Tiptoeing Through Hell: Playing the U.S. Open on Golf's Most Treacherous Courses - Softcover

Strege, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060934255 ISBN 13: 9780060934255

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2003

Synopsis

Veteran golf writer John Strege gives you the history and takes you behind the scenes of the Us Open, considered the most difficult tournament in golf.

The Us Open Golf tournament, one of the four 'Majors' together with The Masters, The British Open, and the Pga, is widely considered the most difficult of the four tournaments. Each year the tournament is played on a different course. Fifty years ago the Us Golf Association, whose tournament this is, decided the condition of the courses had to be toughened. The fairways on the designated course narrowed, the rough was allowed to grow tall and the greens were mowed close and rolled frequently, producing surfaces whose slickness the pros have compared to billiard tables.

In Tiptoeing Through Hell, John Strege has chronicled the last 50 years of the tournament when these punitive conditions have held sway.

About this title

About the Author:

John Strege is the author of five books, including When War Played Through, which won the United States Golf Association's Herbert Warren Wind Book Award in 2005, and the bestselling Tiger: A Biography of Tiger Woods. He has covered golf for more than thirty years, and now writers for Golf Digest. He lives in San Diego with his wife, Marlene, and daughter, Hannah, in San Diego, California.

From Library Journal:

Strege, a writer for Golf Digest and the author of Tiger: A Biography of Tiger Woods, examines how the United States Golf Association (USGA) has made the U.S. Open a supreme test for top golfers. In golf, unlike many other sports, the test is not only of player against player but of player against the course. With the United States Open, the course is prepared to make any challenge to par a difficult proposition: the layout is lengthened, the fairways narrowed, the greens made faster. And, as if that were not enough, the USGA has been known to employ artifice: the Hinkle tree was an overnight answer to a gap in the trees that allowed Lon Hinkle to play the eighth hole at Inverness by way of the 17th. Strege's book provides a context for understanding the U.S. Open in terms of its yearly change of venue. It is a narrative history, with a cast ranging from Sam Snead to Tiger Woods, that includes flashbacks to the previous year's tournament or to the last Open held at this particular venue. Of particular interest is the chapter on Bethpage Black, in Farmingdale, NY, the first truly public course to host a U.S. Open. Both entertaining and informative, this book belongs on the shelf alongside recent titles like John Feinstein's The Majors: In Pursuit of Golf's Holy Grail and Salvatore Johnson's The Official U.S. Open Almanac. Steven Silkunas, North Wales, PA
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0060934255
• ISBN 13: 9780060934255
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240