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Last week marked my favorite golf day of the year, and it had nothing to do with the course, or how I played. It’s because Golf Digest’s Seitz Cup, our annual intrasquad competition pitting old staffers vs. young, taps into all the compelling elements of golf with very little of the baggage. (I was on the geezer team. Thank you for at least pretending that was in question.)
The Seitz Cup will never be called pure golf. We play a two-person scramble match-play format with a handicap system that no one quite understands. There was trash talk, music playing out of portable speakers and, at least for the young team, tiny bottles of Fireball liquor wrapped in cellophane goodie bags. Whatever the Golf Digest company tournament was when the magazine started in 1950, this wasn’t it.
But the format also invites strategy, and the tiny flutter of nerves over 12-footers for birdie. When the golf was over (Old Team prevails!), we sidled up to the bar and analyzed the back-and-forth of matches as if we just played the Ryder Cup.
It’s hard to say if the Seitz Cup makes you a better golfer. But it makes you more excited about golf, so it probably doesn’t hurt.
Golf Digest Old Team captains Joel Beall and Alex Myers celebrate a win in the annual Seitz Cup.
Where the Seitz Cup also succeeds is in bringing together a wider cross-section of golfers than you’d expect from a golf company. We have scratch players and beginners, a healthy middle of the bell curve, plus the dreaded once-a-year dabblers who don’t carry a handicap and yet still hit the ball better than I do. There is no one golf perspective at Golf Digest. There are dozens.
It’s why, in the aftermath, it seemed a waste to not canvas the field with the type of questions that might yield new insights into how different golfers play and process the game. I constructed a survey of 16 questions ranging from players’ equipment preferences to the shots they dread under pressure, to ways they’ve displayed anger on the golf course (which could have been reframed as, “Am I the only one who …?”).
Below, based on responses from more than two dozen golfers, are the most interesting takeaways.
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