The post Former MLB player talks switch to pro golf — and crazy power he produces appeared first on Golf.

The post Former MLB player talks switch to pro golf — and crazy power he produces appeared first on Golf.

In an 11-year Major League Baseball career, Aaron Hicks flashed more than warning-track power. The former outfielder launched 109 home runs, most of them during his tenure with the New York York Yankees.

These days, though, it’s on the golf course where he really lets it fly.

Since stepping away from baseball after the 2024 season, Hicks, 36, has returned to the game he excelled at as a kid, and the results have been impressive. He is already a multiple winner on the Pro Tour, a circuit for current and former professional athletes from other sports. His prodigious length — he can drive it more than 400 yards — has become a calling card.

Appearing this week on GOLF’s Subpar podcast with Colt Knost and Drew Stoltz, Hicks revealed that he routinely produces ball speeds north of 200 mph, with a personal best of 207 mph. For perspective, the average PGA Tour player hovers around 175 mph. Hicks’ numbers are north of those of Rory McIlroy, closer to the neighborhood of Bryson DeChambeau.

Power has never been his problem. Neither, it seems, has golf.

Growing up in Southern California, Hicks was a standout junior player. He learned the game from his father, Joe, a former minor leaguer and avid golfer, and competed on many of the same courses where Tiger Woods honed his skills. (These days, Hicks has another connection to the Woods family: He’s married to former LPGA player Cheyenne Woods, Tiger’s niece.)

Why did he not stick to golf as a kid?

On Subpar, Hicks shared the story of the moment he abandoned the game for baseball.

His father had promised him a new set of clubs if he won a junior tournament. Hicks did exactly that. But when it came time to collect, Joe Hicks had changed his mind.

“Clubs don’t make the player,” his father told him. “The player makes the clubs.”

His dad may have been right, but the lesson was lost on his young son.

“‘You ain’t kept your promise,'” Hicks recalled thinking. “‘I’m going to play baseball.'”

That decision worked out pretty well for him. But after hearing the kind of speed Hicks now generates with a driver, it’s hard not to wonder what might have happened had he stuck with golf all along. You can listen to the entire episode here. You can watch the entire video below.

Top 5 Points:

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How fast is Aaron Hicks’ golf swing speed?
Hicks routinely produces ball speeds north of 200 mph, with a personal best of 207 mph — well above the PGA Tour average of around 175 mph.

2. How far can Aaron Hicks drive a golf ball?
He can drive the ball more than 400 yards, which has become his calling card on the Pro Tour.

3. Why did Aaron Hicks quit baseball for golf?
Hicks retired from Major League Baseball after the 2024 season and returned to golf, the sport he excelled at as a kid growing up in Southern California.

4. Why did Aaron Hicks choose baseball over golf as a kid?
As a junior golfer, his father promised him new clubs if he won a tournament. When Hicks won but his father went back on the promise, he decided to switch to baseball instead.

5. Is Aaron Hicks related to Tiger Woods?
Not by blood, but by marriage — Hicks is married to former LPGA player Cheyenne Woods, who is Tiger Woods’ niece.

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The post Matt Fitzpatrick reveals his favorite U.S. Open venue appeared first on Golf.

The post Matt Fitzpatrick reveals his favorite U.S. Open venue appeared first on Golf.

Matt Fitzpatrick is one of the hottest players in the game right now.

The 31-year-old Englishman is the only PGA Tour player with three wins thus far this season, and is fresh off a 22nd-place finish at the U.S. Open at Shinnecock.

Fitzpatrick is a famously data-driven player in his approach to each golf course, and is known to take copious notes on every shot he hits. Those insights are aided by his official performance data partner Protiviti, which works closely with Fitzpatrick and his team to help turn his practice observations and tournament-round statistics into actionable insights for smarter preparation via a custom-built analytics platform, mobile app and AI powered tools.

On this week’s episode of Subpar, hosts Colt Knost and Drew Stoltz asked Fitzpatrick if he would be willing to share one of his written observations after something bad happened on the course.

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'It was unfair': Major champ laments fan treatment of Wyndham Clark

By: Josh Sens

“None of them were written down,” Fitzpatrick said with a laugh. “They were more said out loud.”

Fitzpatrick has played in 12 U.S. Opens since 2014 and won the 2022 edition of the championship at the Country Club in Brookline, Mass. Stoltz decided to put Fitzpatrick on the spot: Which U.S. Open venue is his favorite, excluding the course where he won?

Despite the recent sting of a difficult weekend in Long Island with rounds of 74-73 on Saturday and Sunday, Fitzpatrick acknowledged that Shinnecock would still be his pick.

“I really like Shinnecock, to be fair,” he said. “I’ve played two U.S. Opens there. I think that’s the place I’ve played the most. I really liked the setup in 2018. I thought it was really difficult, but it was really fair.

“I think people forget that the one thing that I feel that that place offers you, for the most part, apart from maybe a couple of greens, is that if you are out of position, you can get it into a position where you still have a chance of an up and down,” he continued. “And I think that is a big thing. Yeah, the up and down is tough, but you could still be fat side of the green and have a chip, and I felt, that year, it played well from that standpoint. I figured it was the same this year, obviously different conditions with how soft the greens were the first two days, but I would honestly say, Shinnecock is a great venue.”

For more from Fitzpatrick, including a course he’d like to see host a U.S. Open return, check out the full episode of Subpar below.

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The post ‘It was unfair’: Major champ laments fan treatment of Wyndham Clark appeared first on Golf.

The post ‘It was unfair’: Major champ laments fan treatment of Wyndham Clark appeared first on Golf.

The best golfers have short memories. The worst golf fans don’t. Matt Fitzpatrick found that out last week at Shinnecock Hills.

Paired with Wyndham Clark in the third round of the U.S. Open, Fitzpatrick was struck by the volume and intensity of spectator abuse hurled at the eventual tournament winner.

Fitzpatrick’s not naive. He knows that Clark has done himself no favors with assorted displays of bad behavior, none more notorious than his locker-wrecking outburst after missing the cut at last year’s U.S. Open.

“I’m not condoning what he did at Oakmont,” Fitzpatrick told GOLF’s Subpar podcast this week. “It was not really the smartest thing to do.”

Still, he figured the outrage would fade.

“Part of me thought, give it two to three months and everyone would forget about it and you’d never hear about it again,” Fitzpatrick said.

He was wrong. Turns out fans’ memories are long.

“Since you’ve been out there, do you remember a time where fans were as hard on a guy throughout the entire event as they were with Wyndham Clark this week?” podcast co-host Drew Stoltz asked.

Fitzpatrick said he didn’t. And called it “unfair.”

As a veteran of four Ryder Cups, Fitzpatrick has, of course, heard heckling before. He has also encountered it in stroke-play competitions. Battling Scottie Scheffler down the stretch at the RBC Heritage in April, Fitzpatrick triumphed in the face of fans who barked at his ball to get in the bunker. But the scene at Shinnecock, he said, was different.

“Having an American fan base root against an American player is odd,” Fitzpatrick said.

No matter the format, Fitzpatrick noted, the best way to deal with haters is to put on blinders — not to mention earplugs — and play your best. On that front, he said, Clark impressed him with his shot-making and his comportment.

“The guy’s leading the tournament, making putts, doing what he needed to do,” Fitzpatrick said. “Every time on Saturday, he was faultless.”

The following afternoon, after hoisting the trophy, Clark said he hoped he’d won a few fans over. Maybe he has. For now, he’s got Fitzpatrick in his camp.

“I’ve spent a little time with Wyndham,” Fitzpatrick said. “I really like him. I think he’s a good guy.”

You can listen to the entire episode here or watch it on YouTube below.

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The post Rich Lerner shares most memorable line he’s ever heard about Tiger Woods’ peak appeared first on Golf.

The post Rich Lerner shares most memorable line he’s ever heard about Tiger Woods’ peak appeared first on Golf.

Tiger Woods looms large for Rich Lerner.

The 65-year-old broadcaster joined Golf Channel’s on-air team in 1997 — just as Woods’ professional career was launching into the stratosphere. Lerner has had the opportunity to bear witness to Woods’ ups and downs for his entire three-decade stint on the network.

On this week’s episode of Subpar, Lerner joined hosts Colt Knost and Drew Stoltz to discuss his new book, the recently-released Aren’t You That Golf Guy? Lerner said he originally conceived the book as a “Tiger at 50” endeavor, but that changed as he added vignettes from his younger days that included stories and experiences from growing up at his father’s driving range. Lerner describes the book as similar to an Instagram feed, with short chapters, some funny and some poignant. But Woods remains an anchor throughout.

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'We're letting it fly': Rich Lerner's new book doesn't hold back

By: Jessica Marksbury

“It was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen,” Lerner said of Woods’ heyday. “I talk about it in the book at length. It’s not just how much he won, and he won prolifically, it’s how he did it in the most impossible ways. But it’s a complicated saga, we know that. I would say about a third of the book is Tiger, and chronologically the book sort of follows Tiger’s rise, his fall, and his comeback in this redemption story around which there are these dog-legs and detours.”

Lerner said the best story he ever heard that describes was Tiger was like as his peak came from an interview Lerner conducted with Ernie Els.

“I asked Ernie Els in 2010 — I sat down with Ernie in the run-up to the Congressional U.S. Open of 2011. So this is like 10 years, a decade after Tiger’s season for the ages, the 2000 three-major season, and I said, all these years later, how do you view that period of time and Tiger’s impact on you? Because Ernie was meant to win, you know, seven, eight majors, he was definitely gonna win a Masters. He had it all, big supple guy with soft hands.

“And Ernie said to me, in that great South African accent, he said, ‘You know, about 2000, my own father, he said to me, ‘Why don’t you stand up to that man?’ And I said to my own father, I said, ‘You have no f—— idea what we’re dealing with.’ And Ernie was not laughing when he said it, and that one stopped me in my tracks.

“Think about that,” Lerner continued. “‘You have no idea what we’re dealing with,’ as if Tiger were a force of nature, like a tsunami, that couldn’t be handled. And, he was. I mean, they didn’t have an answer for the guy. They just didn’t.”

For more from Lerner, including his thoughts on Phil Mickelson, check out the entire episode of Subpar below.

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The post ‘We’re letting it fly’: Rich Lerner’s new book doesn’t hold back appeared first on Golf.

The post ‘We’re letting it fly’: Rich Lerner’s new book doesn’t hold back appeared first on Golf.

Fans of the Golf Channel have long been familiar with Rich Lerner — an Emmy-award winning broadcaster whose name and face have been network constants for nearly three decades. Over the years, Lerner has accumulated a number of stories he was itching to tell, and now they’re compiled in his first book entitled, Aren’t You That Golf Guy?

On this week’s episode of Subpar, Lerner joined hosts Colt Knost and Drew Stoltz to discuss his foray into book-writing. Lerner says he didn’t hold back in writing the book, taking on some surprisingly personal topics.

“I don’t know if I’m still going to have this gig when the book comes out,” Lerner said with a laugh. “But we’re letting it fly.”

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The book is a mix of Lerner’s childhood experiences working at his father’s driving range, and his professional life in the world of golf.

“The book kind of reads like Instagram, it’s like scrolling,” Lerner said. “The chapters are quick. Some are a little deeper, longer than others. It’s probably two-thirds are loosey-goosey, funny, locker-room kind of stuff, and then the other third is, you know, fairly heavy and, and I think poignant in spots.

“I do deep dives on Tiger, on Phil,” he continued. “There’s Tiger’s rise, his fall and his comeback, the redemption story. I’m deep on Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer, both of whom were very good to me through the years, and then I write about all the modern players. There’s a take on Bryson, Jon Rahm, Scottie Scheffler, we go long on Rory, winning the ’25 Masters, so it hits all the high notes.”

“Nobody tells a story like Rich Lerner,” Knost said. “I was crying laughing at some of the stories. It’s fantastic.”

For more from Lerner, including his best Tiger story, check out the full episode below.

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The post How hard is it *after* instantly earning your Tour card? This pro knows appeared first on Golf.

The post How hard is it *after* instantly earning your Tour card? This pro knows appeared first on Golf.

Alex Fitzpatrick’s rise to the PGA Tour was well documented and fast.

The younger brother of 2022 U.S. Open Champion Matt Fitzpatrick went from winless DP World Tour pro to PGA Tour winner and full-fledged member in the span of four weeks, thanks to his win at the Zurich Classic with Matt.

That put him straight into the field for back-to-back Signature Events in Miami and Charlotte. He didn’t have to keep playing on the DP Tour to try and earn his PGA Tour membership for 2027 and he definitely doesn’t have to go to Q-School.

In fact, Fitzpatrick is exempt on the PGA Tour through the end of 2028 now.

After such a whirlwind promotion, was the pressure on to perform after his brother helped get him PGA Tour membership?

On this week’s episode of GOLF’s Subpar, co-hosts Colt Knost and Drew Stotlz asked Fitzpatrick that very question.

“You know, I felt like there was a little bit of pressure to go out and show my game is good enough. Like every golfer, I wanna be on the PGA Tour and I felt like my game belonged there. So I, that’s why when you asked about sinking in it, I guess it took, it didn’t take as long as I thought.”

Fitzpatrick left little doubt that he belonged with the game’s best players. He finished T9 in Miami and held the 54-hole lead at the Truist Championship before finishing solo fourth.

After a made cut at the PGA Championship, he kept his run of fine play going last week at the Memorial with a T6 showing.

“I don’t know if that’s because maybe I feel so comfortable out here now,” Fitzpatrick continued. “But yeah, I was super happy with how I played the two weeks. And, you know, even going into Sunday in Charlotte, like I felt really comfortable. I didn’t really feel any pressure to go out and win. You know, I don’t think many people expected me to be in the last group on Sunday. So, but I also felt like my game is in a really good spot and I felt like I had a good chance to win.”

To hear more from Fitzpatrick, check out the entire episode on YouTube.

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The post Joe Buck explains the challenges of calling pro golf appeared first on Golf.

The post Joe Buck explains the challenges of calling pro golf appeared first on Golf.

Joe Buck has called six Super Bowls and 23 World Series. He’s a member of the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame and has received the Ford C. Frick Award from the National Baseball Hall of Fame and the Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award from the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Buck has been the voice of some of American sports’ biggest moments over the past several decades. He has faced numerous challenges along the way, but he told GOLF’s Subpar Podcast that nothing compares to the challenge of calling professional golf.

Buck worked for FOX when the network acquired the rights to the U.S. Open and started broadcasting the major championship in 2015. Starting that year at Chambers Bay, he discovered that calling professional golf, especially if you’re only doing it once or twice a year, is a different beast than calling the NFL or MLB on a weekly basis.

“Easily the most challenging thing for me to do,” Buck told Subpar co-hosts Drew Stoltz and Colt Knost. “I remember when FOX got the rights and Johnny Miller was pissed off and everybody at NBC was mad. I was like indignant, like, ‘How could they be mad its network to network?’And Johnny Miller was like, ‘You don’t just fall out of a tree and do a U.S. Open.’ It upset me. I was like, ‘Well, we’re going to do great.’ He was right. He was dead right.

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“It’s hard to pick up the PGA Tour and do our national championship having not done anything else to that point and trying to act like you’ve been there every other week,” Buck continued. “It’s like when I do baseball. I just did a Dodgers-Mets game. I haven’t done a game in a year. It’s hard when you’re not there on a day-by-day basis, and you haven’t kind of walked through the recent history and been there and been attentive to it and known who is hot coming in and you don’t have to research that stuff.”

For Buck, the most difficult thing was that he wasn’t seeing what he was calling with his own eyes. He had to rely on what he saw through monitors and heard through his earpiece.

“Then you add to that the layer of, I’m not looking at any of this with my own eyes,” Buck said. “I’m sitting with my back to the course. I love that game. That doesn’t mean anything. That doesn’t make me any more qualified to do it than anyone else, and I’m not watching it with my own eyes.

“I’m looking forward at cameras and at monitors, and I’m going off information I’m getting out of my ear or from the back of the studio. That’s a weird sensation for me. I usually have the best seat in the house; it’s generated out of my mind for better or worse, I’ve seen it with my own eyes, I can put my own thoughts to it, and now I’m just going off the information [I’m getting through my earpiece].

“You’re trying to put all that together, maintain the scoreboard, trying to create a narrative of why certain players are ascending, why guys are falling apart, remembering the previous shot that happened. It was way more than I ever thought it would be.”

Buck felt that he and his FOX team got the hang of calling golf around Year 5, when they called Gary Woodland’s win at Pebble Beach. But FOX sold the rights back to NBC after that tournament, and Buck’s time calling the U.S. Open ended.

To hear more from Buck, check out the entire episode on YouTube.

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The post Joe Buck explains ‘trap’ he fell into when calling golf on TV appeared first on Golf.

The post Joe Buck explains ‘trap’ he fell into when calling golf on TV appeared first on Golf.

Like any job, there’s a learning curve, even for guys like Joe Buck. Buck and his Fox Sports team called the U.S. Open and U.S. Women’s Open from 2015 to 2020, up until the broadcast partnership abruptly ended in June 2020.

Buck joined this week’s Subpar podcast to discuss his time calling golf on TV, what it’s like to work a Super Bowl, his Mount Rushmore of broadcasters and more. During the golf conversation, he went deep on the learning curve of calling golf on TV.

While he said it was difficult to get used to things like the correct terminology the broadcast desired — i.e. teeing ground, not tee box; or hole location, not pin, etc. — he said he learned his biggest lesson when he fell into a trap he had long warned young broadcasters about.

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“I found that I was trying to prove how much I knew about the players and their recent history and where they are in the Official World Golf Ranking — all the other stuff — and what was missing was, OK, we just saw Spieth putting for par, and he missed it, shot, shot, and now we are back to Spieth. Like putting the narrative together and what we are watching and trying to build that versus trying to prove what I knew. I fell into every trap that I tell young broadcasters not to fall into of being married to your notes and your research instead of just watching what was going on and commenting on that.

“It was a steep learning curve, and I’m not saying I learned it, but by the end I was like, Man, I missed the mark here for a couple of years now. I gotta get back to what I do, which is seeing, reacting and trying to build why someone is red hot, what kind of run they are on and where someone’s tournament fell apart. That’s what’s interesting to the viewer.”

Subpar co-host Colt Knost added that when he first started calling golf for CBS, veteran Frank Nobilo told him to “watch the screen” and “react” versus focusing on notes. Buck agreed.

“All that stuff [in your notes] is stuff that’s happened,” Buck said. “What’s going on on the screen has never happened before, and if you are missing that because you are digging through your notes for something you wrote a week prior, you are missing the boat. If a big wind comes in and throws every note out of the booth, you should still be able to do the game or tournament. And I fell into the trap I warned guys against all the time.”

You can listen to the complete interview with Buck here, or watch it on YouTube below.

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The post How do you take a good range session to the course? An expert explains appeared first on Golf.

The post How do you take a good range session to the course? An expert explains appeared first on Golf.

If you struggle taking a good range warm-up to the golf course, you aren’t alone. Pros deal with the same type of phenomena.

It was one of the topics sports psychologist Julie Elion discussed on the latest episode of GOLF’s Subpar podcast, where she also talked about her work with pro golfers (including U.S. Open champ Wyndham Clark) and amateurs, as well as her new book, “Mastering Your Mental Game,” which will be available next week.

Striping the ball on the range only to completely lose that feel on the golf course is a common problem for golfers. Elion says, for recreational players, the key is to dig deep, try to figure out their best competitive state and choose goals (which she also discussed on the podcast). She said it’s important to “realize you are who you are and be present with it.”

“If you can keep repeating something about how you want to feel and go with that, I think that’s going to serve you better than getting angry at that first drive hooked,” she said. “I have a lot of people over the years who have first-tee jitters, from pros to myself, so I try to help prepare mentally knowing you might feel that. Then, how are you going to respond to that? So you are already prepared that those feelings are coming out. OK, so how are you going to deal with them?”

To further explain her point, Elion said she works with one pro who battled first-tee jitters, even in things such as pro-ams. Her recent homework to him was simple: start your pro-am by hitting a bad shot on purpose.

“Intentionally hit it in the water and then deal with the feelings,” she said. “And then that first tee on Thursday, he was already prepared for the worst that could happen, which was to put it in the water. And he was ready, and it worked.”

For more from Elion and to learn how a strong mental game can help you, listen here or watch below.

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The post How Wyndham Clark’s mental-game coach helped him stay calm in chaos appeared first on Golf.

The post How Wyndham Clark’s mental-game coach helped him stay calm in chaos appeared first on Golf.

“Without her, none of this would be possible for Wyndham Clark.”

That’s how Colt Knost introduced this week’s Subpar guest, mental-game guru Julie Elion, who has worked with a number of the game’s top players, including newly-minted CJ Cup Byron Nelson champion Wyndham Clark.

On the episode, Elion, whose new book, “Mastering Your Mental Game,” will be available next week, discussed her work with Clark, and the progress he’s made over the years.

Reflecting on his recent win, Elion cited the pride she felt watching the final round of the CJ Cup Byron Nelson. The situation: Clark, in the hunt, encountered a mud ball on the par-5 9th hole. He sought casual-water relief from two rules officials and was denied. But he still made par on the hole en route to a final-round 60, winning the tournament by three shots.

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Insiders Only Top Tour mental-game coach shares how to trade anxiety for serenity

By: Julie Elion

“I was riveted,” Elion told hosts Knost and Drew Stoltz. “Because I was so hoping he could look at it the right way, and he’s worked really hard to do that. He looked so good. It wasn’t that I was doubting him. But it was those moments that we have focused on, like how to use everything to get better and for your advancement and to learn from instead of, why did this happen to me?

“I had heard many times, ‘I always roll into the divot’ or ‘I get the bad lie,'” she continued. “So I was teetering, and he was amazing. He was so amazing. I’m really proud of him because he really does the work.”

What does that work entail? Part of Elion’s process with players like Clark involves having them set goals and mission statements for themselves for each round.

“We switch it from daily goals to mission statements, because we just need to shake it up,” Elion said. “But what started to happen is those morph back into daily goals. So, I would say, ‘Well, how’d you do today? And what are you trying to accomplish mentally today?’

“So, the mission statement was kind of a little more global. But every one of my clients — not everyone, but pretty much everyone — sticks to a protocol of, ‘What am I trying to feel today?’ It might be confidence, it might be free, it might be no leaderboards, it might be, ‘I don’t like who I’m playing with, and I’m not gonna let it bother me.’ It could be anything. But like I said earlier, I just try to stay on them to make sure they’re paying attention, not to just technical.”

Those goals, Elion says, are intended to remind the players of what they’re good at, and keep them in the present — something Clark exemplified to an impressive degree on Sunday at the CJ Cup Byron Nelson.

For more from Elion, including some advice for recreational players, check out the entire Subpar episode below.

The post How Wyndham Clark’s mental-game coach helped him stay calm in chaos appeared first on Golf.