To the Linksland

Bamberger, Michael. To the Linkland: A Golfing Adventure. New York: Viking 1992. Print.

First Sentences:

I think the man liked my wife. He kept saying to her, "If you want to eat, eat now. No food till we get to Port Bou."


Description:

Linksland is the old Scottish word for the earth at the edge of the sea -- tumbling, duney, sandy, covered by beach grasses. When the light hits it, and the breeze sweeps over it, you get every shade of green and brown, and always, in the distance, is the water. The land was long considered worthless, except to the shepherds and their sheed and the rabbits, and to the early golfers.

For golf enthusiasts looking longingly at the fleeting summer, please check out Michael Bamberger's To the Linksland: A Golfing Adventure, It's a highly-satisfying peek into the inner workings of tournament golf, the players that strive weekly to make a cut, and the intangibles that make up a satisfactory golf swing. All this is played out on the grand and not so wonderful courses that compose the European Golf Tour.

In 1991, Michael Bamberger, a newspaper sportswriter, gave up his apartment, took a leave of absence from his job writing for Sports Illustrated, and, joined by his newlywed wife, set off to explore the wide world of golf as a caddy.

I wanted to lead the life of the professional amateur, the man who earns a living wage, and not more, for being around the thing that consumes him, the thing that fascinated him, the thing that he loves. 

Bamberger caddied in the national championships of Portugal, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Ireland, and, finally, Scotland, golf’s ancestral home. Once there, Bamberger fell under the spell of one of golf’s fabled  teachers and thinkers, John Stark, whose instruction was simply to "Hear the ball."

The book is divided into two sections modeled after a golf score card. In the first half, "Going Out," Bamberger documents his adventures caddying the European Tour for golfer Peter Teravainen, while in the second half, "Coming In," he describes his own play on famous and obscure golf courses in Scotland, always seeking to improve his game as well as explore the birthplaces of golf.

Scotland was the homeland: the place where the game took root centuries ago...the place where the game breathed free....Scotland was a place where the crunching sound of cleats against the brick floor of a clubhouse served as an invitation to play nine more, starting in the long, late dusk and holing final putts by the light of the moon.

Caddying for Teravainen, a journeyman golfer who survives tourney to tourney by making just enough money to keep going, Bamberger gives us a very personal look into Tour life through the eyes and actions of a man committed to golf. Despite being a very long ball striker, Teravainen had yet to win any tournament in his twelve years playing the European Tour. That did not phase him in the least

When you play as well as you can, and it's not enough, there's not much to be disappointed about. You've done all you can do. 

Peter chooses to ride the cheap, rickety caddy bus (the only player to do so) to each tour destination to save small amounts of money. His clothes are off-the-shelf, his game unpredictable, yet tantalizingly close to making him a top ten tour player. His outlook is almost always optimistic.

Story after story, beautifully written, follow as the pair experience the Tour and talk about players like Faldo, Ballesteros, Nicklaus, Player, Palmer, and Watson, along with fellow obscure competitors pursuing the same goals: play well, survive, go on to the next tournament.

In the second half of the book, Bamberger outlines, after foregoing caddying, his personal quest for improvement in his game.

It is the promise of improvement that makes golf captivating...In golf, in so many ways a bodiless game, the results are wholly tangible. How many whacks. Each player must decide for himself if he is improving....I wanted to search for the primal heart of golf.

Bamberger eventually meets John Stark, the legendary Scot golf pro who advises him to "hear the sound the shaft makes as it comes through the air, listen to how rhythmic and sweet that sound is." Stark encourages Bamberger to play on many of Scotland's courses, taking enough time "to discover some of our secrets." 

The author visits and plays courses with curiously named holes ("Bents," Whins," Blin' Dunt," Coffins," "Finnyfal," etc.) that make up St. Andrews, Cruden Bay, Gullane, and Mjachrihanish,. Everywhere, he tries to glean information about what is the most important advice his fellow players can offer.

But the highlight of the book is when Stark takes Bamberger to Auchnafree, "undiscovered, primal, pure," a six-hole course laid out by one man on his own property. Fairways are not mown or fertilized there, only kept "maintained" by sheep who also construct the bunkers as shelters from the cold. Stark plays the only two rounds there each year, And Bramberger is in awe during their round.

I had rekindled all the feelings of excitement for the game I had know as a school boy. All the clutter that impedes the game in the United States -- the golf carts, the expensiveness, the slowness, the social trappings -- vanished from mind and memory. Through Stark, I had discovered real golf, and I was a happy man.

A wondrously, uplifting, insightful, and deeply-felt book for golfers and those who just enjoy reading about people, places, and dreams.

Happy reading. 

 

Fred

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          (and an Intro to The First Sentence Reader) 

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Bamberger, Michael. The Ball in the Air.   

Author Bamberger profiles three non-professional golfers he meets, including a girl from Nepal who grew up living in a golf course equipment shed and learned to play using a tree branch). They talk about their love for the game and the challenges they have and will face to get onto a course.  

The Golf Omnibus

Wodehouse, P.G. The Golf Omnibus. New York: Gramercy 1996. Print

First Sentences:

Archibald Mealing was one of those golfers in who desire outruns performance. Nobody could have been more willing than Archibald....Every morning before he took his bath he would stand in front of his mirror and practice swings. Every night before he went to bed he would read the golden words of some master on the subject of putting, driving, or approaching. Yet on the links most of his time was spent in retrieving lost balls or replacing America. 

Description:

I don't know why it's taken me so long to finally get around to recommending the wonderful P.G. Wodehouse, The Golf Omnibus. It is truly one of my all-time favorite reads, one that is always there to make me laugh out loud at the characters, actions, or witty wordsmithing. It is my go-to book to recommend and give as a gift book over many years.

The Golf Omnibus is a collection of 31 golf-related stories written in the early 1920s by the fabulously droll Wodehouse. Please don't let the age of these stories put you off. They each depict a wonderfully different world of that era, the sport of golf, and the odd ducks that play it. Players used wooden-shafted clubs called "mashies," "niblicks," "spoons," "brassies," and "cleeks." Just the names of those weapons make me smile.

And the names of the players wielding these tools are simply the outrageously best: Archibald Mealing, Ramsden Waters, Mortimer Sturgis, Mabel Patmore, Rollo Podmarsh, Rodney Splevin, Ferdinand Dibble, Herbert Pobsley, Wilberfod Bream, Cuthbert Banks, and oh, so many more delightful souls with dreams of glory on the course, or of impressing a specific person they fancy.

Most stories are narrated by "the Oldest Member," an ancient golfer always found in the clubhouse lounge sipping a lemon squash. From his comfy chair, he collars players just coming off the course to relate tales of current and formers players he knew. Each one is a hilarious gem (and I don't use that word lightly). 

• King Merolchassar who declared golf the official religion of his nation of Oom.
• Archibald Mealing who, after, six years' efforts, wins his club championship despite having a style of playing that was "a kind of blend of hockey, Swedish drill, and buck-and-wind dancing."
• Peter Willard and James Todd who play a round of golf to settle which one gets the opportunity to woo a certain young lady they both fancy, and following that, who must "leg it out of the neighborhood."

Of course, the Oldest Member has words of advice for even the most unwilling listener. Here are some of his examples picked out randomly, each accompanying a story to support his words:

• Love is an emotion which your true golfer should always treat with suspicion.
• The talking golfer is undeniably the most pronounced pest of our complex modern civilization.
• One of the noblest women I ever knew used to laugh merrily when she foozled a short putt. It was only later, when I learned that in the privacy of her home she would weep bitterly and bite holes in the sofa cushions, that I realized that she did but wear the mask.
• His walk was the walk of an overwrought soul.
• Nothing but misery can come of the union between a golfer and an outcast whose soul has not been purified by the noblest of games.
• It is not mere technical skill that makes a man a good golfer, it is the golfing soul.
  

Story after story brings readers into the off-beat world of privileges, romance, peculiarities, and of course, golf as it is played by the common sports-minded hacker. Truly delightful on every page. Highest recommendation.

Happy reading. 

Fred

Other book recommendations
About The First Sentence Reader blog

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Jerome, Jerome K.. Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog).   

The only book I could think of that is as funny, witty, and personable as the Wodehouse stories. Delightfully comedic in that dry, British manner of three friends deciding to take a leisurely boat trip. Disaster ensues as none has any experience whatsoever with boats. Tremendously droll and clever.

The Grand Slam

Frost, Mark. The Grand Slam: Bobby Jones, America, and the Story of Golf New York: Hachette 2004. Print.

First Sentences:

On September 20, 1913, America welcomed a new hero into its sporting pantheon and for the first time the broad middle of the country embraced with curiosity and enthusiasm the exotic game he'd mastered.

Description:

Bobby Jones was not only one of the best golfers ever (and that include Palmer, Nicklaus, Woods, and anyone else you can name), he competed his entire career as an amateur. That right, he turned down all prize money for every tourney, contenting himself with trophies and the self-satisfaction of playing the game for the love.

In Mark Frost's engulfing The Grand Slam: Bobby Jones, America, and the Story of Golf, Jones' career is documented in well-researched details and interesting anecdotes. Jones played during the early 1900s (when golf relatively unknown in America) through the 1930s. In his childhood he was a club-throwing, swearing, self-taught golfer who displayed enough brilliance to regularly beat adults on his home course, East Lake, in Atlanta, Georgia.

Those were the days of clubs with hickory shafts and nicknames like "Calamity Jane" (Jones putter). Courses were such a new phenomenon that A.J. Spaulding hired a consultant to freely advise local cities on course design simply to provide places where the public could purchase and play with his golf equipment. Interest in this new game grew with exhibitions rounds between immortals like Walter Hagen, Harry Varden and Ted Ray. It was such a match played on East Lake course that ten-year-old Jones watched that inspired him to pursue the perfection of golf.

Talent, nerve, a relentless mentality. Not many players had all these weapons in their arsenal.

From his first tournament in 1911 at age nine to his teen years when he flirted with winning  international championships, Jones steadily improved to achieve his ultimate triumph in 1930: winning the four greatest tournaments in the same year. Holding the trophies for the British Open, the British Amateur, the U.S. Open, and the U.S. Amateur in the same year was nicknamed "The Grand Slam" and Jones was the first and still the only person to reach that pinnacle

Author Frost carefully details each step along the road to greatness, introducing the major golf tournaments, players, and courses, along with Jones' disappointments and record-breaking low rounds, and information about world figures during the World War I, Prohibition, and the Depression. A sports-mad world made him headline news worldwide and the subject of the biggest ticker tape parades New York City had ever hosted.

Even if you are not a golf fan, Grand Slam is a great read, a fascinating look at the intensity of an athlete to could work and will himself to success under a plethora of conditions, and then step away from the game at the height of his fame. He had a successful career designing golf clubs including the fabled Augusta National Course in Atlanta. He even had a motion picture presence, creating 18 short instructional golf films where he worked with celebrities on a specific shot. HIs films played to movie houses between feature pictures and were wildly popular. 

Grand Slam depicts an era and public just discovering a new sport and its heroes. It was the age of sports coverage by radio and newspaper giants like Grantland Rice, Paul Gallico, and Pop Keeler, Jones' best friend throughout his playing days.

I just couldn't get enough of the details of that age as well as the stroke-by-stroke play of Jones throughout his tournament days. For example, when given the honorary citizenship by the the city of St. Andrews (the only other recipient was Benjamin Franklin), he learned that he now had the ancient rights to "catch rabbits," "dry his washing on the Old Course," and "take divot whenever he pleased." Who can't love details like this that Frost dug up?

During the 1920s [Jones] played an average of only four tournaments a year against full-time professionals, generally practices for only a few weeks to prepare himself, and was still, without argument, the greatest player who ever wore cleats....Bob had played in twenty-one majors championships and won thirteen of them.

Readers are immersed in the era and personality of Bobby Jones and the daily effort required to become a champion ... as well as what that road to greatness takes away from anyone seeking to pursue excellence.

Some may discount his legacy by saying he only played a game, but what he achieved remains in its own right as powerful and permanent an expression of the human longing for perfection as any poem or song or painting. Greatness is rare and a solemn responsibility, and because he offered himself in service to his talent with a strong mind, a committed heart, and every ounce of strength in his being, he deserves a lasting place in our memory.

Amen to that. 

Happy reading. 

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Hogan, Ben. Ben Hogan's Five Lessons: The Mdern Fundamentals of Golf  

Simply the best, briefest, and most clear golf instruction book. Period

Yogi, Count. Five Simple Steps to Perfect Golf  

Offbeat, clever, but solid, proven tips from golf's self-proclaimed greatest player, Count Yogi. Never heard of him? Well, take a look at this book for the most down-to-earth instruction and biography you ever will read. (previously reviewed here)

Wodehouse, P.G.. The Golf Omnibus: 31 Tales by the Green from the Maser of Comic Fiction: 

The funniest, drollest, and odd-ball golf stories with completely unexpected plots and outcomes, (such as the two men playing a 16-mile long hole in order to win the favor of a girl). Unmatched reading. 

Special Post - Best Sports Instruction

Now that summer is here, it's time to think about playing outdoors. And playing a sport well is the best fun. But if you really wanted to learn how to be efficient, effective, and joyful at tennis, golf, baseball, and/or swimming, which books would you choose to read? 

Below are my favorite instruction books for these sports. I have used them all for years and each has changed how I play each game. Also, they have given me a better understanding of the principles of efficient use of my physical and mental energy toward a goal of playing well and simply having fun. 

Happy reading. 

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

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Tennis For Life - Peter Burwash

First Sentences 

If you're like almost every other tennis player, you've reached a plateau on which you're stuck.

No matter how hard you practice, no matter how many lessons you take, you're stuck on that level. 

Description:

Peter Burwash, a former tennis professional from Canada, observed the common traits followed by successful pros and then incorporated them into lessons for us ordinary players. He discards the usual advice such as "Watch the ball" and "Racquet back," and instead stresses techniques that actually influence the ball. Burwash emphasizes the importance of the contact point between racquet and ball (backswing and follow-through do not actually direct the ball since the ball is not on the strings during each of these!); snapping the wrist in serving; "catching" volleys like a baseball player; and responding to emergency situations when perfect strokes are not possible. 

He breaks the game down into techniques easily understood, remembered, and applied. These techniques work for players of all levels. Believe me, I've seen it happen countless times when I taught beginning and nationally-ranked players using these same concepts. Definitely a game-changer of a book.

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Total Immersion: The Revolutionary Way to Swim Better, Faster, and Easier - Terry Laughlin

First Sentences  

It's no mystery why people why people have trouble swimming as fast or as far or as smoothly as they'd like: Most of them are doing it backwards.

"Don't worry if you form's not perfect," coaches and instructors have always assured us. "Just get those laps in. Eventually you'll be fit enough to develop a smoother, stronger stroke." 

It really works the other way around, but that's not how it's been taught.

          

Description:

Author Terry Laughlin was a competitive swimmer all his life including college, but gave it up due to the boredom of endless laps and lack of personal progress in speed and efficiency. Entering Masters competitions renewed his interest in pursuing a revolutionary method of swimming and training: using streamlining and gliding techniques rather than energy-inefficient power strokes. Easy to comprehend and easy to practice, these step-by-step progressions practiced in short bursts of one lap provide fun, highly obtainable results. Really changed my stroke and enjoyment as now I can swim over a mile smoothly without becoming winded.

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Five Simple Steps to Perfect Golf - Count Yogi

First Sentences  

It has always been said that good golf starts with a good grip. That is true.

        

Description:

Count Yogi was a highly successful golfer who hustled for money and gave demonstrations on California courses using a simplified approach to mastering the few essentials of the sports: grip, balance, approaching the ball, total swing, and putting.

Instead of breaking down the swing into minute elements no one can remember or implement, he simply focuses on stroke smoothness and a few minor tips (hitting through the ball). Count Yogi also adds plenty of snarky comments about current pros and their detailed books which offer advice the pros/author don't use on the course ... because they all are actually using Count Yogi's techniques, of course. A hard book to find, but worth the effort. Lots of fun to read and plenty of great tips.

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The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance - Tim Galloway

First Sentences  

The problems which most perplex tennis players are not those dealing with the proper way to swing a racket.... 

The most common complaint of sportsmen ringing down the corridors of the ages is, "It's not that I don't know what to do, it's that I don't do what I know."

   

Description:

Self One and Self Two are constantly battling inside the head of every tennis player. Self One, the critical one, says "Why did you do that, you moron," while Self Two, quietly envisions the success of the shot. Author Galloway argues that silencing Self One and focusing on Self Two via visualization of quality shots and results will be more successful than endless drills and techniques. His offers an easy-to-comprehend philosophy, relying on imaging and quietness of the mind to achieve goals. Fascinating, and it actually produces great results both in shots and one's enjoyment of the game.

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The Science of Hitting - Ted Williams

First Sentences  

Hitting a baseball -- I've said it a thousand times before -- is the single most difficult thing to do in sport.

Description:

Williams, the last baseball hitter to end a season with a .400 average, shares the science and practice behind successfully hitting the ball. He has broken this seemingly simple action into details that are easily understood, but require practice, discipline, and then even more practice to achieve the goals. Very solid writing and theories behind this difficult art.