The Golfer's Journal Podcast

Since the Super Bowl era began in 1967, only 800 men have started an NFL game at quarterback. Kyle Allen is in that elite club. He joins host Casey Bannon on this week's episode of  Mind Game  to discuss the physical, mental, emotional and leadership skills required to play the most coveted and challenging position in professional sports. This podcast is 100% reader supported thanks to the Bro...

As a kid, Tom Valentine called Merion Golf Club “the family farm.” His grandfather tended the greens there for 52 years, and his father followed suit for another 27. Tom took a different approach, opting to leave the "farm" to develop newer and more efficient ways to care for courses. That's taken him across the golf world, but his heart still belongs to Merion. Dig in learn more abo...

The brain processes roughly 70,000 thoughts per day. With 100 billion neurons connected nearly 500 trillion different ways, it’s without question the most important club in your bag. So as we continue The Index Experiment , it’s vital to examine the mind’s role in playing better golf. In this new podcast series, we’ll hear from high performers, academics and experts across a wide range of discipli...

You might have heard that gambling legend Billy Walters is releasing a book, and that Phil Mickelson is prominently involved. But have you heard the rest of the story? The one in which Walters is raised in the pool halls of rural Kentucky, rises to legitimate business power on the Las Vegas Strip and uses his time in prison to do some good for other inmates? Walters joins host Tom Coyne to chat ab...

The Golfer's Journal Podcast is made possibly by member support .If you enjoyed this episode, please consider becoming a member here. As host of Golf Channel’s  Morning Drive  from 2011 until its final episode in December 2020, Gary Williams cemented his place as one of golf’s most recognizable voices. He joins host Tom Coyne to take stock of a golf life spanning from Ridgewood to Wyoming to S...

Welcome back to Re-Teed—the show that relieves some of golf’s most memorable tournaments. This time around, Editor Travis Hill reminisces on the chaos that was the 2017 Open at Royal Birkdale which, for him, included birthday cake shots, Wrigley Field and life-changing news. For Jordan Spieth, it included one of the strangest rulings in golf history and some demon slaying down the stretch. We re-t...

Joe McDonnell has always known good golf. He grew up in Hoylake and has been a member of Royal Liverpool since he was a young lad. Today, McDonnell is changing the way the industry thinks and looks at golf holes. Using state-of-the-art topography technology, 3D graphics and an artist’s touch, McDonnell’s hyper-detailed renderings of golf holes land somewhere between golf course architecture and mo...

The Golfer's Journal is made possible by member support. If you'd like to support the show, please consider becoming a member. What’s left after playing and writing your way through Ireland, Scotland and America? For TGJ Senior Editor Tom Coyne, it's settling down and falling in love with a golf course that needs some. Alongside his new superintendent Shaun Smith, Tom details how he be...

The Golfer's Journal Podcast is made possible by member support. If you'd like to support the show, please consider becoming a member here: https://glfrsj.nl/Memberships Geoff Shackelford has written extensively on golf course architecture throughout the years and has consulted for Los Angeles Country Club on course modifications, making him the ideal guest for 2023 U.S. Open week. Shackel...

Friend-of-the-program David McLay-Kidd makes his return to the TGJ Podcast from the site of his highly-anticipated next project: Dormie Network’s GrayBull in the Nebraska Sandhills. The world-renowned architect known for his work at Bandon Dunes, Gamble Sands and Sand Valley joins Tom Coyne to discuss the wide array of course builds he’s currently undertaking, the new course boom, how water works,...

What does it take to be the best in the world? Or maybe just better than yesterday? If anyone knows it’s Cameron McCormick—Jordan Spieth’s swing coach for the last 18 years and one of the game’s most respected instructors. Host Tom Coyne recently paid McCormick a visit at his performance center at Trinity Forest Golf Club where they discussed the mindset of elite players, the power of forgiving yo...

The Golfer's Journal Podcast is made possible by member support. If you'd like to support the show, please consider becoming a member here: https://glfrsj.nl/Memberships Lou Stagner never intended to become the golf data guy. But with a degree in analytics and a spreadsheet that’s tracked every single one of his shots since the 1990s, he’s uniquely qualified for it. The prolific tweeter jo...

The Golfer's Journal Podcast is made possible by Member support. If you'd like to support the show, please consider becoming a TGJ Member: https://glfrsj.nl/Memberships Bernard Darwin didn't invent golf writing. But as TGJ contributor and philosophy professor Matt Chominski tells us, he was the first to prove it could be a career. Chominski and host Tom Coyne are your guides through Da...

After an award-winning career as a PGA teaching professional, Keith Stewart is going all in on something more high stakes: betting on golf. The founder of readtheline.com joins host Tom Coyne to unpack what makes golf such an attractive sport to wager on, his rigorous process for making picks, the pros and cons of sports gambling and all the factors that make The Masters one of the most-bet weeks...

Parker McLachlin, aka @shortgamechef, is a winner on the PGA Tour and is now helping some of the world’s best players revamp their short game using modern techniques. We sat down with Keith Mitchell and Collin Morikawa’s greenside guru to better understand how pros approach wedge play, why our understanding of it needs modernizing, why amateurs make it harder than it actually is and who the best t...

Harry Higgs would like you to know that these are his opinions, and his alone. The PGA Tour veteran joins the pod to give his unfiltered thoughts on the USGA and R&A’s recent distance ruling, criticism from “Twitter warriors,” designated and no-cut events, LIV Golf, the emotional work he’s been doing to play better golf and much more.

You’ve watched JJ Redick knock down three-pointers since his freshman year at Duke two decades ago. These days, when the 15-year NBA vet isn’t talking hoops on your TV, he’s likely grinding over his short game. The legendary sniper joins host Tom Coyne to discuss how he’s redirecting his competitive fire into golf. He also nerds out on club logos, ponders the art inherent in golf course architectu...

Five years after they first started recording their quest to a 0.0, Mike & Eli of Chasing Scratch are still doing exactly that. The co-hosts of golf’s favorite game improvement buddy podcast join host Tom Coyneto to unpack their up-and-down journey to this point, and help our audience avoid any pitfalls along the path of better. For example: Are training aids a scam? Is speed necessary? How ma...

Should I attack this pin or play it safe? How do I move on from a bad shot? How do I get better during the offseason? For the answers to these and many other questions from Broken Tee Society members participating in The Index Experiment, we turn to Practical Golf’s Jon Sherman. As a self described "player coach," Sherman is less concerned with your swing than he is with what you do before, betwee...

Charlie Warzel writes about technology’s effect on culture, people and ideas for The Atlantic . This makes him the perfect person to ask the question: Why are we all addicted to watching the Trents and Big Randys of the world play golf on YouTube? Warzel consumed “a weapons-grade amount of YouTube golf” for his story in TGJ No. 23, and joins the podcast to unpack it all with Tom Coyne. They also d...

Nearly 20 years ago, TGJ Senior Editor Tom Coyne put life on hold, moved to Florida and dumped everything he had into chasing his dream of playing pro golf. He chronicled his journey in the NYT best-selling book Paper Tiger, and recently sat down with TGJ contributor Matt Chominski to reflect on what he learned whilst doing so.

This February, pro golf will receive the F1 treatment thanks to Full Swing: an eight-part Netflix docuseries showcasing what life as a pro golfer was really like in 2022. Vox Media's Chad Mumm—a Broken Tee Society member known to pop into our Discord server—is the man behind it all. He joins Tom Coyne on TGJ Podcast 126 to give a behind-the-scenes look at making the show, the process behind gettin...

Mike DeVries has learned from the best. The Michigan native first picked up the game at Crystal Downs, trained under Tom Doak and worked for Tom Fazio. He's since made a name for himself by designing celebrated modern courses like Kingsley Club, Cape Wickham and Greywalls to name a few. On TGJ Podcast 125, DeVries joins host Tom Coyne from the site of his next project in Tasmania to speak to what...

It’s not easy to pin down Bill Murray, but one way to do so, as podcast host Tom Coyne learned, is to ride shotgun with him across Georgia. In this candid conversation from the midst of a golf road trip to Ohoopee Match Club, the two discuss what they love about golf, where they love to play it, and with whom. It’s Bill Murray as you haven’t heard him before–not the movie star but your pilot acros...

Andrew Green has become one of the hottest names in golf course architecture thanks to his renovation work at Inverness, Congressional, Oak Hill, Scioto, Wannamoisett and many other golden age classics in need of a refresh. But does he want to build something from scratch? He joins Tom Coyne on the TGJ Podcast to discuss his passion for history, his start in golf course design, love for his job an...