The post It’s one of the ‘worst’ golf tips ever — here’s Bobby Jones’ fix for it appeared first on Golf.

The post It’s one of the ‘worst’ golf tips ever — here’s Bobby Jones’ fix for it appeared first on Golf.

“Keep your head down,” said GOLF.com reader Jason Cunningham. “Worst advice anyone can ever give another golfer.”

A chorus of others agreed with that sentiment, and so do GOLF Top 100 Teachers. They voted “keeping your head down” as the worst piece of golf advice.

What makes the idea so bad? Because keeping your head down makes sense in theory, but doesn’t work in practice, teachers say. Golfers can over-exaggerate it, and end up staying down so severely that they stop turning through the shot. Reading Bobby Jones’ legendary On Golf instruction book, Jones agreed, naming it one of the most damaging pieces of golf advice.

“The average golfer would be a lot better off,” he said. “If no one had ever said anything about the necessity for keeping the eyes glued upon the ball.”

He continues:

“When a person begins to think about keeping his head immovable and concentrates upon keeping his eye fixed upon the ball, trouble is being invited. The very act of trying to do something that is unnatural to do sets up a tension that is hard to break…when a man gazes fixedly at a golf ball, he is doing something wholly unnecessary and destructive of the rhythm and relaxation he has striven for.”

Jones’ swing thought: Keep your right arm down

Instead, Jones says your head should stay “practically stationary,” but encourages it to move subtly toward your trail leg on the backswing. He writes that instead of thinking of keeping your head down, he uses another swing thought:

“I always think of it as staying down to the ball with your right side and arm,” he writes. “The most common cause of head lifting can be found in the right side. Whenever the right side and arm fails in holding the player down, the head is forced to move early.”

So don’t keep your head down. Think of keeping your right side, and arm, down. It’s a swing thought from one of the greats — and one that might actually work.

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The post This sneaky-great Masters patron perk is chock full of insight and goodness appeared first on Golf.

The post This sneaky-great Masters patron perk is chock full of insight and goodness appeared first on Golf.

This year, I fell for a 68-page booklet.

Its official name — everything at the Masters has an official name — is the Spectator Guide, and it’s distributed to patrons at no charge. There are many things I love about the handsome handbill. Here, we shall celebrate four of them: 

1. Its size. At 7¾” x 4¼”, it slips snuggly into your pocket, front or back. 

2. Its old-school simplicity. All the information is conveyed via words, numbers and pencil sketches, printed in black and green ink. The only variations from that sequence are the full-color course-map illustration that extends across pages 34-35, and the cellphone policy on page 2, printed in red and all-caps. (Yep, intentionally hard to miss.) The only sign of modernity is the @themasters social handle on the booklet’s cover.    

3. Its notes section. The last four pages of the booklet are empty, reserved for thoughts or observations that patrons might want to jot down. You never know when the beauty of Amen Corner — or going seven hours without the distraction of your phone — might move you to put pen to paper.    

4. Its contents. This, of course, is where the manual really shines. It’s like a Masters search engine — on paper! It has it all: past winners, the scorecard, hole-by-hole descriptions, player bios, significant dates in the tournament’s history, even instructions from Augusta National co-founder Bobby Jones himself about how to cheer: “It is appropriate for spectators to applaud successful strokes in proportion to difficulty but excessive demonstrations by a player or his partisans are not proper because of the possible effect upon other competitors.” 

Those oft-cited patron rules we always hear about? They’re all in here, too, spelled out in unequivocal language:

—”Unsolicited or consistent calls from the gallery are prohibited”

—”Running is considered to be unacceptable behavior”

—”Electronic devices (including phones, laptops, tablets are beepers) are strictly prohibited on the grounds

—”A patron is allowed to bring only one chair onto the grounds,” and “seats in observation stands are not to be reserved”

—Among the prohibited items: flags, stroller and selfie sticks

The highlight, though, is the Spectator Suggestions section, also written by Jones, in 1949, in which he details the five best spots on the course for taking in the action — “gallery centers,” in his parlance. Jones’ top recs: behind the 2nd and 7th greens; left of the 17th green; behind the 10th green; behind the 12th tee; and left of the 15th green. (The last of those is my personal favorite spot; from the top of the grandstand there, you can see the approaches into 15 and the tee shots behind you on the par-3 16th.)

As for the practice of trailing one group around the course? Hard pass, Jones wrote — it’s the “least satisfactory way of watching a medal play tournament.” 

Indeed, if you tried to follow Tiger Woods around Augusta last week, you know exactly what Jones meant. 

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The post How this Bobby Jones descendant is using golf to help promote mental health appeared first on Golf.

The post How this Bobby Jones descendant is using golf to help promote mental health appeared first on Golf.

He also faced struggles with which nearly everybody can relate.

In 1930, fresh off a Grand Slam-winning season, Jones, then 28, hung up his spikes, quit competing, his body more than able but his mind no longer willing. He found tournament golf stressful. It took everything he had, creating pressures that he likened to being “in a cage.”

“There are two sides to the story of Bobby Jones,” says his great-grandson Robert Jones Black. “One was his success on the course. The other was his intellect and emotional intelligence, and the way he dealt openly with his mental health.”

Mental health. It’s a hot-button topic, far more now than it was in Jones’ day.

In golf. At work. And most places in between.

Name the source of stress. The virus. Online venom.

Almost no one is immune.

Black, who is 46 and earns his keep as a sports marketer, has founded a non-profit to help address these problems, an organization that draws on the legacy of Bobby Jones while promoting the values that he embodied.

It’s called the Generation Next Project, and its efforts are focused on a demographic that is often most afflicted by the pressures of our age but also least equipped to cope with them.

Generation Next is all about the mental health of kids.

“When you think about what kids are dealing with today with technology and social media, and then you throw the pandemic on top of it all,” Black says. “They’ve been facing isolation and uncertainties on a scale that you and I never did.”

In response, Generation Next works on multiple fronts. Through fundraising events and private donations, it provides financial support to two non-profits: the American Junior Golf Association and the Positivity Project, a social and emotional curriculum designed to encourage positive traits such as empathy, self-awareness and confidence among the pre-K-through-12-grade population. At the same time, Generation Next creates digital content to help kids and their families identify mental health problems while providing tools and resources to help address them.

Next year, Black and his colleagues plan to launch a series of golf retreats, allowing teens and their parents to escape for two-day, three-night instructional experiences hosted by a golf celebrity.

Instruction

While Black is quick to concede that golf can’t be a cure-all, he’s certain it can be of great assistance.

“I’ll never be able to say to everybody that it is going to be the solution to every problem,” he says. “But the golf community is influential. And the sport itself, whether you’re talking about the values it cultivates or just the simple benefits of getting out in the fresh air, is an incredible illustration of the positive impact you can have on the social and emotional development of kids.”

Like many rays of light, Generation Next was born in darkness. In April 2020, shortly after lockdowns started, the young son of Black’s friend and business partner committed suicide. Twelve-year-old Hayden Hunstable had no history of depression or other mental health issues. But in the isolation of the pandemic, his routine disrupted, many his favorite activities canceled, he had turned increasingly to online gaming. His parents attributed his suffering to what they described as a “perfect storm.”

The tragedy, while unique, rang out as a red alert to a larger problem.

“Even before we all started to feel the full impact of the pandemic, all the experts were saying that there was going to be a tsunami of mental health issues on top of an already volatile environment for kids,” Black says. “And then the tsunami hit, and we were at ground zero.”

In the wake of Hayden’s death, his father, Brad Hunstable, founded Hayden’s Corner, an organization aimed at educating kids and parents about responsible gaming while pushing for federal legislation that would require that resilience classes be included in the core curriculum of K-12 schools nationwide.

It dawned quickly on Black that he wanted to do more than mourn beside his friend.

“My family and I have always tried to be humble about our connection to this very important figure in golf,” he says. “But if ever there was a time to embrace that lineage, the time was now.”

Not only does the Jones legacy give Black leverage in the golf world, but it also provides him with inspiration. Among his other talents, the greatest amateur ever had a gift for crystallizing words into wisdom. His Bartlett’s-worthy quotes are legion. One of many posted on the Generation Next website reads: “Golf is the closest game to the game we call life. You get bad breaks from good shots; you get good breaks from bad shots — but you have to play the ball where it lies.”

Off the course, though, you’re allowed to make improvements. That’s what Black is after. Next year, Generation Next plans to ramp up its charitable efforts, backed by three major fundraisers, each tied to a big-time golf event: the Tour Championship, at East Lake, in Georgia; the Presidents Cup, at Quail Hollow, in North Carolina; and the U.S. Open at The Country Club, near Boston. A percentage of every dollar raised through those and other efforts will go toward producing additional content, which, Black says, will be distributed on digital platforms that maximize reach: a widespread message to address a widespread problem.

“In golf,” reads another Jones quote on the Generation Next website, “the most important distance is the five inches between the ears.”

That’s true in life, too.

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The post What is the Masters and how did it start? A brief history of golf’s most famous tournament appeared first on Golf.

The post What is the Masters and how did it start? A brief history of golf’s most famous tournament appeared first on Golf.

In 1930, the legendary Bobby Jones retired from competitive golf after 13 major championship victories. Around the same time, he met with Clifford Roberts, an investment banker from New York who Jones met a handful of times. For years, Jones dreamt of building and opening a golf course in his post-playing career, and Roberts was prepared to help his newly-retired friend see his goal through to completion. The two decided Augusta, Ga. — a suburb of Atlanta — would be the ideal location for a golf club, and quickly purchased a parcel of land belonging to Fruitland Nurseries. The pair hired Alister Mackenzie, a renowned golf course architect, to design a layout, and within three years’ time, Augusta National was open for play.

Soon after opening, it was decided that Augusta National would host a golf tournament, both to give back to the game of golf and as a way of promoting the new club on the national stage. Roberts, who was named the club’s first chairman (a title he would hold for close to four decades), suggested the name Masters, but it was quickly shot down by Jones, who thought it presumptive. Eventually, membership agreed upon “Augusta National Invitation Tournament,” a name that stuck until Jones relented to Roberts some five years later.

The first-ever recognized Masters winner is Horton Smith, whose four-day total of 285 (or four under for the weekend) was good enough to best Craig Wood, Billy Burke and Paul Runyan. Smith also became the first two-time Masters winner ever in 1936, when he outlasted Gene Sarazen en route to his second-ever victory in the tournament. Jimmy Demaret was the first pro to win the Masters under its current name in 1940, capturing the $5,000 first prize as many of the game’s biggest names — Ben Hogan, Sam Snead and Byron Nelson, among others — began to flock toward the event.

Traditionally, the Masters is held in the first full week of April, a tradition adopted with the Masters name in 1940. With rare exception, the tournament has been held annually in the months of March and April for the entirety of its existence. The tournament was canceled for a number of years during World War II, and was postponed to the fall in 2020 due to the Covid pandemic.

Ultimately, names like Hogan, Snead and Nelson (and later, Nicklaus, Palmer and Player) deserve credit for building the tournament’s international mystique. Those half-dozen names own 20 Masters titles and the lion’s share of many of the great moments in tournament history. In 1949, Snead became the first golfer to receive a green jacket for winning the tournament, which up to that point had been reserved only for Augusta National members (previous winners were retroactively awarded jackets soon thereafter).

The tournament scoring record belongs to Dustin Johnson, who claimed his first Masters in November 2020 with a 20-under total of 268. The win made him the only golfer to record a 72-hole score in the 260s, and the first winner of the tournament outside the months of March and April.

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The post Whiskey Wednesday: Whiskey and a life lesson from Bobby Jones’ grandson appeared first on Golf.

The post Whiskey Wednesday: Whiskey and a life lesson from Bobby Jones’ grandson appeared first on Golf.

There’s perhaps no more apparent confluence of golf and American whiskey than The Clover Whiskey. The brand boasts Bobby Jones on the label for each of its bottles, and considering 2020 marks the 90th anniversary of Bobby Jones’ grand slam, I decided to pour myself a dram and call up Dr. Bob Jones IV, the grandson of golf’s grand slam winning golfer.

On The Clover whiskey…

2020 has been a challenging year for many people and businesses — both inside the golf industry and otherwise. The Clover Whiskey is no exception. The Clover line is a relatively new entry into the world of whiskey. They have three lines of single-barrels: A 4-year-old bourbon with notes of oak and caramel; a 10-year-old Tennessee whiskey with heavy notes of vanilla; and a 4-year-old rye, perfect for golfers who like a bit of spice to their whisky.

The Clover was originally sold only in golf clubhouses across the country, but with so many closing temporarily due to the global pandemic, the whiskey has been increasingly available to buy online — with plans for more in the future, Dr. Jones said.

“Each whiskey comes from a single barrel, which gives each whiskey a uniqueness and quality my grandfather would be proud of,” he said.

On a November Masters…

In some ways, strange though it may sound, the seriousness of Covid-19 began to hit home back in early March. America wasn’t in lockdown by then, there were no schedule alterations and indeed, I was on the road at the time, covering the Arnold Palmer invitational. But when Augusta National issued a statement saying they were monitoring the situation for this year’s Masters, it sent a shock wave through golf. Not long after, the club announced it would reschedule the 2020 tournament to November.

Needless to say, Dr. Jones thinks the club that his grandfather co-founded made the right call, and that after a year that’s been so difficult for so many, he thinks the alteration of this year’s tournament will be a highlight for the game.

“I’m sure it will pain them not to have spectators there, but the club has been monitoring things very closely, and they’re doing the right thing,” Dr. Jones said. “My grandfather would be proud. … The tournament this year will be special. It’ll be a celebration for all of golf.”

On the lessons passed down from his grandfather…

Bobby Jones’ accomplishments are hard to fully comprehend within a modern context. Not only did he win the Grand Slam — a feat yet to be matched — he was also a successful lawyer and businessman, who later co-founded and co-designed one of the greatest golf courses on Earth.

But the backbone of all those compliments, Dr. Jones says, was humility. Those lessons have been passed down from generation to generation, and they serve as a great reminders for the rest of us.

“My grandfather used to always tell us, to never forget the big people in life can be very, very small, and the small people in life can be very, very big,” he said. “If you go about your life trying to have a positive impact on people, it’s amazing the impact you have.”

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