READING THE GREENS
BOOKS ON GOLF FROM THE ARTHUR W. SCHULTZ COLLECTION
PART THREE
- 9th Hole: The Mental Side of Golf
- 10th Hole: The Duffer's Game
- 11th Hole: A Droll Affair
- 12th Hole: Golf Tales
9TH HOLE:
THE MENTAL SIDE OF GOLF
Golf's rigors have never been limited solely to physical exertion. The effort required to evaluate the physical lay of the course or the alignment of a particular hole, the pains taken to assume the proper stance and execute a balanced swing at the ball -- these and other key elements of the game have always been a matter of utmost concentration and intense personal discipline.Recognizing the important role of metaphysical factors, books on golf have carefully evaluated the mental and psychological aspects of the game. Titles such as P. A. Vaile's The Soul of Golf (1912), R. D. Townshend's Inspired Golf (1922), and Kenneth R. Thompson's The Mental Side of Golf (1939) presented golfers with thoughtful observations on the the essence of the game and the ways in which the patterns and structure of a round of golf could be assessed and utilized by the percpetive player.
"The mental condition plays an all-important part in golf," observes James Currie Macbeth in the chapter of his work, Golf from A to Z (1935), devoted to the topic of "Temperament." Theo. B. Hyslop addresses frankly and systematically the various Mental Handicaps in Golf (1927) and, utilizing two pyramid-shaped diagrams, admonishes his readers, "The reasoning faculty should rise above the emotional and even the volitional."
David C. Morley approaches the unlikely subject of "Freud in Golf" by arguing for a relationship between a golfer's efforts to master the game and Freud's understanding of mental activity as residing in two spheres, the conscious and the unconscious. But Alex J. Morrison takes the mental approach to golf still further in Better Golf without Practice (1940). Instead of weeks of mechanical execution of endless golf swings, Morrison says, the golfer should imagine the action of swinging a club over and over in the mind. Seated in a comfortable chair in the privacy of one's home, away from the distractions of competition or the judgments of trainers and friends, the thoughful golfer can play a solitary mental game, rehearsing again and again the ideal stroke and swing in the realm of the imagination.
ITEMS EXHIBITED
Hyslop, Theophilus Bulkeley. Mental Handicaps in Golf. London: Baillihre, Tindall & Cox; Baltimore, Md.: Williams & Wilkins Co., 1927.
Macbeth, James Currie. Golf from A to Z. London: Putnam, 1935.
Morley, David C. Golf and the Mind. London: Pelham Books, 1978.
Morrison, Alex J. Better Golf without Practice. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1940. First edition.
Thompson, Kenneth R. The Mental Side of Golf: A Study of the Game as Practised by Champions. New York; London: Funk & Wagnalls Co., 1939. First edition.
Townshend, Richard Baxter. Inspired Golf. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1922. Second edition.
Vaile, Pembroke Arnold. The Soul of Golf. London: MacMillan and Co., Ltd., 1912.
10TH HOLE:
THE DUFFER'S GAME
Golf is a deceptively simple game, easy to play indifferently and very difficult to play consistently and well. Duffers, hackers, and amateurs of all varieties have struggled with the game's challenges for as long as golf has been played; and their frustrations and setbacks furnish the substance of a genre of golf books directed to the problems of the less expert player.As more players with differing levels of skill entered the sport in the nineteenth century, golf rulemakers responded with a system of handicapping that compensated less able players with a given number of strokes and made it possible for them to compete with more accomplished players on an even plane. Grantland Rice and Clare Briggs offered The Duffer's Handbook of Golf (1926) and Morrie Morrison counseled the occasional golfer on "How to Play Your Best."
Throughout the twentieth century, duffers have drawn inspiration from celebrities on the fairways who played golf no worse and sometimes no better than the average hacker. Athletes like Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth took up the sport and swung as vigorously at the tiny white golfball as they ever had at a fastball down the middle. Hollywood luminaries and public figures from Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks to John D. Rockefeller and Rube Goldberg were frequently pictured on the course, club in hand. Equally important, American presidents made recurring appearances on the greens, beginning in the days of William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson and continuing to the more recent duffer's dedication and mixed golf records of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, and Bill Clinton. The trials of the celebrity whose game is cruelly exposed in public were perhaps never better expressed than in George Plimpton's The Bogey Man (1968).
Ordinary players retreating from another maddening day on the course could thus take comfort, not only from the reverses suffered by the rich and famous, but also from the published literature urging average golfers to greater effort the next time out. Tom Scott and Geoffrey Cousins promoted Golf for the Not So Young (1960), Louis T. Stanley offered "Tips for the Outsize Golfer," and Bob Toski, posing what has been the motto for all earnest duffers, exhorted his readers in the Beginner's Guide to Golf (1955) to "Practice, Practice, Practice."
ITEMS EXHIBITED
Hutchinson, Horatio Gordon. Golf: A Complete History of the Game, Together with Directions for Selection of Implements, the Rules, and a Glossary of Golf Terms. Philadelphia: Penn Publishing Co., 1900.
Morrison, Erwin G. Here's How to Play Money Golf. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1953. First edition.
Plimpton, George. The Bogey Man. New York; Evanston: Harper & Row, 1968.
Rice, Grantland, and Clare Briggs. The Duffer's Handbook of Golf. New York: MacMillan Co., 1926.
Scott, Tom, and Geoffrey Cousins. Golf for the Not So Young. Foreword by Gene Sarazen. London: Peter Davies, 1960.
Stanley, Louis Thomas. Fontana Golf Book. Fontana Books. S. l.: Fontana Books, 1957.
Toski, Bob. Beginner's Guide to Golf. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, Inc., c1955.
11TH HOLE:
A DROLL AFFAIR
"Golf," Mark Twain famously remarked, "is a good walk spoiled." His view, shaped by his own mixed record at the game, has been shared by generations of other frustrated golfers. A. A. Milne, the British children's author and occasional writer on golf subjects, expressed the matter in less succinct terms but just as pungently. "Golf is popular," Milne said, "simply because it is the best game in the world at which to be bad."Retaining one's sense of humor despite any reverses has always been one of the most difficult challenges of the game, and the literature of golf has played an important part in helping golfers maintain a crucial focus on emotional equilibrium. As early as 1892, in A Batch of Golfing Papers, Andrew Lang imagined the incongruity of Socrates struggling with his stroke on the links. P.G. Wodehouse's droll prose skewered the hopelessly addicted golfer in The Heart of a Goof (1926?). More recently, cartoonists like Herb Middlecamp and Reg Manning have exposed the lighter side of the game, and John Garrity has rendered an essential service to all struggling golfers by describing the most bizarrely conceived and pitifully maintained golf holes and golf courses throughout America.
In the end, perhaps no one has better represented the grudging acceptance of the follies of golf than Bob Hope. As one of America's most durable and popular entertainers, Hope made golf jokes, golf quips, and golf puns a regular part of his comedic arsenal. In countless venues on the military front lines from the 1940s onward, Hope strode the stage, tossing one-liners and sharp asides to the assembled troops, his golf club always in hand as the inevitable prop. In Bob Hope's Confessions of a Hooker; My Lifelong Love Affair with Golf (1985), the comedian sums up a career devoted to seeing humor in the unlikeliest of settings and in making the impossible game of golf a tolerable experience for all his fellow sufferers.
ITEMS EXHIBITED
Armour, Richard Willard. Golf Bawls. Cartoons by Herbert Middlecamp. New York: Beechhurst Press, 1946.
Lang, Andrew. A Batch of Golfing Papers by Andrew Lang and Others. London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., Ltd., [1892].
Garrity, John. America's Worst Golf Courses: A Collection of Courses Not Up to Par. New York: Collier Books, 1994.
Hope, Bob. Bob Hope's Confessions of a Hooker: My Lifelong Love Affair with Golf. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1985. Signed by author.
Manning, Reg. From Tee to Cup. Phoenix: Reganson Cartoon Books, 1954. First edition.
The Wall Street Journal. Fore! Golf Cartoons from The Wall Street Journal. Charles Preston, ed. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1962.
Boynton, Henry Walcott. The Golfer's Rubaiyat. London: Grant Richards, 1903. First English edition.
Wodehouse, Pelham Grenville. The Heart of a Goof. London: Herbert Jenkins Ltd., n.d.
Wodehouse, Pelham Grenville. Wodehouse on Golf. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., Inc., 1940. First edition.
12TH HOLE:
GOLF TALES- 'You're a good nine handicap,' said Bond with just sufficient sourness. He glanced at the balls in his hand to pick out Goldfinger's and hand it to him. He gave a start of surprise. 'Hullo!' He looked sharply at Goldfinger. 'You play a Number One Dunlop, don't you?'
'Yes, of course.' A sixth sense of disaster wiped the triumph off Goldfinger's face. 'What is it? What's the matter?'
'Well,' said Bond apologetically. ''Fraid you've been playing with the wrong ball. Here's my Penfold Hearts and this is a Number Seven Dunlop.' He handed both balls to Goldfinger. Goldfinger tore them off his palm and examined them feverishly.
Slowly the colour flooded over Goldfinger's face. He stood, his mouth working, looking from the balls to Bond and back to the balls.
Bond said softly, 'Too bad we were playing to the rules. Afraid that means you lose the hole. And, of course, the match.' Bond's eyes observed Goldfinger impassively.
Ian Fleming, Goldfinger (1959)
Ian Fleming's Goldfinger (1959) is rightly regarded as the novel with the most memorable golf scene of all time. When the suave and self-assured agent James Bond encounters Aurie Goldfinger in a golf match and manages to confound the cheating archvillain by switching balls before the end of the game, golfers everywhere can relish 007's moment of triumphant satisfaction.
Yet other writers have also told golf tales, even if not to such a wide international audience as Fleming. John Cheever considered the figure of the golf widow in the course of his searching examination of suburban life. And Patrick Cake, like many other storytellers, is drawn to the golf course as an ideal setting for homicide. In The Pro-Am Murders (1979), set at the Bing Crosby National Pro-Am golf tournament on California's Monterey Peninsula, private investigator Dion Quince pursues a dangerous criminal who controls a binary bomb. Illustrated with photographs from actual golf tournaments at Cypress Point, Pebble Beach, and Spyglass Hill, Cake uses the familiar environment of a golf match to bring fresh plausibility to a scenario of terror.
ITEMS EXHIBITED
Gardner, Nancy Bruff. The Country Club. New York: Bartholomew House, Ltd., 1969.
Cake, Patrick. The Pro-Am Murders. Aptos, Ca.: The Proteus Press, 1979.
Cheever, John. The Brigadier and the Golf Widow. New York; Evanston; London: Harper & Row, 1964. Ex libris Colonel Robert D. Jones.
Cork, Barry. Laid Dead. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1990. First American edition.
Crosbie, Provan. Fairways and Foul. London: Robert Hale Ltd., 1964.
Fleming, Ian. Goldfinger. New York: MacMillan Co., c1959.
Milne, Alan Alexander. By Way of Introduction. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1929.
Sutphen, Van Tassel. The Nineteenth Hole: Being Tales of the Fair Green. Harper's Portrait Collection of Short Stories, v. 3. New York; London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1901.
READING THE GREENS:
BOOKS ON GOLF FROM THE ARTHUR W. SCHULTZ COLLECTION