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Thursday, May 15, 2008
Like duffers, golf books scatter wildly
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Probably — and I say so to protect myself from litigation — more useless books are written about golf and how to play it than any other game. You might include cooking, but that’s not a game, and one false step and you can get poisoned. But golf is the hot topic now, with all these touring pros in the vicinity torturing themselves at Sugarloaf, even the guy who designed the course. Greg Norman must have been mad at somebody, particularly anybody who plays golf.
We had another golfing visitor in town last week, I hear. I missed Carl Hiaasen. I was out of town at another golf event, watching Paul Goydos almost win The Players Championship. He has a better handicap than Hiaasen, and he doesn’t go around writing books about it. I mention Goydos over Sergio Garcia because Sergio won about the way Ernie Els won a tournament awhile ago. Neither won it, somebody else lost it, in the case of the TPC, Goydos. Good-natured, humorous and just recovering his game, as is Hiaasen.
Goydos is making more headway. Hiaasen starts his book with an 18 handicap and he finishes at 18. The confounding struggle in between is the meat and potatoes of his project, titled “The Downhill Lie,” which reminds me of another golf story, or almost golf story, having to do with another chap who spent a life jousting with the accursed game, Jim Murray, the great columnist.
Jim was being escorted to his burial place in a cemetery in Los Angeles by a cadre of old pals. Most of us had played golf with him on some continent or another, and knew of his contentious relationship with it. He once talked the owner of a new course not yet opened to the public to let him play a round first, that way he could say he once held a course record, though it may have been 104. As his escorts walked away from the hearse down a slope toward the burial plot, laboring under the weight of the heavy casket, one of our group murmured softly, “It’s a downhill lie. Jim wouldn’t like that.”
So, you get the significance of a downhill lie in golf. Hiaasen had given up golf 30 years before and his renewal became his “downhill lie,” 207 pages of it. He is a genuinely esteemed author, and sport is not his customary genre. I’ve noticed his name on books by my wife’s bedside at times, but since she deals in quite a contrast of reading material, it never occurred to me that the same guy would be writing a book about golf. So when “The Downhill Lie” arrived in my mail, curiosity seized me and I read the darn thing from cover to cover. And laughed, and empathized, and sneered, and tired of his constant name-dropping, David Feherty, for instance.
Golf literature, to employ the term loosely, mainly falls into two categories: How-to and how-not-to. There are some outstanding books of instruction, Hogan’s “Five Fundamentals of Golf,” without which Larry Nelson would never have reached the stars, he says. And Harvey Penick’s “Little Red Book,” and Bobby Jones’ “Golf Is My Game,” and many another.
For every one of those, there are two dozen about some guy and his lousy game. If you can’t play it well, sit down and tell the world about it. Get it off your chest. Belabor us with your world travails, and the worse it is, the better it sells, I’d guess. Must be, for all those that are out there. For pure how-to, I guess the Englishman Ted Ray’s book covered it all, “Driving, Approaching and Putting.”
I say that, for nobody ever writes a book about putting. Most important stroke of the round, makes or breaks the game, and all the self-acclaimed experts write about everything but putting. I forget if Hiaasen gets into it or not. I’d check it out, but I’m not certain I could stand that much painful golf again.
