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Wise Words for Golfers
A Dazzling Compendium of Quotes, Anecdotes,
and Gems of Wisdom from the Royal and Ancient Game
By Dale Concannon
Thomas Dunne Books, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-27525-0 $22.95
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There's some wonderfully obscure references. We're treated to Tobias Smollett's observations of the Leith golfers in the 1770's and Declaration of Independence signer Benjamin Rush's two cents on golf. Points deducted, however, for wasting space on "Grip it and Rip it," "Drive for Show, Putt for Dough" and "Putting is really a game within a game." You don't say.
There is some thick rough: too much Bob Hope, Nick Faldo and Tom Watson, not enough Joanne Carner, Charles Price or Andrew Kirkaldy. Andra', the legendary Scottish pro who later toured America spoiling to fight a real Indian lost a match to Harry Vardon, and was heard to mutter "Watch the Greyhound! Watch the Greyhound!" (Harry was nicknamed the Ganton Greyhound.) He also offers details of a memorable match with the equally immortal J.H. Taylor.
The best lines - I don't know about dazzling - are given some context, they aren't just left to wither and dangle. When Joyce Wethered answered "What train?" the reader, who has not heard the story, learns that a train was passing hard by the Old Course as she putted out. The story's details are jumbled here but the bottom line is that, such was her concentration, she never heard it. What train? There are too few of these, sad to say. We want to know what the circumstances were when Tommy Bolt called the British crowds "about as miserable a bunch of people as you could ever have the misfortune to run into in a supposedly civilized world." (One imagines he made the same point in private in fewer words.) Supposedly it was a Ryder Cup. When? What happened?
The author, an Englishman, refers to Brent Musberger as a "Top US Sports Presenter," George Plimpton as British and repeats a Will Rogers quote. Never mind. There's enough Balfour and Haultain, real excerpts not just a plucked line or two, and more than a few truly impressive snippets from the game's literary DNA to reward the reader. A favorite: abject beginner, Walter Danecki attempts to qualify for The Open in 1965 with rounds of 108 and 113. "If I'd played the big ball I'd have been all over the place," he concluded. That's the spirit, old boy. He missed the cut by 75 strokes. Good stuff.
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Fore! Play
The Last American Male Takes up Golf
By Bill Geist
Warner Books, 2001
ISBN: 0-446-52763-7 $24.95
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Bill Geist gets a lot of things. Monster Trucks & Hair-in-a-Can, Slickers, Toward a Safe & Sane Halloween & Other Tales of Suburbia, and his definitive slant on the quintessentially American torment, Little League Confidential, are all wonderful. But golf is harder, deeper, a little more overwhelming than covering the American growth industries of weird and wacky; deeper than the guy selling La-Z-Boys along the route of the New York Marathon, deeper than the perils of car radio theft, deeper than the delights of Henry Hanger's Hanger World, or even the depravity of Little League parents, subjects that the CBS News correspondent has expertly mined.
He's big enough to admit, that in the end, he just doesn't get golf. He seems to have trouble getting past the baggage - the plaid pants and all the rest, the stereotype of what golf used to be before it became cool. He's not alone of course but he's just not on his 'A' game here, unfortunately. He gives it the old Eagle Scout try but to those of us long ago sucked in, the novelty of his observations wear a little thin. Sure, we're over the edge. A bit extreme, perhaps, but comparing us to the slaves of the Jim Jones cult in Guyana is not far off the mark. We know.
He's disappointed the seats in the cart don't recline, and at one point tries to invoke a rule that golfers be required to urinate at least one club length from the path. (Don't look for Mr. Geist's commentaries anytime soon in the USGA's Golf Journal.) Funny, he picks up on the soothing bird sounds during golf telecasts. In fact, wasn't it CBS who was caught "sweetening" their broadcasts with tapes of non-native birds?
"Occasionally you hear piano music in the background," he continues. "Now, where the hell is the piano? Where I play, on ratty public courses, it's more like Dr. Dre on a boom box." We know.
The PGA Merchandise Show provides some fun, right up his alley. He takes quaint lessons, dabbles in golf psychology, drags his boy along, gets paired up with a country club couple from, he imagines, "You'll Never-Smell-it-Hills," but you've heard it all before. The author can take his place with the rest of us, guilty of the myopia that has us believe our golf is far more interesting than it is.
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golf-ing
A Duffer's Dictionary
By Henry Beard and Roy McKie
Workman Publishing, 2001
ISBN: 0-7611-2370-9 $7.95
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It's easy to dismiss the genre of stocking stuffer, read in the john, novelty golf books which separate well-meaning aunts, secretaries, children and event planners, and, sure, some golfers, too from a few bones. This one is not nearly as deadly as most. Under important etiquette rules, for example, is an unspoken code rarely mentioned, if included here in jest: "If your opponent is new to the course, don't spoil the surprises." That's true enough.
A tasteful McKie illustration amplifies the point. A golfer wrestles an alligator with the gator clearly getting the best of it, a club firmly in its mouth. In another, pull or pushed shots are defined as "Absolutely straight, perfectly hit, unbelievably solid shots that fly incredibly far in entirely the wrong direction."
Yes, OK, quiet yuks, not bad. While some are inevitably laid on a little thick, I trust we're not too
far gone to give a credible golf joke its due on…those…rare…occasions.
There is (I've met him) at least one "author," who purports to have made a million dollars selling books with titles such as "What Men Know about Women" - blank books they are, often sold in discount women's clothing stores. This book is not nearly as depressing, or even what one might expect from the author of Zen for Cats. As always with the lighter side, one's mileage will vary. "Senior - A golfer who attributes his poor play to the fact that he lacks the physique of a younger player. See JUNIOR." You get the idea.
Given their apparent enthusiasm for the game, along with the always compelling "they're our future…" rationale, it remains one of the game's minor mysteries that da youth have not been adequately served, largely deprived of appropriate reading matter. This, then, is the current champ, if by default, in a category that typically features dancing bears in alternate spikes.
How to explain the void? Either the market has been blind to realize and address an opportunity, or the game remains, basically, for adults, and publishers figure small minds just can't grasp the game's complexities. I'm guessing. This book, with lots of photos of kids "just like you," sans the dancing wildlife, is upbeat and informative. There's bits about famous players and their earliest experiences in golf, plenty of wacky facts and assorted historical nuggets.
Colorful and never preachy, it should help set future generations well on their way to a lifetime of personal suffering and humiliation. The author, golf columnist for Canada's National Post, throws in a few arcane Canadian references but these will hardly distract American readers. This book would be a lovely start to those enticed by the game at an impressionable age, which so many of us recognize - too late! - as a distinct advantage.
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Passion for Golf
In Pursuit of the Innermost Game
By Roland Merullo
The Lyons Press, 2000
ISBN: 1-58574-162-0 $20.00
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"The more we make ourselves small and quiet in the Taoist sense, empty in the Zen sense, interiorly still in the way of Thoreau and Teresa of Avila, the more the beauty of our surroundings leaps out at us and quiets the mind still further."
Woa, bubba! No telling what my boys who tee off at dawn and are into the brewskis by the turn would make of this. The author, a novelist, delves very deeply into the introspective pleasures and challenges of golf, rediscovered in middle age. The golf pro is in his eyes
a "priest or mullah" (an ayatollah perhaps, but then he doesn't know our Kev), the clubs, a conduit for transcending the limitations of the body, the course,
a near familial relative, to which interaction brings us closer to the Zen concept of spaciousness, and, once around the block, nearer to the meditative high performance level of "the zone."
He tries to hold himself back, but it's hard. Give me a man who has shanked an 8-iron into an Etruscan tomb and observed fox, eagle and bear against a New England backdrop, and I will give you a man bound to wax poetic. He pulls out the heavy artillery: Hesse, Lao-tzu, the Bhagavad Gita, T.S. Eliot, Whitman.
"I will not risk saying it aloud, but I sometimes have the thought that golf is divine poetry, the Creator's metaphor for what he has made: the unfathomable enormity of all space, and within it this hard spinning sphere upon which so much seems to rest; the illusion of movement and completion - tee to green - that only bring us back, perhaps scarred and wiser, to the beginning."
Uh huh. I'm reminded of the scene in Animal House when John Belushi grabs the guitar of an overtly earnest folk singer and smashes it against the wall during their toga party.
My reaction to Mr. Merullo's passion was not nearly as extreme. Robert Butler noted that "Novelists are in the same business as the priests. We're all trying to figure out answers to the big cosmic questions." Taken in the proper light, and in the proper frame of mind, the author's passion is a blow right down the stripe.
Light Reading - Edition I
Light Reading - Edition II
Light Reading - Edition III
Light Reading - Edition IV
Light Reading - Edition V
Light Reading - Edition VI
Light Reading - Edition VII
Light Reading - Edition VIII
Light Reading - Edition IX
Light Reading - Edition X
Light Reading - Edition XI
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