Hole By Hole
It's about golf.
Hole By Hole
It's about golf.
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Review Course and player management skills focus of new book Like most golfers who were first exposed to golf in the last few decades, I have almost never played a round with the assistance of a real, live caddie. On the rare occasions that I did, at Pebble Beach Golf Links and The Links at Spanish Bay, they were great experiences. I had no idea how liberating it was to simply walk the course without a bag on my shoulders, or while pushing or pulling a golf trolley. All I had to do was think about my next shot, and listen to what the caddie suggested about club selection, targeting, and how my putt would probably break on the green. The loopers I hired clearly had years of experience, both on the courses and with a wide variety of golfers. Their people skills were the equal of their ability to gauge the wind, pick a club, and read a green. Whenever they’re done caddying, some of these guys should explore a career in the diplomatic service. The caddie/player teams we see on the professional tours are just one of the many ways in which the professional game differs so much from the rest of us. The caddie can help process the flow of information that is needed to put the right swing on the ball, and also keep the golfer maintain a focus on the task at hand. Left to our own devices, too many of us can ruefully admit to thinking about the last shot while in the middle of the next one, with less than happy results. Although caddies are rare commodities, the rest of us can still take advantage of what caddies can bring to the game, if we really want to. That’s the message of James Y. Bartlett’s new book, "Think Like a Caddie, Play Like a Pro" (Sellers Publishing; $24.95 SRP). Bartlett is a longtime golf writer, and teamed up with the Professional Caddies Association to write this book. Other contributors include Reid Champagne, who writes for Delaware Today magazine and other local publications, as well as Mark Nelson and Anderson Craigg. Caddies don’t make the swings, but they can help the golfer with everything that leads up to them. The point of the book is to suggest to players how to use the resources that any good caddie brings to a round; in a sense, how to be a caddie for yourself. Think in terms of the typical situation facing any golfer in a routine eighteen-hole round. A good caddie will know the course conditions. The caddie will help the golfer assess every likely element that could affect the ball’s flight or roll toward the target, be it wind, ground slope, hazards, or other factors. A caddie will rarely if ever let the golfer take his swing without making sure the player is aware of these factors, is prepared to handle them, and is focused only on that particular shot at that particular time. A professional player can take advantage of a second brain in conducting the pre-shot routine. What this book does is illustrate how the rest of us should try to split our minds in two and improve our results with the same process. The book includes plenty of examples from the professional tours, along with several amusing anecdotes. There are several useful checklists for different game situations. I also especially liked a segment on the right kind of statistics to keep track of during a round. Some of these stats don’t normally show up on The Golf Channel’s post-tournament shows, but they should be highly useful for the rest of us. This book is a nice introduction to the concepts of course and player management that are such important elements to improving your game. It is a fast and enjoyable read, written from an interesting perspective. Review Date: July 23, 2010 |
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To Win and Die in Dixie: As with most other sports, golf can be a wonderful cocoon against the outside world, where the cares and responsibilities of life can be set aside for a few hours in pursuit of sporting triumph, however defined. Governed by a series of imperious rules that artificially fence in the player’s options for achieving those goals, golf also insists that compliance with those rules provides a way to test one’s makeup, beyond the confines of the sport. Perhaps no other game claims that it provides an opportunity to reveal character, as opposed to building it. Nonetheless, the real world has a bad habit of intruding into the artificial ones we create. Steve Eubanks’ new book is a timely reminder of these facts of life, with his detailed study of the death of one of the inventors of the modern game. J. Douglas Edgar is not well known to most golfers nowadays, but in the late teens and early twenties of the last century, plenty of folks knew all about him. He set a longstanding competitive scoring record in his first victory in the Canadian Open, and followed it up with a successful defense of his title the next year. It wasn’t so much that Edgar won, or how low he went when he did. While trying to figure out how to play with a bad hip condition, Edgar invented what we now know as the modern golf swing. Its emphasis on building torque between the upper and lower halves of the body, with the downward move beginning with a hip turn instead of the arm swing, led to a huge boost in Edgar’s distance and control. When he was “on,” Edgar was simply unbeatable. Like others of his era, Edgar’s tournament play was an adjunct for his regular work as the golf pro for a club, in his case an upscale layout in Atlanta, Georgia. Two famous golfers, Bobby Jones and U.S. Women’s Amateur winner Alexa Stirling, learned the game and Edgar’s swing under his tutelage. In mid-summer 1921, however, Edgar’s increasingly charmed life came to a swift and violent end. The initial impression was that he was a victim of a hit-and-run accident with a car. This scenario fit in nicely with the growing consensus in Atlanta and elsewhere that something had to be done about safety and traffic conditions, as more and more cars filled the streets in the aftermath of World War I. An Atlanta Constitution reporter, Comer Howell, was among the first to the scene, as Edgar bled out on the streets. He also thought at first that a car had hit Edgar. It was only later that Howell came to believe that something far more sinister caused Edgar’s demise. Working from transcripts of the coroner’s inquest, court papers, and other contemporary accounts, in addition to Howell’s notes, Eubanks shows the reader that Howell was most likely correct about the cause of Edgar’s untimely passing. While highly accomplished on the golf course, Edgar’s personal life was far less exemplary. He enjoyed more than the occasional cocktail, and Prohibition didn’t help matters. He was generous to a fault with his money, to the point of profligacy. His immaturity in that respect led to strict financial controls by his club’s management In addition, although married and the father of two children, there are indications that he often enjoyed other female companionship, as a reward of sorts for his athletic prowess. Some things don’t change over time, apparently. Some of Edgar’s circumstances are more tightly tied to his times, however. Atlanta was a Southern bastion of the early twenties, with blatant appeals to racism marring political, social, and economic life in Georgia. An English immigrant, Edgar did not appear to be tied to local mores in these respects. As Eubanks shows, that fact may have been a critical element in explaining why Edgar was killed. This book is a fascinating glimpse at a part of golf’s history that has not been given as much attention as it deserves. The mystery of Edgar’s death almost certainly provides part of the explanation for why that is so. Sports biographies tend to emphasize the positive over a fuller understanding of a game’s heroes, and in Edgar’s case, that was no easy task. Eubanks should be commended for not following the usual script with this great story. Review Date: May 31, 2010 |
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The Magic of Recycling Never let it be said that the golf publishing industry is environmentally insensitive. For example, they firmly believe in recycling, on at least two levels. Allow me to explain. Golf Magazine, now affiliated with Sports Illustrated, has for many years run an extremely popular section of specialized "Private Lessons" for their golfing readership. That’s not particularly unusual, but printing those pages on brown-tinted recycled paper certainly is—especially when compared to the usual glossy paper used for the rest of that publication. These golf lessons are aimed at different segments of the playing audience—low handicappers, seniors, high handicappers, power hitters, and short-hitting "straight" hitters. The tailored-to-talents approach is one reason why these pieces are so popular, but there are other factors. The illustrations are uniformly helpful, especially for visual learners. In addition, the text for each piece is usually short, sweet, and blessedly non-technical. While none of these lessons are a complete substitute for a good session with your local golf teaching professional, they are often very useful for those looking for a basic understanding or a quick reminder. Golf Magazine’s second level of recycling is now on sale, with the publication of a revised and updated edition of a book of these Private Lessons (Abrams Golf; $29.95 SRP). The paperback edition compiles over two hundred of these pieces, culled from the last twenty years of the magazine’s series. Unlike the magazine versions, the segments do not carry an identifying label for the primary intended beneficiary of each lesson. On the other hand, from the text it’s usually pretty easy to figure that out; and for some, the lessons should be valuable for all skill levels. This new edition should be a good seller, as the golf season begins across the northern half of the country. Golfers can skim through the pages, stop on a topic that interests them, and quickly enjoy a handy playing tip. Review date: March 19, 2010 |
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Review A bucket list for golfers Whenever folks reach the stage of life where they have a large amount of disposable income, there’s a conundrum about how to spend it. After setting aside the usual charitable donations to one’s favorite causes, and providing for one’s heirs (if they deserve it), the next big decision is about whether to buy lots of stuff, or lots of experiences. This is a very nice problem to have, according to most of us. Nonetheless, a lot of folks nowadays seem to decide that they have enough heirlooms and collectibles. Instead, they decide to go for multiple exotic vacations to far-flung locales, or similar hard-to-replicate activities far from their normal way of life. Accumulating these experiences is then checked off on what’s now called the bucket list (as in, things to make sure you do before you kick the...). There’s even been a movie about this phenomenon, using this extremely descriptive title. The publishing industry is also astute enough to capitalize on this trend, despite its relatively macabre tone. Oregon-based free-lance writer/editor Chris Santella has put out several books of this type, covering such diverse pursuits as diving, fly-fishing, birding, and sailing. He’s now released his second book devoted to a golf-related bucket list, with his Fifty More Places to Play Golf Before You Die (Stewart, Tabori, and Chang; $24.95 SRP). I assume that for some readers of the first such book, they recently discovered that they have a little more time on their hands than they first thought they would. Santella reached out to his own network of movers, shakers, and doers, and convinced them to contribute their own chapters devoted to their favorite courses. It’s a wide-ranging assortment, with golf destinations sprinkled throughout most of the earth’s continents. Anyone with a combined foreign travel/playing golf bug would really enjoy reviewing these options. There’s a course in Perth, Australia called the Golf Club at Kennedy Bay that would be awfully tempting to Cape Region golfers right now, buried as they are in several feet of snow. The Jade Dragon Snow Mountain Golf Club in Lijiang, China, as touted by longtime golf writer Jeff Wallach, may not have been on too many folks’ bucket lists before this book came out. Based on Wallach’s praises, it will soon appear on several itineraries. The White Witch course in Montego Bay, Jamaica has a Cape Region connection. It was financed and built on land owned by John Rollins, a major contributor to Beebe Hospital. The course winds its way over 600 acres of lush tropical greenery. Some of the chosen golf courses are far more familiar to most golfers. Golf consultant Tim Moraghan highly recommends Pinehurst No. 2, site of this year’s United States Open. Chambers Bay Golf Course in Washington State also makes the list, and it will host this years United States Amateur Championship. The book’s closest course to the Cape Region is also a favorite of professional golfers and those living in and around Washington, D.C.—Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, MD. For each chapter, the writers describe their chosen course in the finest of purple praise, of the type usually found in travelogues and in-flight magazines. They also include a helpful guide for how best to reach the destination, as well as some of the accommodation options available to the golfing tourist. With this winter shaping up as one of the worst ones ever experienced in the Cape Region, this book is a very pleasant read. Most of us won’t be golfing at these fifty places any time soon, at least not without hitting the Powerball lottery, but the photographs and glowing narratives make for nice daydreams just the same. Review Date: February 12, 2010 |
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