A Spirit of Golf Stories from Those Who Love the Game Compiled and edited for The PGA of America by John M. Capozzi JMC Publishing Services, 2001 ISBN: 0-9656410-6-6 $24.95 800/910-4944

Little of the human condition escapes the local golf pro. Those who survive the long hours, supreme ironies and miseries of customer service, develop a hard shell and a soft heart. The scars from prolonged exposure to the game can be read on their faces.

Uncanny teachers, pros are often fine storytellers. Keen and aware observers, they're excellent company. Other than small town municipal court, few venues eclipse the sustained quality of entertainment and enlightenment found hanging around a pro shop.

This Harvey-esque collection goes a far piece in recording the vibrant oral tradition. The horror, glory and pathos of the dreaded P.A.T., or Players' Ability Test, alone could fill several chapters of the sequel.

Submissions came in over the transom. We get numerous accounts of improbable shots, Arnold Palmer's good will and generosity, the obligatory if not quintessential Tommy Bolt story and various life lessons. It is surprising how positive an impact the Olympian pro tourists apparently shower on the faithful by merely signing a cap or handing out a ball - numerous letters attest to this.

Celebrities pop up here and there. Maine muny pro Bill May fixes Ted Williams' slice by suggesting he adapt his swing thought at the plate to his golf. "Hell, I just aimed and hit it there!" Williams said, sharing the secret of hitting. Presto, swing thought! End of slice. End of lesson. In another, Bill Gates gets reprimanded for wearing jeans at a country club.

"You really need to listen to what I'm telling you," Shawn Humphries, a young director of instruction, implores Clint Eastwood during a lesson. Dirty Harry glares and confides: "It's been a long time since I've had to listen to anybody."

The best stories are about the lunch pail guys, those who minister beneath the magazines' radar to a world bent on driving itself insane. Although he was a touring pro, this reflection of Jug McSpaden by sportswriter Alan Hoskins goes a long way in painting the picture: "Jug really liked helping people, but on his terms. He was hard to get to know but once he got to know you, he'd help you all he could." That epitomizes the stereotypical pro, pretty much salt of the earth.

One minor bone: There must be a better way of acknowledging the more familiar names besides listing their PGA Tour wins. After their stories, Greg Norman is tagged as "Winner of Two Major Championships;" Arnold Palmer as "Winner of Seven Major Championships, 1963, 1975 U.S. Ryder Cup Captain." This scalp counting grates the sensibilities. After all, this book is not really about the touring pros, wins, money, fame. It's to celebrate the contributions of the PGA pro on the beat - those who stayed home and set aside their own playing aspirations to faithfully till the local golf soil. Their remembrances reflect a rich life and combine to offer a deserving tribute.

Venus on the Fairway Creating a Swing - and a Game - That Works for Women By Debbie Steinbach with Kathlene Bissell Contemporary Books, 2001 ISBN: 0-8092-9982-8 $17.95

The classical reference hints of the separate orbits of the sexes rather than the Roman Goddess of Beauty. The tact here is not feminist, pop, or even astronomical, but physiological and cognitive. Body types and thought processes, basically. Women with lower centers of gravity require different moves - a wider stance, less shoulder turn, more hip turn - to make the ball fly far and sure. They also think differently, a logical conclusion - perhaps revelatory in golf, nothing new to us Martians. Left unsaid is that golf largely taught by men (as if) from Mars has undoubtedly complicated matters.

Former LPGA player Debbie Steinbach seeks to restore some planetary harmony, joining a legion of aspiring best-selling authors hoping to piggyback on the success of John Gray, Ph. D.

She bumps up against a familiar, genderless handicap, common ground. Good players have a natural ease. "It," whatever it is - hand eye coordination? - comes more easily to the gifted. Women, and men, taking up golf quickly discover that golf athleticism might as well be from another planet, especially those bringing less time, less ability, less desire and less commitment to golf than the prodigy turned teacher.

The author gets this and she's very good on drills, listing dozens easy enough to grasp, if not successfully execute: swinging with the feet together, for instance, to instill good balance and involve the arms.

Simplistic virtues aside, there are occasional lapses confusing to even the most enlightened of either sex - Q angles, spine lean, target lines, et. al - but she's quick with a fall back position.

Anticipating problems with the full swing, she offers readers an out. "If this chapter has thrown you into mental meltdown, I want you to take two aspirin and go back to lesson number one - impact. Forget about everything and hit the [impact] bag!"

Competition, etiquette, the mental game, couples golf, there's also insights from her salad days on tour. One of her top students, on the team at San Diego State, once troubles Hollis Stacy for some kernel of insight. The three-time U.S. Open winner, pauses, then suggests: "Water. Drink water," before returning to her range balls.

No surprise, Ms. Steinbach is bullish on strength and flexibility training. She even mentions the novel outward finger stretch using a rubber band.

"If you are serious about your golf," she pumps us up, "get serious about your fitness."

Therein lies the dilemma. We're not serious about either our golf or our fitness. This, of course, bears no reflection on the quality of the instruction, which is undoubtedly sound. But it does provide some common ground shared by those from both Mars and Venus.

Golf It isn't just a game My 65 Years as Caddy and Starter At the Waynesville Country Club, Waynesville, North Carolina By Old Bud Mull Snowglobe Publishers, 2000 ISBN: 0-9713886-0-1 $15.95 (Available from: 828/456-9396)

A homespun tribute to a homespun life, Bud's nostalgic tales seem far removed from a world moving so much faster. Stick around in one place long enough though and you never know who'll turn up. Sam Snead, Chi Chi Rodriguez, Richard Nixon all passed through and played Waynesville. Bud once shot 66 with a ball out of bounds to Dr. Cary Middlecoff's 75.

Through numerous ownership changes, whether in the pro shop, tap room, or at the first tee, Old Bud has been a fixture. Now there was the time Ernestine, a congenial shepherd who liked to ride around in Bud's cart, up and ate the senator's ham sandwich. "We went and got him another one." And then there was that day Bud's drive hit a cart path and rolled up 10 yards shy of the green on the 411-yard third. "It shook me up so I bogeyed the hole."

He got his caddie badge at 14. Fees were 35 cents for nine holes, 60 cents for 18. There was the dreaded belt line - "the way it works was you get down on your hands and toes and as you go thorough this line of caddies, they would hit you with their belts." A bunch of tow-headed Depression-era country kids in overalls mug for an old photo. They caddied, had swimming holes, barefoot summers and took Saturday night baths in a washtub.

You might catch a break going through the belt line. "But if they didn't like you, Boy, you had it." The owner paid out 25 cents to the boys who caught the moles terrorizing the golf course.

Carts took over in the mid-50's. The idyllic caddie life disappeared into history and the mind's eye. "I'm awfully glad I got to be a caddy," Bud concludes. Heck, yea.

"A-Game" Golf The Complete Starter Kit for Golfers From Tiger Woods' Amateur Instructor By John Anselmo with John Andrisani Doubleday, 2001 ISBN: 0-385-49813-6 $25

At 10 Tiger was menaced by a hook. A nasty, quacking mallard, what they call in Texas a schoolboy hook.

Muny pro John Anselmo fixed that. His young charge sprouted through his teens, so fast he grew through five sets of clubs between his 10th and 18th birthdays. Entrusted by Earl Woods after extensive interviews, Anselmo finely adjusted Tiger's swing and game as his body and mind matured.

The title's catchphrase has since fallen into disuse, rightfully so. It smacked of pomposity. Tiger himself, under scrutiny, dropped the pretense of grading his game at least publicly.

His one-time teacher is still very much active in tutoring promising young players. Swing wonks, the Tiger curious and the struggling established player will find solace in his methodology.

"I feel sorry for golfers who are trying to improve," he writes, his own professional ambitions derailed by an errant range ball to the eye. "…I'm frustrated by this because I have taught one way and one way only my entire life, and my method of teaching is based on knowing what the body can and cannot do, and on what I have learned by watching the game's best players in the world at work."

Taking aim at convention, he presents both standard methods on a variety of shots and situations, and then his own Anselmo Way. I apologize. It's not light reading.

For eye position, to take one of any number of examples, he takes issue with the notion that one should always look straight down at the ball. No. This is only the case for mid-iron shots. On short irons, pitches, knockdowns, and punch shots, one should focus ahead of the ball; for woods and long irons, eyes should be focused behind the ball.

Which is to say that this is a starter kit akin to those old build-a-jeep kit offers in the back of comic books. The instruction is forthright but complex and one can readily see how the disciplined instructor and the precocious Tiger must've clicked in dissecting demons in the swing plane and downswing.

With the grip, to take another Anselmo twist, he cautions against the old adage of holding the club as if a small bird were inside. With a driver or iron, he prefers that the club be held firmly enough that someone who wanted to could almost pull it from your hands. Grip pressure, he believes, changes with the shot.

Surprisingly there's not a Tiger or John Anselmo story in the above-mentioned A Spirit of Golf. There should be. An oversight but perhaps not out of character, indicative of the measure of the man Earl would entrust his son through his formative years.

The results speak for themselves.

Billy Boy By Bud Shrake Simon & Schuster, 2001 ISBN: 0-7432-2480-9 $21

It's a short list, the first page of the golf literary fiction leaderboard. Given the recent offerings, Tiger's first born may enter Q-School before anyone in Hollywood dares revisit a golf script or suggests adapting another golf novel to the big screen.

Which would be fine. Just what is the problem? (Caddyshack and the memorable sequence in Goldfinger excepted.) Do the stories try too hard? Must the characters always drip with "meaning"? Is it that the male lead holds the club like an anaconda? Does somebody somewhere, the author perhaps, just not sufficiently "get" golf to spin a believable yarn? Or is the problem simply that they take themselves and golf way too seriously?

Regrettable swing thoughts cracking a new golf novel but the reader has reason to be wary.

Once in a very great while, I'm glad to report, like the duffer's 60-footer that falls, or the blissful swing, someone gets it right.

"Golf is a sport if you are trying to beat somebody. It's a game if you're playing for fun. Golf is a business, if that's what you want to make of it."

Now we're getting somewhere. The voice of reason belongs to a gracious golfing angel in the form of John Bredemus. A legendary and mysterious figure in Texas golf, Bredemus designed Colonial Country Club in Ft. Worth, among others. Harvey Penick fans will recall Bredemus, a Princeton man, was a confidant of Jim Thorpe's, an eccentric genius who traveled with little more than a bag of checkers and a few books. He belongs in a novel.

"Golf is a jackass in a hailstorm," he tells the book's protagonist, a sharp and studious young buck who survives the caddie belt line and an alcoholic father. "Golf is whatever you want to make of it."

With good story telling and many other things, golf included, less is often more. The author, an accomplished novelist and former sportswriter, doesn't dawdle where others might. His characters make golfing sport, business and fun in the Ft. Worth of his youth.

"As with all who play golf, Billy knew there were moments in the game that approached divinity. A serenity invaded him, a sense of being at ease, a feeling that swinging the golf club was a simple and natural thing to do."

Nothing more be said. The reader can exhale, relax and enjoy the story.

There's a match, of course, and a dame, a villain and a goofy rich oilman who has no trouble with most vices but would never cheat at golf. Ben Hogan guest stars, the kinder and gentler Hogan of whom stories are less often told. There's a delicious moment, when things look bleak. Young Billy steps up, "frightened by the enormity of what he was about to do."

"Mr. Hogan, sir," he says, "I have bet all my money and my future on this match. I want to choose my own clubs and read my own putts."

Hogan gives him a look and then "a tight little Gary Cooper grin." He retreats. Back in a cart, Harvey Penick, who makes his fictional debut, tells Hogan under similar circumstances he'd of done the same thing. Hogan concurs.

The story turns unpredictably, which is golf if not Hollywood. "Cheerfulness is the greatest essential to enjoying golf," Bredemus says at one point. He provides Billy with the sort of assistance many believe Ben Crenshaw got in winning the '95 Masters. Perhaps it's cheerfulness that's missing from so many of Billy Boy's competitors, and that make this tale stand out so markedly by contrast.

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