AUGUSTA, Ga. — Gary Player is a golfing great from another era. A man light-years ahead of his time, with some strong opinions about the golf swing.
A few of which he unleashed following his ceremonial opening tee shot at the 2025 Masters.
Asked to give a piece of advice about how countries outside the U.S. can create a golf superstar of their own, Player dropped a multi-faceted take based on his own experience.
Let's break down the three key parts, and rank them from least-to-most spicy:
3. Better athletes are coming
"There's no such thing as a par-5 in golf anymore. So every time they play golf, par is 68. Now they're starting to drive the par-4s. We haven't started yet. We've never had a big man play golf. Wait until you get a LeBron James or Michael Jordan, with bodies like that, they're going to drive many of the par-4s. I watched a man the other day hit four drives, 475 yards. We haven't had the big men come out yet."
Take rating: 🌶️
You hear this take floating around a lot, in golf but also in other sports. That the more popular golf gets, the more elite athletes that would've played other sports will flow into golf. There's some anecdotal truth to this, but it's hard to quantify, and also tricky to know where the point of diminishing returns are. A 6'9", 250 lbs build may be ideal for basketball, but is it also true for golf? Especially when in golf, unlike other sports, there are hard caps on the length of the clubs you can use. That presented a major struggle for the 6'8", newly-minted professional Christo Lamprecht.
2. The golf swing isn't that important
"The swing is not the thing. The thing that wins major championships is the mind. Everybody I've seen that wins six or more majors or many majors have a different mind. So you can't just think the swing is going to do it. And you've got to be dedicated. You've got to eat properly. You've got to sleep properly, and you've got to work hard. So the choice is yours...[Rory McIlroy] has the best swing in golf without a question. He's the fittest golfer. He does a dead lift of 400 pounds. I don't know if you're aware of what a dead lift is. 400 pounds. If you do 100 pounds, it's exceptional."
Take rating: 🌶️🌶️
This is a medium-spicy take but honestly, I kind of agree with it. There are some fundamental things that every good golf swing has. A good sequence to start your downswing, for instance. But if you have those things and the ability to hit the ball well, consistently, the difference maker will come down to other things. Power; focus; dedication; your strategic approach. Player has this opinion because he is living proof of it. He started working out when people thought working out would be bad for golfers, and he reaped the rewards of being right. There's still skepticism towards things like lifting weights being good for golfers. Rory doesn't believe it, and as Player correctly identifies: He, too, is enjoying the benefits of the skeptics.
1. Golf coaching is bad now
"The teaching today is far worse than when we played golf as young people. They're teaching golfers today to [bow their wrist] at the top of the backswing. Now, I don't know how many of you play golf, but that is fatal. They're teaching people to play that. And then they're teaching to suck the club across the line. You cannot throw a ball in the basket doing that. You've got to keep it on line. So to get a good teacher today is an extremely difficult thing. Tom had a coach, and Tom today, his swing is almost -- other than his injury, is almost as good as it was when he was a young man getting the club in the right position at the top, turning and unwinding. The junk that I hear being taught today."
Take rating: 🌶️🌶️🌶️
With the whopping caveat that I'm not a nine-major and three-time Masters-winning legend like Player, I think this sells a generation of golf coaches short. Good and bad coaches exist across every era. The difference now, if nothing else, is that teachers have access to better information and technology than ever before, and so do golfers. They're merely a couple of clicks away from that same good information (which is why you should sign up for Golf Digest+!). It's how someone like Viktor Hovland could effectively teach himself how to play golf by watching YouTube videos.