HIGHLAND PARK, Illinois, September 9-- Everyone's got his or her list of favorite books, and I'm no exception. I'm not a voracious reader (although I'm married to one), but I do a plow through a fair number of books on certain subjects, golf among them. Here are a few of the best. If you're not a golfer, go straight to The Rub of the Green -- it's nominally about golf, but that part isn't really central to the story.
Those who can do, teach
William Hallberg is a professor of English at East Carolina University. He's also a low-handicap golfer who likes to travel, and he combines the latter two interests in a book called The Soul of Golf.
Living up to a pretentious-sounding title like that is a tall order -- but Hallberg pulls out the driver and stripes one right down the middle. The Soul of Golf traces a trip Hallberg took by car in 1996, the purpose of which was to find "answers to golf's mysteries." He elaborates on this in the book's first chapter:
[O]ff I go to dissect the vast metaphor of golf... to probe the conundrums of the greenest sport known to man. Will I ever understand why we revel in the game's curious topography? Or why we will pay a month's wages to fly across the country or across the ocean to be humbled by a sacred patch of green earth? Will I come to know why we play a game so apt to bring us down? Or why we revel in our post-traumatic suffering? How is it that millions of golfers just like me persist in chunking and chili-dipping and shanking and hacking and duffing and diddling week after week on courses all across the republic?
That passage is pretty philosophical, but Hallberg soon proves he's a down-to-earth guy. He describes his travels around the country, the places he visits, the people he meets, and the golf courses he plays, with wit, charm, and introspection.
He scores a free round at Cypress Point, one of the toughest courses to get on in America. Afforded this rare opportunity, he proceeds to have a fantastic round playing alone, the first golfer off in the morning. At the other end of the spectrum, he tees it up at a beat-up course located on the grounds of a VA psychiatric hospital in Los Angeles, sneaking on with a couple of patients. Hallberg's two playing partners are guys who have probably never played before and may never play again; he shows them a few swing basics, guides them around the course, and really cares about them and their enthusiasm for the game:
They are so amazingly effusive and earnest and appreciative that my skeptical self can't quite take them seriously. Then, Larry's voice will crack with emotion, or Dave will shake his head just so, and one or the other of them will pat me on the back like an old friend. And then I'm ashamed of myself for doubting their sincerity. Probably no one has really taken time to attend to issues other than their addictions and their psych profiles and their survival on the streets. They are mere emblems of a sociological phenomenon with predictable symptoms and foregone outcomes.
Then along comes some fellow who gives them a few tips on how to play a game that will abandon them in a few days just as surely as the grass grows. And they fall all over themselves in their appreciation. The here and now of the game is crucial to them for reasons I can't understand. Why should it matter so? How could it?... Their inept game was surely a metaphor for something, something, even if they didn't quite know what it was.
Hallberg's description of the way he coaches one of his playing partners to sink a birdie putt is priceless -- but you'll have to buy the book if you want to read it. The Soul of Golf is a beautiful piece of writing, worth as much for its descriptions of the value of friends, family, and life itself as for the golf segments. I'm indebted to Charlie Alfred, a golf mentor of mine, for introducing me to this book.
Another wonderful book by Hallberg is his 1988 novel called The Rub of the Green. It combines golf, a love triangle, and a year in a minimum-security prison in ways I never would have thought possible.
The novel traces the protagonist's life as he grows up with golf -- at first, using the game as a way of working through the grief he feels when his mother dies, later as a means of gaining a scholarship to Ohio State, and finally, as a profession. Along the way, he falls in love with his college teammate's girlfriend, which leads to confrontation later on when teammate (now a fellow touring pro) mistreats girlfriend (now wife), which leads to our hero going after his friend with a car, breaking his legs, and ending up in the slammer for a year -- where he finds himself stuck with a group of tiresome but harmless fellow inmates with whom he coexists with varying levels of success. He's assigned the task of building a small golf course on the prison grounds, and he uses the project as a way of redeeming himself -- as the book's back cover says, finding "his own odd brand of salvation."
Like Soul, The Rub of the Green is one of those rare books that make me feel sad when I get to the end; reaching the last page is like taking leave of a good friend. Hallberg's powers of description are formidable, and he conveys a contemplative, philosophical outlook entirely in keeping with the humbling, patience-instilling nature of golf.
Uncle Dave's doctoral dissertation
Putt Like the Pros, by Dave Pelz with co-author Nick Mastroni, was originally published in 1989. Unlike Hallberg's books, Pelz's isn't a masterpiece of prose -- the writing is pedestrian at best and at times downright clumsy. But the content is superb. Sort of like his TV offerings on "The Golf Channel Academy" -- Pelz is never going to win any awards for stand-up comedy, but he can certainly teach you how to get up and down.
Like a lot of golfers, I'd always felt that putting was a black art, at which some people had the magic touch while most of us struggled against the dreaded yips and just tried to keep our three-putts to a minimum. Based on years of empirical research -- and I mean exhaustive research, like rolling thousands upon thousands of balls on real, live greens under every condition imaginable -- Putt Like the Pros takes the mystery out of putting. Pelz shows that putting is simply a matter of getting the putter moving at the proper speed in the proper path, keeping the face at the right angle, and hitting the ball on or near the sweet spot. He presents the elements that go into a consistent putting stroke and lays out a practice routine that will help you achieve it.
I confess I haven't gone ahead and adopted his practice routine -- largely because of lack of time -- but the first thing I did after reading the book was to cut three inches off my putter shaft, to allow my arms to hang down with my hands directly under my shoulders, which Pelz says is important (with your hands directly underneath your shoulders, the putter's face angle tends not to change during the stroke -- that makes it more likely you'll hit the putt straight).
Inside the golfer's mind
I try to read, or at least browse, W. Timothy Gallwey's The Inner Game of Golf every couple of years or so, because it gets right to the core of why so many of us are our own worst enemies on the golf course. Gallwey's concept (developed for tennis, but applied to golf, music, and other athletic pursuits) is that we tend to get in our own way by trying too hard, being overly self-critical, and focusing too much on mechanics. He encourages us to develop a state of "relaxed concentration," in which we're aware of our body motions, but aren't trying to control their every nuance.
Gallwey's technique is remarkably similar to that of the late Arnold Jacobs, who played tuba with the Chicago Symphony for over 40 years and who gave a couple of week-long master classes I attended about ten years ago. Jacobs was big on avoiding "paralysis by analysis" -- he said we should "order the product," that is, think about the sound we wanted to make, instead of thinking about which muscles had to move in this or that way in order to produce that sound. Gallwey's approach is that it's imporant to be aware of how we're moving, but not consciously try to do this and do that.
Dozing the bull
Driving the Green, by John Strawn, describes the making of a golf course from start to finish. It begins with a wealthy businessman looking at a piece of Florida real-estate and thinking, "This looks like a great place for a golf course," and ends with the completion of the course and its associated housing development. Along the way, Strawn describes environmental snags that delay the project, financial shenanigans that come pretty close to killing it, and the massive infusions of money, ego, and mechanical power that go into the creation of a golf course.
The birth of a golf course might not sound like exciting reading, but Strawn makes it interesting by having access to inside information and to the people who actually build the course itself (as well as the people who try to stop it from being built). He presents a balanced view of the whole project and isn't afraid to be critical of the environmental and artistic compromises that are made in order to see the development through to profitability. For my part, I hadn't realized how much work goes into making the artificial appear natural -- Strawn relates that one golfer complimented the architect for how he managed to shoehorn a hole around a curving stream and tuck a green in behind a pond; the architect confesses that all of that topography was entirely created by bulldozers -- originally, the course was a flat piece of land with no running water anywhere.
Takin' it deep
Let 'er Rip!, by the late Gardner Dickinson, is a collection of reminiscences, commentary, and instruction from one of the most knowledgeable (and opinionated) old pros in the game. Dickinson spent many years as a protege of Ben Hogan, and the book is full of remembrances of Hogan and his contemporaries, as well as insights into why Hogan was the greatest golfer in history. Dickinson includes personal stories about Hogan and descriptions of Hogan's swing, Hogan's steely temperament, and Hogan's approach to making a golf ball do just about anything he wanted it to do. There are also remembrances of Sam Snead, George Bayer, Cary Middlecoff, Jimmy Demaret, Arnold Palmer, Billy Casper, Lloyd Mangrum, Lionel Hebert, and numerous others.
The book touches on dozens of subjects -- it's divided up into short articles, most of which are a couple of pages in length. He talks about the Senior Tour and grouses that "rules are killing nostalgia." Dickinson's contention is that the Senior Tour is supposed to be an exhibition, where guys who won major championships a few decades ago can go out and have fun in front of a crowd -- "The public is paying to see the Sneads, the Nicklauses, the Trevinos, the Boroses, the Januarys, and not the 'Johnny Appleseeds' who are riding their backs." I don't buy that at all -- I love to watch guys like Bruce Fleisher and Allen Doyle, neither of whom made much of a splash on the regular tour, racking up wins against the better-knowns on the Senior Tour. But I didn't say I agreed with Dickinson on everything, just that I liked his book.
He's also got chapters on putting and other technical aspects of golf, as well as segments on the LPGA (of which his wife, Judy Dickinson, was an executive for a number of years), the politics of golf, and even some poetry. There's something for everyone who loves golf in Let 'er Rip!.
So those are my recommendations. If I had to rate one as my overall favorite golf book, it'd definitely be The Soul of Golf, followed closely by Hallberg's novel. I'm leaving out others, like Harvey Penick's Little Red and Little Green books, because those have received plenty of attention in the golf press. If you happen to run across any others you think I should know about, feel free to drop me a line!
Copyright © 1999 John J. Kafalas