From the hearth: Picking up a favorite book, opening at random and finding a satisfying passage is, I believe, a mark of a good book. Anyway, that's how the following selection was made. Chance also remains a compelling subject in Sport. In golf it is revered, or it should be.

On the maintenance side of golf, where the obsession with eliminating luck has reached new lows, hazards are created to permanently swallow up balls (such as tall grasses in ditches), or hazards are only fair if they prop balls up so well that luck is eliminated from rearing is head (see bunkers that give the players better lies than the fairways do). For some unknown reason, golfers demand this extreme "either-or" situation instead of understanding the exciting nature of a more arbitrary, unpredictable situation, one that can even lead to the most satisfying of all shots: the heroic recovery.

This desire for predictability and the elimination of luck strips charm from the sport. That's because there is often a genuine thrill in finding a ball and then trying to extricate oneself from trouble. There is a certain excitement and passion that you develop from playing golf when hazards allow you to hold out hope of finding your ball and, just possibly, getting to play it.

Robert Hunter once wrote, "Great golfers would find the game stupid if no occasion arose to use the more difficult shots in their repertoire. The keenest delight in golf is given to those who, finding themselves in trouble, refuse to be depressed, and, with some recovery, snatch from the opponents what seemed for them certain victory."

The Art of Golf Design by Geoff Shackelford and Michael G. Miller, Sleeping Bear Press, 2001. Printed without permission.

The Golfer's Ten Commandments
Royal and Ancient
Into the Bear Pit
Helicopter Words
The Walter Hagen Story
ClubAlert . . . The Electronic Club Leash
I Remember Augusta
Hoch as in Choke!
Bud, Sweat, & Tees
Only Golf Spoken Here
Passion for Golf
Fourteen Clubs and the Auld Claret Jug
Gleanings from the Wayside
Discovering Donald Ross