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Fresh-faced golfers may not be familiar with the tired yarn about God and a 1-iron, or Sam Snead telling Ted Williams about playing foul balls, but most of us will have heard these chestnuts, more than once.
The Quotable Golfer, at $20, with only one or two quotes a page, is not only a little too familiar with its offerings, but tight at our expense. Next to the considerably more thorough and friskier competition, The Hole Is More than the Sum of Its Putts, (Reviewed in our second issue) this amounts to a mini-tour by comparison.
Worse, those sayings that aren't already worn thin can be downright puzzling.
"Don't swing the club, let the club swing you." That from Leslie Nielsen's video. Uh, OK.
"Grip it and rip it?" You don't say. That's hot off the presses.
"Dad, I won. I really played well today. Happy father's day!"
Now, that's a nice thing for Nancy Lopez to wish her pop, but what exactly is in this for us? Where is the inspiration? The privately shared chuckle? The enlightenment? A punch line, even.
Others require a (too) careful reading of the caption to make any sense of the nugget. It's annoying, frankly, but we can't overlook that sagacity in golf is but a swing away. And no matter how committed one is, even to the magazines, one can't have heard everything. An attractive book, it should do well around holidays.
Rating: Scooper * *
Hogan embodies a distant vision of golf: deep, pure - and severe. His enigma remains intact to this day. We can look and admire, marvel or recoil, but we can only get so close.
The legendary stories run the gamut, from generous to aberrant, even barbaric behavior, human to super-human. He knew people talked about him, and we can take it on the account of his acquaintances that his reticence was in part a reaction against giving up something of himself to strangers, along with his distaste in knowing that whatever he said would be misconstrued and repeated. Of course he could be gracious and thoughtful, but those private aspects to his character are far less compelling, and revealing, than the battles with his demons. If ever a superstar was ill equipped for a larger role, it was the hard case, his oneself.
Those who played bit parts in his life: his physician, his niece, his secretary, lunch companions at Shady Oaks, LPGA mainstay Kris Tschetter, whom he befriended near the end, CBS's Ken Venturi, provide whatever they can. Hogan, we learn, took his coffee black, favored peach ice cream and made considerable efforts to keep up with those playing Hogan clubs.
Too vast a subject, he's certainly far bigger than the collected sum of vignettes presented here for us to draw any conclusions. The casual, trivial insights in I Remember. . .are but border pieces to an incomplete psychological puzzle. We're really no closer to cracking the code, which would surely have pleased Hogan.
Rating: Cat Stroker * * *
Dark, dreary photos and the stilted writing aside, this Cliff Notes primer on the mental game effectively breaks down in 95 pages what the world's religions have been trying to accomplish for considerably longer, in lengthier versions and with more vigor.
"As a man thinketh, so shall he be," we learn, and six irrefutable reference points are included to thinketh our way onto the straighteth and narroweth, literally and figuratively - when we consider such aspects as nutrition and temperament.
Dr. Wiren is an eminent and eminently positive guide. He confides to keeping a Post-it note to his bedroom door. "Warrior?" it reads, posing the question: "Are you a wimp or a warrior?" With most of us the answer varies from day to day but there is no denying the effectiveness of some kind of mental preparation, visualization, or merely, as has been popularized in song, emphasis on accentuating the positive.
Mantra-like exercises can help us steer emotions and visualize positive results. Whether platitudes like "Confidence promotes trust in what you are doing" can get us there, well, your mileage may vary. For those who have been unwilling to acknowledge the mental game, or remiss to delving into alchemy, this book will prove palatable and useful to appreciating the importance of attitude. As if we needed any more impetus to get started, Tiger Woods, we're told, has been getting this kind of tutoring since he was a lad. But then he had a head start from a Buddhist mother.
Rating: Cat-Stroker * * *
A cache of handwritten notes and corresponding photos discovered in Bob Jones's Atlanta law offices offered Ben Crenshaw a unique opportunity to revisit the fundamentals as expressed and demonstrated by the master, as he often did, so elegantly.
This is a lovely pairing. Working through the bag, Bob Jones executes the shots. He's depicted in large black and white photos alongside brief companion bullet points. On the opposite page, Crenshaw does the same. The two men are shown side-by-side with Ben
in color.
The Masters champion deferentially offers his commentary and occasionally interjects adjuncts of his mentor Harvey Penick. Not surprisingly, while some things have changed everyone is largely in agreement. Ben's enthusiasm for his hero at critical positions of the swing is certainly genuine and dead-on - Jones's turn during the full swing is a sight to behold!
So often instruction books emphasize the incorrect positions. It's a pleasure to see such classic snippets frozen in time (the close-up sequence of their respective putting grips shows they're nearly identical) and blown up large enough to admire and savor.
As a bonus each man plays a stymie, a shot long exiled from the game, but one that Jones strongly advocated; indeed, Ben tells us he might not have won the Grand Slam without it. The steps, Ben advises, to properly "laying" one:
- Stay down through the shot.
- Hit the back of the ball first with light but crisp, descending blow so as to just clip it off the putting surface. (Be careful not to take a divot out of the putting surface!)
[An aside: I once asked Harvey Penick if he could teach me how to play a stymie. He looked at me archly, shook his head and said: "You don't need to know how to do that," and changed the subject.]
Rating: Whip-cracker * * * *.
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Caddie Sense
By Michael Carrick with Steve Duno
Thomas Dunne Books, 2000 |
Tom Kite wanted driver. Driver?! Sunday, Pebble Beach, 18th tee, slimmest of leads, final round of the U.S. Open - for all the marbles - the winds howling.
His caddie Mike Carrick was "quaking inside" at the thought. And while "the conditions screamed 3-wood," he recognized his man's confidence. The day had been a good one, the team relishing the brutal conditions. Carrick kept his misgivings to himself. "Yup, that's the club," he said. "Put a good swing on it."
As we know, Kite nailed the drive ("Best swing of the week," he said as the ball safely cleared Carmel Bay), and Carrick, secure in the trust that defines the best of golf's antiquated working relationship, still had a job.
Unfortunately, we don't get nearly enough of these stories. Obviously a keen observer with an estimable run, Carrick surely has plenty. Around Austin they tell the one about Tom whiffing from greenside gunch. He turns with an incredulous, withering look. "I think it's the same club, Tom," the caddie deadpans. The story goes Kite laughs, relaxes and then holes the chip.
The author likens the player-caddie relationship to a marriage, or the caddie a sole proprietor relying on his business (and no doubt golfing street) smarts. Other times, he says, the role is more akin to roadie, "who help make the show possible, all the while standing backstage, on the fringes of fame."
It's a tenuous, perilous, ancient and fascinating relationship, and hardly glamorous. Instead, unfortunately, we get instruction. Few will take the suggestions to heart: getting club-fitted, homemade yardage books ("equivalent to military intelligence information gathered by your side's spies"), ho hum, "playing the percentages." Like his player, Carrick keeps to the short grass. His long tenure may be best explained this way: "Don't initiate, just respond." Never forget the player is always right.
Rating: Cat Stroker * * *
Light Reading - Edition I
Light Reading - Edition II
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