Golf books for 2010

By Jeff Silverman
August 24, 2010


AUGUST

The Gate To Golf

Author: J. Douglas Edgar
Publisher: Martino Publishing

The remarkable life and mysterious death of J. Douglas Edgar, an important enough early theorist on the modern golf swing to have attracted a young Bobby Jones as an eager acolyte, was recently resurrected in the vivid detail of Steve Eubanks's "To Win and Die in Dixie." A year before his body was found on the side of a Georgia road, Edgar, a transplanted Brit, wrote his short, simple and long out-of-print testament to what he believed was the game's underlying secret: the inside-to-out path to the ball, which he fervently believed could be facilitated by passing the clubhead through a very simple training aid. This no-frills reprint — complete with original, grainy illustrations — may not be golf's Rosetta Stone, but it's still an essential hinge in the swing's evolution, and 90 years later still holds the key for curing a slice.

18 Game-Changing Lessons: Talking Golf With Legends and Pros

Authors: Mark Steinbauer with Hunki Yun
Publisher: Stewart, Tabori & Chang

With more than three decades as a teaching pro, Mark Steinbauer has made a point of listening. To Harvey Penick. To Ben Hogan. To Jack Nicklaus. To Jim Flick. To Bobby Locke. To Kathy Whitworth. The game-changer? His knack for transforming the stories he's taken from them — and others — into helpful lessons that he can clearly apply to high, low and mid-level handicappers. Put the 18 lessons together and you've built a fundamentally sound approach.

The Greatest Game: The Ancyent and Healthfulle Exercyse of the Golf

Authors: Hugh Dodd and Prof. David Purdie
Publisher: Interlink Publishing Group

Humor, like golf, is a delicate enterprise, and the first indication that this illustrated British import might not be as wry as it wishes is the preciousness of the subtitle. The second is the fellow who scripted the forward — noted comic Colin Montgomerie. Still, it's not heft of the Ryder Cup captain that weighs down this effort, it's the effort: "The Greatest Game" strains to be clever, its observations on the game, its characters and its character as passé as hickory shafts. Comedy is about timing; this one's time has come — and gone.

JULY

St. Andrews: The Home of Golf

Authors: Henry Lord and Olver Gregory with photography by Kevin Murray
Publisher: Corinthian Books

Please pardon us if we jump the gun here — this British import's U.S. pub date isn't until November — but longevity has its privileges, and it's not every day that a tournament celebrates its sesquicentennial. (Was it only 150 years ago that the Brits began teeing it up in earnest in pursuit of what would become the Claret Jug?) Of course, that first championship, won by Willie Park, was contested at Prestwick; the event didn't even move to St. Andrews until 1873, but any excuse to toast St. Andrews is a good one, and Lord and Gregory offer cheers with a full cup. "St. Andrews" is a lovely, illustrated tribute to the game's cradle — its history, its courses, its clubs and societies, its university, its cathedral graveyard, its narrow streets and its good citizens. Seve Ballesteros contributes an emotional foreward, and proceeds from sales benefit brain cancer research. So why wait 'til November? You can find it on Amazon's UK portal now.

Tom Morris of St. Andrews: The Colossus of Golf

Authors: David Malcolm and Peter E. Crabtree
Publisher: Birlinn Limited

This full-bore bio of Old Tom, set against the context of the game's evolution across his long lifetime, won the highest accolade that a golf book can — the USGA's Herbert Warren Wind Award — when it was first published in a limited edition run across the Pond two years ago. It's arrival for general consumption on these shores is especially timely. Given the tumult surrounding the game these days, a walk through its formative years with the first lion of the links stirringly reminds us what a compelling — and consuming — endeavor golf can be and why so many of us remain so willingly captivated by its thrall.

Play Away, Please: The Tale of the Sale of Golf's Greatest Icon

Author: John Peter Hagen
Publisher: Mainstream Publishing

Pop quiz time: If the London Bridge is in Arizona, where is the Old Course starter's box. (Hint: It ain't in St. Andrews anymore.) The story of how one of the game's most recognizable and beloved structures — in the shadow of the R&A adjacent to the first tee since 1924 — was auctioned off in 2001, purchased by California developers, dismantled (in a gale, no less) and shipped 7,000 miles to where it's been in storage ever since is as absurd a tale as it is a cautionary one for our times. Hagen, the self-proclaimed golf nut who made the actual purchase, entered into this peculiar tragicomedy with only good intentions, but good intentions don't make good stories — it's how they unravel that do. And, oh, do they ever unravel.

JUNE

Play Golf the Pebble Beach Way: Lose Five Strokes Without Changing Your Swing

Authors: Laird Small with Dave Allen
Publisher: Triumph Books

Sometimes, you have to make the best of the hand that's dealt you. As director of the Pebble Beach Golf Academy, Laird Small comes to the table with an instructional full house, and his approach is as sensible as it is simple: The better you think your way through a round, the better you'll actually play. Turns out Pebble — no surprise, really — is a virtual Jet Propulsion Lab for building a better golfing brain. And here's the fun part: The suggestions Small offers for success there — from overcoming first-tee anxieties, bouncing back from bad shots and understanding what each hole asks strategically to how to block out the scenery and focus on the green on No. 7, carry the cliffs on No. 8, and why it's prudent to leave driver in the bag on 18 — all translate nicely to wherever else you might happen to be playing.

Don't Choke: A Champion's Guide to Winning Under Pressure

Author: Gary Player
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing

Ch ... ch ... ch ... — well you know — is right up there with that other unmetionable: the sh ... sh ... sh ... — and you know that, too. Despite the imperative of the title, Player doesn't bark orders; he's too savvy for that. Instead, his clever little tome uses his most important victories as primers for examining the various ways we fall prey to our nerves and the various ways we can withstand and triumph over pressure both on the course and off. Player being Player, his insights are as generous as his anecdotes.

MAY

Cracking the Code: The Winning Ryder Cup Strategy: Make It Work for You

Authors: Paul Azinger and Dr. Ron Braund
Publisher: Looking Glass Books

Less focused on the matches themselves than on the team-building techniques incorporated to bond a disparate band into a cohesive unit, Azinger's account is as much a window into his own obsessive personality as it is a portrait of putting together a winning team. Interesting? Absolutely, with lots of practical applications in business for good measure. Still, imagine Captain Hagen — or even Captain Crenshaw — buying into a management mojo that promotes Disc Personality Profiles and Myers-Briggs Type Indicators over cocktails and weird shirts.

Tiger: The Real Story

Author: Steve Helling
Publisher: Da Capo Press

The first of what should be — if only by its timing — a cottage industry of history-on-the-fly efforts to dissect the fall of Tiger bills itself as the "Real" deal, but "retread" is just as apt. We've read it before in earlier bios, and Helling, a reporter for People, has nothing significant to add to the post-Thanksgiving crash. Tiger, the enigma, remains uncracked.

Unplayable: An Inside Account of Tiger's Most Tumultuous Season

Author: Robert Lusetich
Publisher: Atria Books

Ditto. But with a little better juice, in part because of Lusetich's tack; rather than straight bio, he follows Tiger's 2009, hardly expecting the inspiring comeback he was intent on chronicling would devolve into a public unraveling. His doggedness on the scene gave better access beyond-the-ropes — and a few new revelations. But, alas, no real Tiger.

Moment of Glory: The Year Underdogs Ruled Golf

Author: John Feinstein
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Quick, what do Mike Weir, Jim Furyk, Ben Curtis and Shaun Micheel have in common? Go to the top of the leaderboard if you answered the major champions of 2003. None had won one previously, and none has won one since. Replaying and re-examining each event, Feinstein assays the burdensome weights on and off the course that attend both winning and — via Len Mattiace and Thomas Bjorn, especially — just falling short.

Golf Anatomy

Authors: Craig Davies and Vince DiSaia
Publisher: Human Kinetics

Fitness experts Davies and DiSaia have assembled an exercise and conditioning program with a fascinating twist. Instead of photos, "Golf Anatomy" uses anatomical illustrations first to show what muscles each of its dozens of exercises works on, then how those muscles are used in the golf swing. Knowing precisely how your muscles fire might not improve your scores, but it's one less thing to think about — because they thought about it for you.

One Week in June: The U.S. Open

Edited by Don Wade
Publisher: Union Square Press

Athletes get up for the big ones. So do writers, and the lineup — led by Grantland Rice, Herb Wind, Dan Jenkins, Dave Anderson, Dick Schaap, Alistair Cook and Jim Murray — assembled for this Open highlight reel of tip-top typing casts an impressive shadow, indeed. So does the anthology’s sweep — with contemporary coverage reaching back to the event’s 1895 debut, before continuing its march through Ouimet’s Brookline, Jones’s Winged Foot, Hogan’s Merion, Arnie’s Cherry Hills, Miller’s Oakmont, and Watson’s Pebble on to Tiger’s. If the Open is a sprawling canvas — and it is — Wade’s collection nicely displays how the artfulness extends beyond the golf course to the printed page.

Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont

Authors: Adam Lazarus and Steve Schlossman
Publisher: New American Library

There’s a reason Johnny Miller never gets tired of reminding us about his final round in the ’73 Open: It was that good. But his staggering 63 in the pressure cooker is only one of the compelling storylines that historian Schlossman and his former student Lazarus — a pretty good story right there — weave together in their meticulously detailed narrative of an Open filled with genuine thrills, dramatic subplots, and, in Oakmont itself, the most feared location in the game.

Bad Lies: A Field Guide to Lost Balls, Missing Links and Other Golf Mishaps

Photographs by Charles Lindsay
Publisher: Little, Brown

What is it with this guy? "Lost Balls," Lindsay’s 2005 photographic romp through all that can go wrong for a golf ball (and so much can), was the visual equivalent of absurdist comedy. (Or was that absurdist tragedy?) While his Mulligan volume expands his field of vision considerably beyond the ball itself, the absurdity of the Royal & Ancient endeavor remains his focus, and his focus remains unerringly sharp. Just beware of the alligator.

APRIL

Golf Girl's Little Tartan Book: How To Be True To Your Sex and Get the Most From Your Game

Author: Patricia Hannigan
Publisher: Stewart, Tabori & Chang

Embracing the premise that "girls" (favored descriptive for the female of the species) don't have to approach the game the way "guys" (ditto for males) do, PR whiz and Golf Girl blogger Hannigan whips up a fluffy confection of advice, tips, hints and observations, complete with pink pages. If the tone is light and chatty, there's empowering substance beneath the icing, and the kind of good counsel — like obeying the rules, playing from the correct tees, learning to laugh at yourself, and why it's important to hole every putt — that more than a few, uh, guys could benefit from.

Golf Courses of the World: 365 Days

Author: Robert Sidorsky
Publisher: Abrams

It's just as easy to overdose on eye candy as it is the real stuff; the trick is to know when enough is enough, and Sidorsky's format - a golf course a day, every day across a two-page spread with stunning photo and capsule write-up facing each other - at least tries to impose some discipline. An update of the 2005 original, the current edition adds some 200 venues — from Ballyhack and Bayonne to Castle Stuart and Barnbougle Dunes - to its globe-trotting rota. That good news has a flip side; 200 worthies no longer make the cut. The suggested way to get over that? One day at a time.

The Last Putt: 2 Teams, One Dream & a Freshman Named Tiger

Authors: Neil Hayes & Brian Murphy
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

While Tiger's never been just another golfer, his short career at Stanford'd been the rare patch of Woodsiana that hasn't been picked clean. No longer. Given the story of "The Last Putt" — and all that surrounded the 1995 NCAA championship faceoff between Oklahoma State and a Cardinal squad led by Woods, Notah Begay, and Casey Martin — the real surprise is that it wasn't told sooner. This is golf with lots of joy, lots of spirit, and lots of underlying racial and social subtext. And guess who stands over the crucial titular putt?

The Power of Positive Idiocy: A Collection of Rants and Raves

Author: David Feherty
Publisher: Doubleday

Feherty may be an acquired taste, but he's our acquired taste, ranting and raving regularly on the back page of Golf Magazine and this very website. In case you might have missed something that was on — and out of — his mind from 2004 into 2009, it's reprised in this collection: the columns, the mailbags, the random posts — all presented if not always accountable. As jester, Feherty shows no fear or mercy, and while his wit can cut to the heart of things, his real gift is just how much heart there can be to his wit.

Dream On: One Hack Golfer's Challenge to Break Par in a Year

Author: John Richardson
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing

Thanks to Twitter and Facebook, this chronicle of a quixotic quest achieved the near impossible: it climbed to the top of Amazon's golf book charts in England last year. Thanks to 70,000 range balls, 60-odd instructional volumes, 33 videos, a couple dozen mind-game cassettes, and the saintly patience of his wife, Richardson achieved the near impossible, too, dropping 33 strokes in 363 days. He celebrated with lobster and champagne. We can ponder his diverting memoir of obsession and perseverence with envy.