It’s Tee Time in America

A celebration of The Golfaissance

For Esquire’s Summer 2021 issue, I pitched, planned, wrote/edited a 14-page package in the feature well celebrating golf’s pandemic-induced renaissance. It was a boom the game hadn’t seen since Tiger Woods said “Hello World.” I thought there had to be more golfers among the Esquire readership than ever before, too. And so I sought to put together a package that would serve as the tipping point for what eventually became the biggest phrase in the golf world, “Growing The Game,” but that would entertain and inform the already seasoned golfers among Esquire’s audience. The package included.

• A profile of Johnny Manziel, the Heisman-winning quarterback turned pro-golf dreamer who’s been hanging out in Arizona honing his game and accepting his past.

• An as-told-to interview with Kamaiu Johnson, a pro golfer who recently received his first PGA tour exemptions, and whose story began with a woman’s kind gesture to a young Black man with an interest in the game.

• A visit to Scotty Cameron’s putter studio to see how golf’s “Philosopher of Feel” came to be the architect of the game’s favorite flat sticks.

• An eight-page fashion story highlighting the best of golf’s style revolution.