Table of contents for May 2026 in Golf Monthly

Following significant recent investment, Rockliffe Hall is entering an exciting new era as it strengthens its position among the UK’s leading luxury golf resorts. The five-star destination in the beautiful north-east countryside is undergoing a multi-million-pound transformation that will see it re-emerge in 2026 as a world-class, gastronomy-focused luxury golf hotel. At the heart of the investment is the restoration of the historic Grade II-listed Old Hall plus the launch of ATLAS James & Maria Close, a new global culinary concept to further enhance an already outstanding food offering. Elevated championship golf Set within rolling parkland countryside, Rockliffe Hall’s championship course has long been recognised as one of the region’s finest. Created by Hawtree Design, the layout blends seamlessly into the landscape, with recent investment further enhancing the playing experience.…

Cyprus GF: 18 holes: €140-€240 including buggy Stats: par 70, 6,296 yards Cyprus is a year-round destination and for those wishing to include golf, Aphrodite Hills is the perfect resort at which to base yourself. The course, designed by Cabell Robinson, opened in 2002 and lies just a short drive from the international airport at Paphos. Construction proved a lengthy affair due to the challenging, but ultimately very rewarding, topography over which it is laid out. The holes run along high ground between deep gorges, creating great drama and fabulous views, and the course is as challenging as it is fun. Not for the faint-hearted, there is a thrilling back tee on the 3rd, which calls for a truly heroic drive over the chasm. It is then quite a drive…

Be reassured that not even the world’s best athletes are perfect. Golf is not as easy as some players make it look, and if you are among the many who struggle from the depths of greenside bunkers, take heart, because Nelly Korda had the same problem as a teenager, before finding a new direction and blazing a trail to become the women’s World No.1 golfer. When Korda was 14 years old her game was in tatters, it would seem. “Honestly, if you had seen my golf swing… it was the most atrocious swing I have seen in my entire life,” Korda tells us with striking self-deprecation in this exclusive interview. “It was so steep, so loopy, and there was such a disconnect between my arms and body.” It was 2013, and…

Shot on location at Salgados Golf Club 1 Think of posture as the axle to a wheel – or the centre to your swing. Get it wrong and the swing becomes inefficient and challenging. The main image (right) shows an optimum back angle supported by enough knee flex to counter the tilt. This is good for balance and stability, and allows you to make the best use of the ground through your legs. A good tilt also produces good arm hang, directly under the shoulders. Get this right and it will have a positive effect on the mechanics of your backswing. My arms are hanging roughly vertically and the club comes out at an angle through the hands. This automatically sets my wrists in a position where they can create…

1 PRACTISE EFFICIENTLY I won’t generally hit balls for longer than half an hour. At some point you get an overload and then it’s actually detrimental to your progress, so I try to break it up into different segments. It’s fine if you work on technical things, but then I want to bring some kind of challenge into it or break it up completely and go and do some short game to reset my brain. If the sessions get too long, you’ll lose focus and then you’re also losing the ability to improve. So try and add some structure to your practice. My game certainly improved when I approached it with little tasks and a lot of variation, with the bottom line of trying to improve what I wanted to…

Cobra has carved out a distinct niche for itself in the driver market by marrying high-level innovation with striking aesthetics. With the release of the new Optm line-up, the brand is doubling down on stability by introducing a new metric to the lexicon of club design: product of inertia or POI. The Optm X is the mid-spin, high-forgiveness model and the headline story for Optm is a shift from focusing solely on moment of inertia (MOI) to optimising POI. This new approach accounts for club rotation across all three axes – horizontal, vertical and the ‘toe up or down’ Z-axis – rather than just resistance to twisting on a single plane. By using supercomputing and A.I. to optimise mass placement, Cobra claims to have reduced this POI by more than…

What is the difference between lofting up a 3-wood or lofting down a 5-wood to effectively create a 4-wood? Ron Peters, via email You don’t hear the term 4-wood bandied about much anymore as the club seems to have gone out of fashion. That said, we are seeing them in the bags of professionals now, with the likes of Sahith Theegala using one. The main difference between adjusting one club to add loft and another to take off loft will be the face angle. Adding loft to a 3-wood to create a 4-wood will close the face angle slightly, while lofting down from a 5-wood will open the face. Depending on what shot shape you’re trying to encourage – or stave off – that’s something to bear in mind when…

Essentials West Drive, Angmering, West Sussex, BN16 4JE Stats: par 70, 6,280 yards GF: round: £60wd, £70we; twilight: £35-£40 (from 4pm) Ham Manor, close to the coast in the West Sussex village of Angmering, is home to a fine, easy-walking parkland layout created in the mid 1930s by the great Harry Colt towards the end of his prolific course design career. Originally called Goring Hall Golf Club, it boasts a grand old manor for a clubhouse, which forms a fitting backdrop to a closing hole remodelled and extended in the last decade. Water now awaits menacingly between the clubhouse and green to devour anything slightly pushed or overhit. Switching it up This hole was originally the 9th but the two nines were flipped in relatively recent times. This means it…

Looking back down the 4th hole at North West, the shortest par 4 on the course, beautifully situated alongside Lough Swilly North West GF: 18 holes: €150 This County Donegal club dates back to 1891 and is one of the founding members of the Golfing Union of Ireland. Close to the two fabulous links at Ballyliffin, its lovely course enjoys an exceptionally attractive setting between water and mountains. Some land has been lost to erosion, so the footprint is quite compact, with every inch used to great effect to keep you interested all the way. Beginning with a long par 4, the opening five holes hug the shoreline and can be particularly testing into the wind, but the par 5s that close each nine should offer hope of redemption. This…

A missed opportunity I was interested to read Nelly Korda’s quote after the WTGL was announced. She said it was a missed opportunity for TGL and WTGL and that mixed matches could elevate the women’s game. I am a keen 11-year-old boy golfer. I have a sports-mad and very sporty 14-year-old sister and am desperate for her to start playing golf. I really think it would help to have some mixed events to grab her attention. Everyone would realise that the women are so incredibly talented, and it would mean that you would get new spectators into the women’s game outside of the TGL. If the TGL mixed events go well, we could have mixed events on the tours and the two tours would both benefit, especially the women’s game.…

“IF LUKE QUALIFIES, I WILL BE CADDYING FOR HIM AT THE OPEN”Ian Poulter reveals he will be on the bag at Birkdale if his son manages to seal a place “YOU’RE NOT GOING TO GET A TON OUT OF ME, BUT IT DOESN’T MEAN I’M NOT VERY, VERY HAPPY TO BE SITTING HERE WITH THIS”Cameron Young was asked about his muted celebration after winning the biggest title of his career at Sawgrass “THAT WAS LITERALLY CHILD’S PLAY COMPARED TO BETHPAGE”Matt Fitzpatrick responds to the abuse he received from the crowd at the Players Championship “I’M STILL HEARTBROKEN FROM THE RYDER CUP. I’M TRYING MY BEST TO SEPARATE MYSELF AND MOVE ON, BUT IT’S HARD”Six months on, Keegan Bradley is still hurting from what happened in New York…

Tyrrell Hatton is convinced honesty is the best policy - especially after receiving a surprise parcel as a result of his decision to provide an eye-popping insight into the boozy celebrations to mark him qualifying for a fourth Ryder Cup. Hatton had people laughing out loud, shaking their heads in disbelief, and even feeling a bit queasy as he used a press conference to provide every detail of the evening he spent with Jon Rahm once Luke Donald had confirmed he was definitely on the team. Hatton admits he later wondered whether he was wise to have been quite so graphic when speaking about the tear-up that ended with him passed out in his hotel bedroom, having been violently ill. His session with Ryder Cup partner Rahm, just after a…

Where should I be aiming off the tee? By Top 50 Coach James Jankowski One of the biggest differences between tour pros and club golfers is penalty avoidance. The best players keep double bogeys off the card by managing where they miss. On the PGA Tour, the average driver dispersion is around 60 yards and this is a useful benchmark. If there is a hazard on the right-hand side of the fairway, your target should be at least 30 yards left of it. That gives you enough margin to swing freely, knowing that even a poor shot is unlikely to find trouble. In the picture, my target is the left half of the fairway. If I hit the ball within my dispersion pattern, the worst outcome is the left rough…

Sometimes strange things happen on the golf course, as Ben Griffin found out in his third round at the Genesis Invitational. His tee shot on the 2nd hole became lodged in the netting between the golf course and the driving range, with his ball coming to rest 30ft from the ground. The Local Rules stated that the driving range was out of bounds and that a ball was out of bounds when it was beyond the netting and baseboards. So, this ball lodged high in the net was still in bounds. Griffin made it clear he was going to proceed under unplayable ball relief, as there is no free relief for interference from a boundary object. To do this, though, he first needed to identify his ball. Initially he tried…

The FootJoy Pro/SL is one of the most successful shoe franchises of all time. It launched in 2016 to great fanfare as a clean, premium spikeless shoe that was instantly recognisable and incredibly popular on tour. The latest generation has seen a complete overhaul. New materials, a new outsole design, and even a new last (the foundational mould dictating the shape of the shoe) combine to leave the new Pro/SL looking unrecognisable compared its legendary predecessors. I’ll be frank about my opinion on the looks: I don’t like them. The Pro/SL used to be a far sleeker and more luxurious-looking shoe. It used to be the most desirable footwear on the market not that long ago, but I don’t think the same can be said now. I’ve read comments about…

Is the 3-wood the scariest club to hit? For many club golfers, standing over a fairway wood attacking a daunting par 5 or hitting from a tight tee induces nothing but anxiety. But the good news is that it really doesn’t have to be that way – you just need the right model for your game. The initial phase of our testing here took place indoors, inside the Golf Monthly Performance Lab, to eliminate external variables such as wind, mud and rain. We used our premium Foresight GC3 launch monitor to standardise our testing and evaluate and categorise each club’s raw performance. However, full testing isn’t complete without heading onto the course, so we then took everything outside to properly assess crucial real-world elements like turf interaction, acoustics, feel through…

Golfers like to go off the beaten track once in a while, to venture somewhere new and relatively unexplored – it’s like a badge of honour. If you’re someone with a thirst to be among the first to play a new course, add Tbilisi, Georgia, to your list. Rich in culture and boasting incredibly diverse landscapes, Georgia is the most visited country in the South Caucasus. Although it would be a stretch to call it one of Europe’s fastest-growing golf destinations at this time, a significant investment has gone into putting this country on the golfing map. Even the keenest of golf travellers would um and ah over a five-hour flight to play just 18 holes – how long it takes to reach the intersection of Eastern Europe and West…

I don’t look very often at the World Rankings, but I’ve just done so and once again it is reassuring for European golf with four players in the men’s top ten and two – Robert MacIntyre and Sepp Straka – currently lying 11th and 12th. Rory McIlroy is 2nd, Tommy Fleetwood 4th, Matt Fitzpatrick 6th and Justin Rose 7th. Between them they have won seven Majors, with Fleetwood still trying to win a big one, although maybe this year’s Open will offer a real chance on his home course of Royal Birkdale. Let’s hope so. Certainly the crowd will be behind him in Lancashire. By the time you read this, things may have changed dramatically, but it’s more than slightly encouraging that Europe has four in the top ten while…

Gary, congratulations on winning your first PGA Tour title for nearly seven years at the Houston Open. You must be on cloud nine? That was probably top to bottom as well as I’ve played on tour. Obviously I had a great week at Pebble in the 2019 US Open, but I was just in complete control in Houston. I’m proud of that. I put a lot of work in. It’s obviously been a struggle for me the last couple of years, but I knew physically the game was as good as it’s ever been. Coming out with what I’m battling a couple weeks ago definitely freed me up a little bit. It allowed me to focus my energy where I need to, and that’s on me and taking care of…

Ping’s commitment to its industry-leading women’s clubs extends into 2026 and beyond with the launch of the new G Le4 family. The G Le4 driver has been designed using the same Carbonfly Wrap crown we’ve seen in the G440 family of drivers. It allows weight to be relocated so the CG can be positioned lower and deeper, with the driver optimised for swing speeds of 80mph or less. The same technology extends into the fairway woods, where new lofts of 23°, 28° and 33° have been introduced to improve playability and gapping. Continuing the success of previous generations, G Le4 is designed as an iron/hybrid combo solution, allowing golfers to create the ideal set make-up with optimal gapping to help ensure success right through the bag. This includes options from…

Shot on location at Salgados Golf Club 1 A good set-up allows the upper body to move independently from the lower body and core. When golfers sit too much into their address position, with too much tension, that separation becomes tricky and they may then overuse their hands and arms. Instead, try tilting forward more from the hips – more than with any other club – and allow your arms to hang naturally beneath your shoulders with plenty of space. This should be relatively free from tension, with a relaxed posture, almost like you’re falling forward. From this position, it becomes much easier to dissociate the torso from the lower body, core and head. A sound putting stroke relies on synchronisation and co-ordination, not on locking everything together through muscular…

Ping has long been the standard-bearer for the ‘super-game-improvement’ iron category. From the early Karsten irons to the recent G730, the mission has remained the same: make the game as easy as possible. The new Ping G740 arrives with that same DNA but a significant facelift and some clever engineering tweaks aimed at refining the ‘big iron’ experience. The first thing I noticed was the improved shelf appeal and I much prefer the new look compared to the outgoing G730. The branding just feels more premium and of its time, and the numbering font is much nicer. Ping has also done away with the high-shine chrome finish, opting for a cleaner, more contemporary aesthetic that looks far more sophisticated for this type of iron. However, once you set the club…

The SM11 creates a strong first impression, with Titleist making subtle but impactful changes to the visuals that made the SM10 arguably the best-looking wedge on the market. The most obvious visible update has been moving the SM11 branding from the back to the hosel to clean up the in-the-bag look and create a more minimalist aesthetic, which I love. Furthermore, the refined banner strip across the back of the head gives the club a more sophisticated visual and the contrasting colour works well against whichever of the four finishes you choose – tour chrome, jet black, nickel or the raw option that rusts over time (my personal favourite). The grooves have undergone a high-frequency heat treatment to double their durability and maintain high spin for as long as possible.…

With so many head styles and sub-categories, golf’s iron market can be a difficult one to navigate. However, given that these clubs make up the majority of your set, you should do a certain amount of homework before investing your hard-earned cash in new sticks. The good news is, thanks to our enthusiastic team of testers who, frankly, spend more time on launch monitors analysing numbers than is probably healthy, we have hit all the best sets on the market and a fair few more on top. Before you go for a fitting, which is always something we recommend, this overview will help you identify the performance characteristics that are the most important for your game. Is it forgiveness? Is outright distance a priority? What about workability and feel? Or…

Early in the new year, when so many of our golf courses in the UK&I were either under water or at best somewhat boggy, I escaped down to the Sussex coast and the excellent Top 100 links at Rye. Before playing its superb and resolutely traditional Old course, I spent the morning thoroughly enjoying its second layout, the Jubilee. This set off a train of thought regarding just how many excellent ‘second’ courses become lost in the mist as visitors understandably focus in on the main attraction. This is not the case at the eight clubs in the UK&I that have two or even three Top 100 courses. Nor is it so at clubs such as Ballyliffin and Trump Turnberry where one course is in the Top 100 and the…