The normally voluble Yocom was si- lently rapt at such moments, thrilled to let the fruits of his labour and skill spill forth. “These special golfers, I wanted to know what drove them from the in- side,” he says. “Most of them had a hard shell to keep the world out and their feelings in, so the interview was often an exercise in getting underneath that. I wanted our session to have the feel of a last will and testament, a summation of what was true in their life.” No surprise that when a famous golfer dies, obitu- ary writers lean hard on My Shot. Yocom developed the interviewer’s skill for quick adaptation early in life. Born and raised in Salt Lake City, Yo- com’s birth parents married and di- vorced each other three times, his mother marrying another three times and his father twice more. Growing up, Yocom lived among constantly chang- ing versions of blended families. In response, Yocom became a “free- range kid. I was out of the house a lot, looking for something I guess I wasn’t getting there. As long as my mom knew where I was, I might stay at other kids’ houses three or four days at a time. Par- ents of my friends usually liked having me around. I was keeping their kids busy, I was respectful, and I could keep conversations going with some of the offbeat information I had picked up, which felt good.” As a teenager, Yocom missed a year of high school because of a difficult re- lationship with a stepfather. Essentially on his own and needing money, he took on miserable jobs like packing eggs in a chicken-harvesting plant and keeping a sewage station tank called the Digester unclogged. “I have an affinity for ragtag people who grew up like I did, and sometimes they for me,” he says. “I remember do- ing a My Shot with Hale Irwin, and as he was recounting his hardscrabble childhood in Baxter Springs, Kansas, he paused a moment, looked me right in the eye, and said, ‘You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?’” But Yocom’s path also had early posi- tives. He fondly remembers preschool years when his mother, Leona, taught him phonics and soon had him read- ing pages along with her. “I was blessed
Mike O’Malley, structured the sequence of answers as a bouncy, digressive monologue that kept the reader want- ing more. The mix included punchy one-liners, like Billy Casper’s answer to what hippopotamus tastes like: “Not surprisingly, it’s very watery.” Or Boo Weekley’s incomplete recollec- tion of being knocked out cold by the first punch thrown by a boxing orang- utan: “I woke up bleeding in the back of a friend’s pickup truck.” Or JoAnne Carner’s conditional decision after the death of her husband never to marry again: “That will change when Sean Connery calls.” From the greats, there were weighty insights. Said Jack Nicklaus, “There are more good players today. There were more great players in my day.” Mickey Wright’s loving description of a perfect 2-iron she hit in 1957 at age 22, followed “I wanted our session to have the feeling of a last will and testament, a summation of what was true in their life.” by the haunting reflection that “I spent the rest of my career trying to duplicate the feel of that shot,” closes the book on golf’s innate elusiveness. Because most subjects had lived a lot of life, many of My Shot’s most pow- erful moments dealt with mortality. Hubert Green recounted how a nurse he had grown to hate for her gruffness held his hand and cried with him as he endured chemotherapy for throat cancer. Doug Sanders, in terrible pain from a neck condition but wanting to avoid the stigma of suicide, explained how he arranged his own contract kill- ing (he called it off after successful cor- rective surgery). Larry Nelson recalled the terror he felt in Vietnam when a large group of enemy soldiers rustled through the jungle only a few yards away while the rest of his platoon was asleep. He knew that a comrade startled awake would mean annihilation.
the decades he’s ac- cumulated a collec- tion of whimsically adjacent ephemera. In support of his ex- tensive knowledge of World War II’s Pa- cific theatre, Yocom
CURIOUS MINDS Yocom talks wedges with Phil Mickelson in 2003. The two bonded
over many subjects.
owns a vial of volcanic black sand from a landing beach at Iwo Jima. His fasci- nation with vintage clarinets was en- riched by acquiring handwritten notes by a legendary master of the instru- ment, Artie Shaw. The magnificence of racing thoroughbreds giving their all led him to obtain a strand of hair from Secretariat’s mane. A JFK obsessive, he has preserved a sliver of wood from a picket fence that conspiracy theorists believe marked the spot where shots were fired on the grassy knoll. “Great conversation starters,” says Yocom, whose delight in lively discus- sions always makes him the most reluc- tant party to let them end. Of course, he’s most knowledgeable about the subject that’s given him an illustrious career. Still a Golf Digest contributor after his 36-year full-time tenure ended in 2020, Yocom’s award- winning body of work has covered ev- ery area of the game, from instruction to the rules to profiles to historical ret- rospectives. He’s also collaborated on books with Jackie Burke, Johnny Mill- er, Phil Mickelson, Corey Pavin, and David Graham and helped ghost-write “Tiger Woods’ “How I Play Golf.” Yocom made his most enduring mark with My Shot, a collection of 125 inti- mate one-on-one interviews in which a who’s who (and the occasional who’s that) of golf allowed our benevolent provocateur to steer them towards the real and revealing. Running from 2002 to 2020, My Shot stands as the most successful long-term series in the his- tory of Golf Digest and what Yocom calls the best he ever did. By going deep – with intense prepa- ration, curiosity, and an instinct for the right question in the right tone at the right moment – Yocom elicited stories and reflections that produced wisdom, humour, regret, confession and idiosyncrasies. For the length of the series, an equally immersed editor,
GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA 21
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2026
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator