behind the news

David Dusek on Golf, Editing and a National Magazine Award

The Ellie winner discusses his winning feature, "The New Way to Putt," his own golf handicap and magazine articles that can shift paradigms.
May 12, 2006

David Dusek

David Dusek is the Senior Managing Editor of GolfOnline.com and Golf.com. This week, his feature in the October 2005 issue of Golf Magazine, “The New Way to Putt,” won Golf a National Magazine Award.

Felix Gillette: Congratulations on winning an Ellie. In the lifestyle category, your article ended up beating out such heavyweights as GQ‘s, “The 20 Hamburgers You Must Eat Before You Die.” Were you surprised when you heard that your article had triumphed?

David Dusek: It’s a humbling kind of thing. With a golf publication, sometimes you’re not sure people are going to recognize how much effort goes into the end product. I think it was a really effective story and package. We’re something of a niche publication that gets a lot of visibility, and the game gets a lot of visibility. But when you’re talking about magazine editors, maybe they play or maybe they don’t. Maybe they’ve seen the progression we’ve gone through in the last year, maybe they haven’t. They’re probably going to be more intimately aware of some of the titles that perennially seem to be up for awards and get a lot of nominations. To get a win against publications like that, it’s really nice. My name is on that article but there were a lot of talented people working very hard to put that together.

FG: How did you celebrate winning the Ellie?

DD: I wasn’t actually at the awards dinner. I found out early the next morning. There were some bottles of Dom Perignon that were popped open yesterday, here, in the office.

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FG: Your winning article, titled “The New Way to Putt,” tests out a radically different way of putting. Basically, every golfer since the Late Pleistocene Era, myself included, has been taught to putt with our heads down while keeping our eyes intensely focused on the golf ball. In your reporting, you discovered that most golfers actually get better results if they putt with their heads up, gazing directly at the hole. Crazy. Where’d you get the idea for this style of putting?

DD: It’s not that no one had ever tried this before. Dr. Bob Christina, dean emeritus of the School of Health and Human Performance at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, he was one of the people who did the research on this story, along with Eric Alpenfels [director of Pinehurst Golf Advantage]. The three of us have had many conversations.

One of the things that came up is that golf is one of the few sports where you don’t actually look at your target. It’s a target-oriented sport. You’re trying to hit the ball into the hole. But, for example, a basketball player, when he shoots a free throw, will look at the hoop when he shoots the ball. A quarterback in football will look at the receiver when he throws a pass. Our eyes and our brains, as we discovered in the story, are tuned to work like that. And so — just to see how it would work — we had a couple of people hit a few putts. Immediately, they did better.

Once we had the initial idea that there could be something to this, that’s when we decided to do the full research. If there was going to be something statistically significant that we were to discover, then you’ve got gold. You’ve got something that you can herald as new research. You’ve got cover lines coming out all over the place. You’re not putting up empty promises. This is something that the reader can see: 28 percent better in 15 minutes. It sounds like one of those, “Lose 50 pounds in 5 days without exercising!” things. It sounds too good to be true. But this is something that is actually doable.

FG: Do you think your article could result in a major paradigm shift within the sport?

DD: I think that golf is one of the most traditional sports out there. I would be really surprised if you saw a professional player on the PGA Tour this weekend, all of a sudden, looking at the hole instead of looking at the ball.

FG: What kind of feedback did you get after the article ran?

DD: I received a lot of emails from readers saying, in some cases, “Thank you so much, I’ve been doing this, or I tried this. Your article verified what I’ve been thinking for a long time. I’m no longer the laughing stock of my Saturday morning game.”

It felt really good that people were reading it and responding to it. And number two, that we were actually doing our job and helping people enjoy the game and play it better. Will we see a real paradigm shift? I think that’s a little bit much to ask. But you never know.

FG: Have you changed your own putting style?

DD: Personally I’ve been doing this for about a year, and doing remarkably better. It’s great.

FG: What’s your handicap?

DD: About a nine.

FG: How long have you been at Golf?

DD: Since 2003.

FG: Tell me about your career trajectory before landing at Golf.

DD: I graduated in 1993 from St. Lawrence University with a degree in English literature. I was then a professional tennis player and instructor. I became a coach to make some money while I was playing. A client of mine had a cousin who was starting a magazine about tennis for people in Connecticut, called Court Time. She asked me some advice … and eventually offered me a job as the in-house tennis expert for this very humble, 30,000-circ, Connecticut tennis publication. I jumped at the chance. It was the perfect situation. It was almost like I was interning, but with an editor’s title.

After two years, I got picked up by Tennis Magazine, which at that point was being sold by the New York Times Magazine Group to Miller Publishing. I worked at Tennis Magazine as the senior editor for equipment and instruction content.

Then I took a jump into the Internet with a company called mysportsguru.com in early 2000. Perfect timing….We ended up burning through a lot of money real quick. Then I got picked up by Golf Magazine shortly after that. It worked out really well. It was a good fit. In October, I was put in charge of GolfOnline.com and Golf.com, which are the two Web properties for Golf Magazine.

FG: Was it disorienting to switch sports?

DD: It’s not that difficult. You’re basically trying to know your readership. Tennis players think it, and live it, and breath it. They go to work, and they’re thinking about their evening game. They like to watch it on TV. They buy a lot of equipment. Golfers are the same way.

FG: Is there any other nugget of conventional golf wisdom — you know, like, swing with your eyes open, avoid hangovers, thunderstorms are a big deal — that you’re in the process of tearing asunder?

DD: The newest issue of Golf Magazine, which is going to be coming out on newsstands in a couple of days, the cover story talks about how high you should tee up the ball. On the cover, there are three different balls on three different tees. That’s a story, as far as paradigm shifts go, which could have a real impact because it’s so simple.

Felix Gillette writes about the media for The New York Observer.