Welcome to the fourth installment of Lessons From a Vintage Golf Magazine.
If you’re new here, the idea behind this series is simple. We dig up golf instruction from an old magazine and hold it up against the game as we play it today. I’ve come to realize there’s more untouched wisdom sitting in past golf instruction than most of us realize.
For those who haven’t read the previous posts in this series, you can check them out here.
For today’s post, we’ll be looking at a piece called 17 Ways to Play Smarter Golf from the February 1980 issue of Golf Digest.
(If you want to read the original you can view it here)
It was introduced by longtime Golf Digest writer Dick Aultman, and it opens with a question every golfer has asked themselves at some point:
“How could I be so stupid?”
Aultman’s answer to that question was to hand it over to an entire roster of major champions and respected teachers, and let each of them take a crack at it. Collectively, the group had won 52 majors and roughly $13 million on tour at the time of writing. Each contributor was given a short, standalone lesson on managing your game, and yourself, a little better.
In total, there were seventeen lessons, but I picked out the six that I felt were most transformational for your game (and to save you a little time). I broke them into three categories:
Commitment
Diagnosis
Managing Yourself
Alright, let’s get into it.
