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Watch: Cliffside 18th at McLemore in Georgia offers stunning views, thrilling shots

McLemore sits at No. 5 in Georgia on Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play list.

RISING FAWN, Ga. – The 18^th hole at McLemore in northern Georgia isn’t for the faint of heart. Just as its altitude might trigger a response in anyone afraid of heights, the golf hole itself requires plenty of strategy and fearlessness off the tee and from the fairway.

Designed by Rees Jones and Bill Bergin, the 435-yard par 4 sits on a cliff’s edge 1,200 feet above the valley floor below. Telling golfers to stay right on the hole would be silly and obvious, because it’s perfectly clear that any kind of pull or hook off the tee will send a ball off the cliff’s rocky face into the forest below. It’s a stern test on one of the most scenic sites for a golf hole anywhere in the game.

The rest of the course climbs even higher from that cliff, providing views for miles across a valley full of farms and barns – on a clear day it’s possible to see more than 50 miles as the mountains continue to rise to the northeast. And the closing hole offers the best of those views – have your camera ready on the drive from the 17^th green to the 18^th tee.

McLemore sits at No. 5 in Georgia on Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play list, making it a can’t-miss in a stacked golf state. And as the property is located near Lookout Mountain within an easy drive of Atlanta and Chattanooga, Tennessee, McLemore provides a great escape into the beginnings of the Appalachian Mountains.

Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play 2022: Top 100 U.S. public-access courses ranked

Simplicity of Golf: Launch monitors for recreational golfers can reveal helpful data and insights

A new crop of launch monitors at affordable prices delivers surprisingly good accuracy, valuable data.

The word “about” is used far too often by weekend golfers. Ask nearly all of them how far they hit their driver in the air and you will get an answer along the lines of, “My driver, about 240 yards.” Ask about another club and you will hear, “My 6-iron goes about 160 yards.”

As the pros you see on TV how far they hit each club in their bag and you get a totally different answer. “Driver carry is 297 in the air.”

Players on the PGA Tour know that because nearly all of them use a launch monitor on a regular basis, and units like a TrackMan 4 or a ForeSight GC Quad, which can cost well over $12,000, deliver accurate information about how far shots go, how much spin they have and what the player’s club was doing as it made contact. Insights like that can help players improve, make smarter decisions and play better golf.

Thankfully for club players, a new crop of launch monitors at more-affordable prices are coming to the market. They deliver surprisingly good accuracy and many also collect valuable ball and club data, as you can see in this video.

Why Scottie Scheffler is the man to beat at the PGA Championship: ‘Him saying it’s one of his favorite golf courses has to be terrifying for the rest of the field’

At Southern Hills, the reigning Masters champion is the man to beat at the PGA Championship.

TULSA, Okla. – Scottie Scheffler left the Green Jacket he won in April hanging in his closet at home in Dallas this week. As New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick might say, Scheffler’s on to Southern Hills, a course where he won the Big 12 men’s individual title at Texas and once called it his favorite course.

Scheffler shot a 64 during a practice round at Southern Hills two weeks ago and shot 61 at his home course before shooting 19 under at the AT&T Byron Nelson. CBS Sports analyst Colt Knost said that Southern Hills reminds him a lot of Royal Oaks Country Club in Dallas, where Scheffler grew up playing and still is a regular.

“Him saying it’s one of his favorite golf courses has to be terrifying for the rest of the field,” Knost said.

Southern Hills: Yardage book | ESPN+ streaming | How to watch info

Though the course received a facelift from noted architect Gil Hanse, Scheffler brings a comfort level to Southern Hills and the 104^th PGA Championship that could be a difference maker in his pursuit of the second leg of this season’s Grand Slam and his fifth win of the season.

“I didn’t feel like Gil made any massive changes to the course and it still played fairly similar to how I remembered it other than a lot of the run-offs are a bit different. But outside of that, it still feels pretty much the same,” he said. “It’s just really hard. It’s right in front of you. You know what to do. It’s just hard to actually do it.”

Scheffler is making his third start at the PGA and has recorded two top-10 finishes. The difference is that now he’s learned what it takes to win.

“I definitely took some confidence from Phoenix,” he said of the site of his maiden win on Super Bowl Sunday this year. “I think I made four bogeys the first 11 holes and still won the tournament, and I think in the past, I believed I had to play perfect golf on Sunday in order to win. So for me to know that I can make mistakes and bounce back from them and still be able to win tournaments is really important.”

Scheffler was praised for how he handled major-championship pressure Sunday at the Masters, and it wasn’t until his post-round news conference that he admitted he “cried like a baby” that morning as the weight of the moment hit him like a bag of bricks.

“I think it was just fantastic that he shared how heavy it was. Then how did he respond? There he was in the Green Jacket,” said Scott Van Pelt, the lead anchor for ESPN’s PGA Championship coverage. “I just thought it gave you context that a guy who hadn’t shared with us much that he felt those things, and he shared it with the world. Maybe it’s easier to do that when you’re wearing the jacket because now you can be truly honest about it. I thought it was really cool.”

“Pre-round, it’s all apprehension, isn’t it?” said CBS Sports lead analyst Nick Faldo. “We’re the worst at thinking what could go wrong, and it does in this game. But it’s a wonderful feeling, and I’ve felt it, you get on the range and you’re hitting balls and you’re absolutely fine. You are the duck on the pond and you are absolutely happy. He obviously has that ability.”

At a course where he’s had success and oozing with confidence, the World No. 1 and reigning Masters champion is the man to beat.

“My game feels like it’s in a good spot,” Scheffler said. “I’ve obviously been on a pretty good run here recently and I’m definitely not trying to stop it. So hopefully going to keep it rolling this week.”

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