The 75 Biggest Moments in Golf Digest History, Part IV: 1994-2006

Nobody likes listening to a golfer go through his or her entire round shot by shot, but allow us some indulgence as we near the end of our 75th anniversary year. We were very selective. To choose the 75 moments that tell our story—from a naval officer named Bill Davis getting a taste for magazine publishing after writing an account of a kamikaze attack, to our current position within global sports leader TNT Sports—we discarded stories and episodes that were merely popular or fun in favor of those that had lasting effect. An editorial moment had to ripple for years afterward in the way Golf Digest operated, the golf world or even media at large. That’s why senior editor John P. May quietly deciding in 1961 to try photographing Ben Hogan with an 8-millimeter motion camera, which birthed our interactive and digitized modern swing sequence analyses, gets the same nod of importance as when we upended tempers at the PGA Merchandise Show in 2004 with our first Hot List ranking of clubs. We also didn’t spare our embarrassments, such as when in 2010 the cover story “10 Tips Obama can take from Tiger” landed the same week revelations of Woods’ personal life busted the Internet and a fire hydrant.

Thank you for being a member of the Golf Digest community. We hope you enjoy the stroll down memory lane of this special club that predates us all.

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Thank you for being a member of the Golf Digest community. We hope you enjoy the stroll down memory lane of this special club that predates us all.

Max Adler, Editorial Director

The 75 Biggest Moments in Golf Digest History: 1940-1969 / 1970-1980 / 1981-1992 / 1994-2006 / 2007-2023

1990s

1994: Tiger Woods appears on the cover for the first time and joins as playing editor three years later. To date, his image has been on 35 of our covers, though his most impactful content might be the 2019 YouTube release of his video series “Tiger Woods: My Game,” a collaboration with Golf Digest and GOLFTV, in which Woods provided rare insights into his training, course strategy and shotmaking.

1996: GolfDigest.com launches as an uneven, pixelated experiment primarily as a place to sell subscriptions and store overflow content. With time, the website emerges as a destination with a distinct voice and viewpoint that can embrace the multimedia capability of the Internet. Over the next decade, greater bandwidth leads to video lessons from top players, interactive extensions of Hot List equipment reviews and minute-by-minute dispatches from writers at majors.

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1997: The July Issue is the best-selling of all time with a 59.71 percent sell-through rate on the newsstand and total sales of 195,000—the largest of any golf periodical in history. Who was on the cover? Nobody. It was an illustration of a spinning golf ball with the cover line: “How to Fix Your Slice.”

Our July 1997 cover

1997: Senior writer Tom Callahan spends a month in Vietnam searching for Earl Woods’ best friend Tiger Phong who disappeared in a post-war “re-education camp” in the 1970s. Earl named his son in the hope that he would become world famous and lead the two old warriors to reunite. Callahan comes back with an even more incredible cover story: “The Spirit of Tiger Woods.”

1998: Our first ranking of Golfing CEOs places Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems as No. 1 and Jack Welch of GE as No. 2. The two low handicappers set up a series of challenge matches, invite each other to join their boards and do a billion-dollar deal within months of Golf Digest publishing the list. Executive compensation expert Graef Crystal sees a correlation between the CEO’s competence on the golf course and their companies’ stock performances. As quoted in the New York Times, Crystal says: “For all the different factors I’ve tested as possible links for predicting which CEO’s are going to perform well or poorly, this is certainly one of the oddest—but also the strongest—I’ve seen. There’s got to be something here.”

1998: A new cover slogan: “How to play, what to play, where to play”—suggested by technical consultant Art Chou—becomes a retroactive mission statement that will define the brand for three quarters of a century.

1998: Long-time and valued contributing teacher Davis Love Jr. dies tragically in a private plane crash on Nov. 14 en route to a Golf Digest Schools meeting.

1999: Golf Digest’s June issue is the first to break the 300-page mark, weighing in at 302.

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2000s

2000: Golf Digest names “The Stinger” in a cover story about the quintessential low, running tee shot taught by Butch Harmon and popularized by Tiger Woods.

2000: Golf Digest unveils its 50 Best Teachers ranking with David Leadbetter voted No. 1 by his peers. “You create power by coiling your upper body on the backswing,” he advises, “then feel the stretch increase momentarily before the arms swing down.” The following year, Butch Harmon is ranked No. 1 by his peers—a title he does not relinquish for the next 23 years when he moves to a new Legends of Instruction award in January 2024 (Mark Blackburn is voted into the new top spot).

2001: Condé Nast buys Golf Digest in June, and Si Newhouse infuses the established brand with a new sense of design, art, photography, literature, fashion and style—what the editors respectfully call “fabulousness.”

2001: Golf Digest acquires Golf for Women in November, names Susan Reed as editor and doubles down on women’s golf. The highly acclaimed title gets nominated for a National Magazine Award for its coverage of men’s-only exclusionary policies but suffers financial losses and is shuttered in 2008.

2002: Guy Yocom’s fabled “My Shot” series begins with Sam Snead, who takes on dark rum, mean dogs, terrorism—and why he could have beaten Tiger Woods. The series delivers the lives and golf philosophies of its subjects, from Lee Trevino to Evel Knievel, and becomes the best-read section of the magazine for years to come.

2004: The first Hot List—ratings of every new driver, fairway wood, iron, wedge and putter at the PGA Merchandise Show—is published and rocks the golf industry. Equipment editors Mike Stachura and E. Michael Johnson preside over sprawling coverage of technical innovation that ranges from perimeter-weighted irons, metal and oversized woods, the Pro V1 golf ball and countless iterations of implements that test the limits of the rules.

2006: Golf Digest Index, a separate magazine for elite golfers, begins as a quarterly. Deutsche Bank exec (and later PGA of America CEO) Seth Waugh graces the cover. The idea: Every serious golfer has an index, and we’re all three degrees of separation from getting an invite to play Augusta National—that is, you know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who can get you on anywhere. The magazine folds in May 2009, another victim of the Great Recession.

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