By Tom Bedell
‘Tis the season for the heavyweight contenders in the publishing world according to golf, those weighty tomes with big photos on big glossy pages at big prices, books that are a pleasure to contemplate even before tearing into the wrapping. Afterwards, they can reward hours of idle paging when not merely adorning the coffee table.
This will also be the last spate of books in golf’s age of innocence, before the squirmy era of the Tainted Tiger, so revel in the blissful ignorance still on display.
Indeed, The Golf Book (Sports Illustrated Books; $29.95), displays a unique 1991 photo of high school freshman Tiger Woods, the visual perspective making it look like the young lad is encased in a golf bag; it’s only the perspective of time that makes the pensive Tiger appear slightly menacing, and not a little lonely.
This comprehensive look at the game’s history includes tantalizing excerpts from past SI pieces from the likes of Grantland Rice, Herbert Warren Wind, Bernard Darwin, George Plimpton, and more recent entries from Dan Jenkins, Rick Reilly and others.
But it’s really the superlative photographs from the magazine and the game’s historical vaults that make this book the sheer pleasure that it is, at a reasonable price besides. Only room on the coffee table for one book? This is it.
Which is why a larger coffee table might be in order. Both Golf’s Dream 18s by David Barrett and Planet Golf USA by Darius Oliver (both from Abrams, $50 and $60 respectively), are replete with gorgeous photographs of great golf holes, which will either carry a player safely through winter, or induce raging cabin fever.
Barrett’s take is really a slim excuse for a book–imagining 18-hole routings from great holes from different world-wide golf courses. But that doesn’t diminish the fun. There are different cards (with varied tee box lengths) for holes deemed Scenic, Historic, Short, Long, Strategic, Well-bunkered, Bunkerless, and so on, leading up to the Ultimate Dream 18, a fantasy worth striving for. (I’ve only played six of the holes, so there’s work to be done.)
Golf architecture fans will swoon over Oliver’s guide, a sister volume to Planet Golf, which surveyed courses outside the U.S. Together the pair make for impressive and definitive research on the world’s great courses.
Oliver serves up solid text about more than 140 of the best in the U.S., though making this sad but salient point: “…the one major reservation I have about endorsing golf [in the U.S.] is exclusivity. In Planet Golf more than 80 percent of the courses reviewed were readily accessible to visiting golfers, while in this volume the number that are open for outside play is less than 20 percent.”
One could get around loading up the coffee table further by putting The Club Menu on the kitchen cookbook shelf. Authors Scott Savlov and Jon Rizzi have tucked in at various post-round tables to come up with what the subtitle calls: “Signature Dishes from America’s Premier Golf Clubs” (Pindar Press, $50).
That, too, usually means private, but you don’t have to find a member to try out the recipes from 50 clubs, ranging from soup (Del Monte Artichoke Soup from Pebble Beach) to dessert (and nuts, if you count the Banana Bread with Maple-Pecan Butter from the Windsong Farm Golf Club).
I can vouch for the Grandma’s Meatloaf from Bandon Dunes, though I haven’t had the nerve to make it myself yet.
Food is also central to Roland Merullo’s The Italian Summer (Touchstone Books, $24.99), which is neatly summarized by its subtitle: “Golf, Food, and Family at Lake Como.” Merullo, author of the entertaining golf novel, Golfing With God, plays out of the Crumpin-Fox club in Bernardston, and I’m angling to pair up with him for a round so we can compare notes about playing golf in Italy.
I wrote an article about a two-week Italy trip my wife and I took that also involved a lot of golf and food, but Merullo had the sense to spend an entire summer near the shore of Italy’s famous northern lake, then emerge with this engaging travelogue that satisfies a number of appetites at once.
For those hungering to improve their games, two entries might work. Dave Pelz’s Damage Control: How to Save Up to 5 Shots Per Round Using All-New, Scientifically Proven Techniques for Playing Out of Trouble Lies (Gotham Books, $35), immediately wins the prize for the year’s longest subtitle.
This is actually a mulligan for Pelz, since the book first came out in 2006 with the more concise subtitle of “How to Avoid Disaster Scores.” If wordier, the general thrust is the same commonsensical advice on reducing the impact of errant shots, and successfully escaping from trouble without putting up the egregious big number.
In Ben Hogan’s Magical Device: The Real Secret to Hogan’s Swing Finally Revealed (Skyhorse Publishing, $16.95), Ted Hunt attempts to dig out of a mountain of previous prose the secret that Hogan often said could only be found, “in the dirt,” meaning through endless practice.
More than a few have called Hogan’s swing perfect, so finding out how he accomplished it might well be worth pursuing, and Hunt goes about this with some digression and wordiness, but a generous helping of anecdotes and photo illustration in laying out the elements of Hogan’s swing in detail.
Whether he actually clarifies Hogan’s method is debatable, but then I’ve never been one to respond well to written instruction and drills; I’m better off in the dirt.