Football often outdraws World Series games.) Standing still, in his view, is decline. What worries Rolapp most specifically is a structural problem with no easy fix. Golf, unlike the NFL, spent the better part of two decades organised around a single transcendent star. The most successful sports in the world, he says, find a way to rejuvenate themselves with every new cycle of stars. After Tiger Woods, Rolapp thinks the PGA Tour lost a little of that instinct, and the last five years have laid that bare. The new PGA Tour schedule is set to launch in 2028 with fewer and more consequential events, a clearer season-long narrative, and a calendar built to be legible to someone who hasn’t followed the sport their entire life. The new schedule is not, Rolapp is careful to say, a wholesale expansion: not more tour cards, not a longer season. It’s a reorganisation of what already exists into a structure a casual sports fan could explain to a friend: a real regular season, a real postseason, and stakes attached to specific weeks rather than diffused evenly across an entire calendar year. It is the tangible expression of everything the conversations with players were meant to surface. “I feel like it’s the beginning of the end of the beginning,” he says. What’s been accomplished so far, he says, is real but incomplete—”not even a fraction of what we need to do.” The goal beneath the goal is not simply to win golf’s internal war but to make the PGA Tour something closer to what the NFL became during his 22 years there: not merely the dominant tour in its sport but a genuinely mainstream piece of the American sports calendar. Rolapp’s method to get there has been almost tediously transparent, which players say is precisely the point.

SEPTEMBER 2026

GOLFDIGESTME.COM 63

GOLFDIGESTME.COM

SEPTEMBER 2026

Another gap Rolapp talks about is between the millions of Americans who play golf and the far smaller number who are fans of the tour.

“The communication that Brian and the team have done with the players has bordered on repetitive,” says Maverick McNealy, “which is far better than the alternative of springing something on everyone completely by surprise. Brian has done an awesome job of stress-testing a lot of these ideas out in the media, out in public, with the players, trying to poke holes in them as early as possible. We’ve left a few ideas behind that clearly weren’t going to work and proceeded with the ones people seemed excited about.” “I feel a huge responsibility to our PGA Tour members,” Rolapp says. “This is how they make a living. I feel it’s my responsibility to create a system that lets them make a living based on how they play but also lets them display their skills to the world.” He extends the same weight to fans, to the sport’s stakeholders and business partners, to the abstract notion of an institution built to outlast the person currently running it. “You don’t just get to worry about the players,” he says. “You don’t just get to worry about the fans. You don’t just get to worry about the shareholders, your partners. You’ve got to worry about all of them, and that’s a lot.” The Public Investment Fund pulled its funding from LIV Golf earlier this year, a decision that might have done more to end the standoff than anything drafted inside PGA Tour headquarters. Rolapp did not spend the year as a passive beneficiary of that collapse. He was instrumental in the internal politicking that brought Brooks Koepka back once the five-time major winner signalled he’d grown tired of LIV—a defection that mattered less for what it added to the tour’s leaderboard than for what it signaled to everyone else still weighing an exit from the Saudi league. While PIF was quietly stepping back, Rolapp was moving to make sure there’d be nowhere else for LIV to turn. Alliances with the DP World Tour, the Asian Tour and the Australian Open closed off what little runway LIV’s leadership had left as it searched for new investors to replace the big one that walked away. Rolapp is careful to head off the accusations that have followed him since the job began, that the changes are cover for private equity interests, or a slow abandonment of the tour’s charitable mission. “That gets muddied with, we only care about economic return, or it’s private equity, or we’re going to abandon the charitable mission,” he says. “None of that is true.” Where friction does exist gathers around two things. The first is money. Any move that touches the tour’s ownership structure, or opens the door to outside capital, gets read by a certain skeptical constituency as evidence that Rolapp is quietly steering the tour toward

a private-equity payday, whatever he says publicly about the charitable mission. The second is harder to name but just as real inside the sport: A low, persistent hum of resistance from golf insiders—at the tour as well as at other governing bodies with their own histories and own turf—at taking direction from a man who, 12 months ago, had never worked a day in golf administration. Although rarely stated aloud, this faction believes that golf’s problems require someone who’s lived inside golf’s traditions, not someone importing lessons from a league with a completely different business, labor structure and audience. Rolapp is aware of both currents and unbothered by them in roughly equal measure, treating the privateequity suspicion as something to be corrected with a plain answer and the insider skepticism as something to be worn down, slowly, the same way he wore down players who didn’t yet have a reason to trust him. Rolapp doesn’t carry the battle scars of the players and executives who lived through the schism year by year, but he’s aware of the fatigue it left behind. He also has no patience for golf’s favourite excuse for doing nothing. “Golf is different, or we’ve never done it that way—those don’t resonate with me,” he says. “You have to think like a fan. It’s not that complicated.” Another gap Rolapp talks about almost as much is between the millions of Americans who play golf and the far smaller number who’d call themselves fans of the tour, a disconnect he first noticed at that caddie window at Congressional. “It’s confusing” and “All the events are the same” are what he hears now when golfers tell him why they’ve drifted as fans. Closing that trench, more than any schedule change, is the real bet. Fans looking closely might see something that hasn’t been offered in a long time: not a framework under siege, or under negotiation, or dismantled by competing interests while leadership assured everyone the plane was landing, and no more promises that dissolve into new promises. “You have a responsibility to do it right. That doesn’t mean you’re going to please everybody,” Rolapp says. “It’s sort of bigger than you. If you’re in these jobs for any other reason, you’re not the right person for the job.” He gets up from the chair and starts pointing out more history books in his office. Whether he’s the right man for this job isn’t a question the present can answer. It belongs to 2028, and maybe not even then. What’s certain is that he’s the one authoring this chapter. History, if it rhymes the way Rolapp insists it does, has never much cared who held the pen. Only what was written.

SEPTEMBER 2026

GOLFDIGESTME.COM 65

the me club Carl Downham

David Pendleton-Nash

Ryan Morris

2026 Red Hot Open Jumeirah Golf Estates, UAE

2026 Summer Open Jumeirah Golf Estates, UAE

Hole in One at Hole 17 Dubai Hills Golf Club, UAE

Sam Woodward

Trump Golf Dubai Team

Back Nine Pairs Scramble Trump International Golf Club Dubai, UAE

Employee Excellence Awards Trump International Golf Club Dubai, UAE

SGSC Members

EGF Members

Captain’s Trip to Da Nang, Vietnam Sharjah Golf and Shooting Club, UAE

National Team Camp Royal Golf Dar Essalam, Rabat, Morocco

To read more, visit golfdigestme.com/thegulfclub 66

GOLFDIGESTME.COM

SEPTEMBER 2026

PHOTOGRAPHS SUPPLIED

A gallery of some of the local winners in the amateur circuit. Spot anyone you know?

Golf Digest Middle East - September 2026