The Ultimate Golf Book: A History and a Celebration of the World's Greatest Game - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 061814546X ISBN 13: 9780618145461

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002

Synopsis

Paying tribute to the wonderful game of golf, a gorgeous volume features an entertaining history of the sport, from its inception in the Dark Ages to the present day, beautiful illustrations, and a collection of personal essays from Michael Bamberger, Michael DiLeo, Ward Just, Bradley Klein, David Owen, Jack Welch, and other literary low-handicappers. 30,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author:

Charles McGrath is the editor of the New York Times Book Review. Formerly a writer and editor for The New Yorker, McGrath edited Books of the Century: A Hundred Years of Authors, Ideas, and Literature and frequently contributes to the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and other publications.

David McCormick is a literary agent and former editor at The New Yorker and Texas Monthly.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter 1
Scotland

Golf began in the dark—in a hole actually. Some dissipated
characters in medieval Scotland were out on the dunes one afternoon
with their het kolvin sticks, slapping a ball around. One of them
aimed at a rabbit burrow or a sand-filled crevice. When the ball
toppled in, golf was born.
Golf historians are equally in the dark. Looking for a link
to the stick-and-ball games of continental Europe, they pore over
Flemish woodcuttings and sketches by Rembrandt of men in wide-brimmed
hats using a bladed stick to roll a ball the size of a melon across a
courtyard. Researchers are similarly enchanted by the French game of
jeu de mal, which employed a flexible wooden mallet and a wooden
ball, and by the Belgian game of chole, in which teams of players hit
wooden balls through a designated door or gate up to a mile away.
(The Dutch word tuitje, for the small mound of earth upon which the
ball was placed for the first stroke, is an obvious forerunner to the
golfer"s "tee.") Masters of the obvious have pointed out that a Low
Countries variant of chole, called colf, was played in the shade of
windmills as early as the thirteenth century.
Here we have a case where the lexicographer trumps the
historian. The Oxford English Dictionary defines golf as "a game of
considerable antiquity . . . in which a small hard ball is struck
with various clubs into a series of small cylindrical holes made at
intervals usually of a hundred yards or more . . . with the fewest
possible strokes." No one reading this definition can miss what
separates golf from all the other games employing clubs or mallets
and small hard balls. It"s that little dark place where the ball goes.
Once we accept that golf is about holes in the ground, we can
reflect on the fact that the holes are dispersed over a vast natural
terrain. For that we owe King David I of Scotland, a twelfth-century
monarch whose idea of a good time was cathedral building. It was on
David"s watch that the previously forgettable fishing village of St.
Andrews, on the North Sea between the Eden estuary and the River
Forth, became the ecclesiastical center of Scotland. As a sop to the
local folk—a hodgepodge of Picts, Celts, and assorted Norsemen—David
decreed that certain lands be set aside for the free use of ordinary
people. These commons or greens included some worthless tracts
of "linksland"—places where rivers meet the sea, producing a rugged
dunescape of sand and wild grasses. Neither David nor the common folk
foresaw a recreational use for these lands—or knew, for that matter,
what "recreation" was. The linksland was simply a place where any
Angus or Owen could set snares in the dunes, hoping to capture a
rabbit for the dinner pot.
Nevertheless, King David"s decree established a pattern of
land use that allowed for the development of golf, first at St.
Andrews—where in 1552 Archbishop Hamilton affirmed the right of all
to use the links for "golff, futball, schuteing [and] all other
manner of pastime"—and later in the lowland shires along the Clyde
and Forth estuaries. It would also give the Scots about 750 years to
perfect the game before the rest of the world took notice.
What the Scots came up with was a sport that requires minimal
exertion and no physical risk but demands that the players police
their own conduct to a degree unknown in most other games—or in life,
for that matter—while enduring whatever discomforts nature dispenses
in the form of wind, rain, heat, or cold. We need only glance at the
first thirteen rules of golf, set down by the Honourable Company of
Edinburgh Golfers in 1774, to see how golf answers the Calvinist
demand for sufferance in the face of sustained ill fortune. "If you
should lose your ball by its being taken up or any other way," reads
rule eight, "you are to go back to the spot where you struck last and
drop another ball and allow your adversary a stroke for the
misfortune." Rule eleven imagines an even more dire circumstance: "If
you draw your club in order to strike and proceed so far with your
stroke as to be bringing down your club, if then your club should
break in any way, it is to be accounted a stroke."
The game"s gloomy rules owe in part to Scotland"s national
temper, which was formed through centuries of gory conflict with its
neighbor to the south, England. James IV of Scotland, who died in
1513 at the battle of Flodden Field, was a casual golfer. His
granddaughter Mary, Queen of Scots, celebrated the violent murder of
her estranged husband, Lord Darnley, by playing golf at Seton with
the Earl of Bothwell, the man suspected of arranging Darnley"s death—
and then, some years later, Mary herself lost her head at the order
of her cousin Queen Elizabeth I of England. Thankfully, by the
seventeenth century the crowns of England and Scotland were unified
under the Stuarts, and golf temporarily replaced war and the
executioner"s axe as the arbiters of aristocratic disputes. The Duke
of York settled a quarrel with two English noblemen in the 1680s by
challenging them to a money match on the links at Leith, and like
many a hustler after him, the duke showed up with a suspiciously
talented partner: a shoemaker with a good swing and a sure putting
stroke. The shoemaker, John Patterson, earned enough from the match
to build a home in Edinburgh that stood for almost three hundred
years.
As durable as Patterson"s house is the concept that allowed a
duke to partner with a shoemaker in the first place. The Scots
developed the idea that golfers constitute a society separate from
their stations in ordinary life. A king, although sovereign in the
realm, could play golf with and respect a tradesman. The tradesman,
in turn, could gather with gentlemen of like interest to form a
golfing society or club. The first of these societies, the Honourable
Company of Edinburgh Golfers, organized itself at Leith Links around
1744, and a similar group formed at St. Andrews a decade later.
Neither club owned a golf course—the common land still
belonged to all—but the clubs staged competitions and other group
endeavors. The pattern was set in 1744 when the town council of
Edinburgh offered a trophy in the form of a silver club; the winner
of the annual competition at the Leith Links assumed the title
of "Captain of Golf." St. Andrews adopted the Honourable Company"s
rules and took the club competition a step further by awarding each
year"s winner a silver golf ball, which was then attached to the
silver club. With time, the silver balls hung in grapelike clus-ters,
leading to a curious ceremony called "kissing the captain"s balls."
The golfers who were the first to gain royal sanction came,
however, from neither Edinburgh nor St. Andrews; for reasons known
only to King William IV, that honor went, in 1833, to the upstart
Perth Golfing Society, established only since 1824. The Golf Club of
St. Andrews promptly petitioned the king, pointing out that the Perth
golfers were relative pups. William, it is assumed, rolled his eyes
and sighed, but a year later he granted his St. Andrews subjects the
right to call themselves the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St.
Andrews. Almost two centuries later, the men"s-only R&A stages the
Open Championship and serves as the rules-making body for all golfers
outside North America.
Although it is accurate to call golf a Scottish invention,
very few Scots actually played it. Working people had no time for
games, and golf balls were prohibitively expensive. Perhaps thirty
golfers were playing regularly at St. Andrews at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, and even smaller societies clung to life in
Edinburgh, Perth, and Ayr, and in England at Blackheath. To grow, the
game required a fundamental shift in economics. It needed a leisure
class.
The Industrial Revolution provided that class. Up to the
1800s, goods in Europe were manufactured at the cottage level, with
entire families contributing to the production of flatware, china,
and woolens. The mechanization and specialization of the nineteenth
century changed that system, and tradesmen found themselves able to
delegate some of their work. As the textile bosses, crystal makers,
and bankers took time off for recreation and networking, the ranks of
golfers swelled. They, in turn, supported a growing number of golf
professionals—club makers, ball makers, and greenskeepers who lived
solely off the game.
The most notable of these professionals was Allan Robertson
of St. Andrews. Robertson, the son of a caddie, made "feathery" balls
in his kitchen with the aid of a young apprentice named Tom Morris.
Robertson was also the best golfer of his time. He was the first
player to break 80 at St. Andrews, and he and Morris beat all comers
in a series of high-stakes foursome matches. "His style was neat and
effective," the memoirist James Balfour wrote of Robertson. "His
clubs were light and his stroke an easy, swift switch." The
friendship between Robertson and Morris dissolved, however, when the
older man caught his former apprentice playing with one of the new
gutta-percha golf balls, introduced in 1848. (The rubbery "gutty" was
more durable and much cheaper than the feathery, and Robertson feared
that it would destroy his business.) Robertson died of jaundice in
1859, at age forty-four, having reluctantly switched to the gutty
himself. Morris, meanwhile, moved to Prestwick, south of Glasgow,
where he designed a new twelve-hole course and served as professional
and greens-keeper.
It was at Prestwick that the foundation of modern tournament
golf was laid. On October 17, 1860, Morris and seven other
professionals played three rounds, or thirty-six holes, for
a "challenge belt" of red morocco leather and silver. The winner was
the whiskered Willie Park Sr. of Musselburgh, who edged Morris by two
strokes. A year later, the Prestwick Golf Club responded to the
complaints of excluded amateurs by declaring the belt
competition "open to all the world." This time Morris was the best of
a twelve-man field, beating Park"s 1860 score by eleven strokes to
claim the first Open Championship. Morris would win the Open again
in "62, "64, and "67, but he was soon overtaken by his own son, Tom
Morris Jr., a golf prodigy. Young Tom, whose wrists were so strong
that he was supposed to have snapped hickory shafts simply by
waggling the club, won the 1868 Open when he was seventeen. He then
went on to win the next three, claiming permanent ownership of the
championship belt and first possession of the silver claret jug, the
Open trophy since 1877. Sadly, Young Tom proved to be, in the modern
phrase, a candle in the wind. His wife died in childbirth in 1875,
and the baby was lost as well. Three months later, on Christmas
morning, Young Tom was found dead in his bed in his St. Andrews home,
the victim of a lung aneurysm. Today a monument in the graveyard of
St. Andrews Cathedral shows him addressing a golf ball, his coat
buttoned up against the gale, a Scots bonnet on his head. Forever
twenty-four.
Old Tom, on the other hand, lived into the twentieth century
and helped consolidate the gains that golf had made in the Victorian
era. As greenskeeper at St. Andrews and professional to the R&A,
Morris lived above his own golf shop, just a few feet from the
eighteenth green on the Old Course. Always in demand as a designer,
he traveled Scotland by donkey cart, rail, and steamer to lay out
golf courses for clubs and town councils. Two of his courses—
Muirfield and Prestwick—became British Open venues. Morris would also
gain credit for devising the modern loop system of two nines going
out from and returning to the clubhouse—a scheme designed to make the
player adjust to different wind conditions.
You could argue that Tom Morris did the mop-up work on the
edifice of golf. In his lifetime, the golf course assumed its modern
form of eighteen holes with man-made hazards, mowed fairways, watered
greens, and strategic playing options. The golf ball evolved from a
fragile feather bag to a durable, dimpled sphere that could be driven
long distances and spun for control. Club making entered the iron age
as "cleekmakers" created an arsenal of mashies, niblicks, and rut
irons capable of handling practically any lie. The Open Championship
was launched and stroke play adopted as the preferred format for
deciding major championships. All these developments, if one needs
reminding, took place in Scotland. By 1888 there were roughly seventy
courses on the old sod, with simple links blooming on the springy
machair of the Western Isles and very bad courses emerging on the
denser, fecund soils of the Highlands and lake regions.
Meanwhile, the hole—the be-all and end-all of golf—sought its
own sublime exactitude. For hundreds of years, the size of the cavity
had been arbitrary, ranging from three inches to more than five
inches in diameter. (At the Old Course, the hole reportedly matched
the diameter of a standard St. Andrews drainpipe.) The hole"s depth
was even less constant. When a golfer was ready to play his first
shot to a new hole, he put his hand in the hole he had just putted
into and took a pinch of sand upon which to tee his ball. "It often
happened," the two-time British Amateur champion Horace G. Hutchinson
reported with comic gravity, "that one had to lie down so as to
stretch one"s arm at full length in order to reach the ball at the
bottom of the hole."
It was not until the nineteenth century that the Scots
invented a device to cut uniform holes—either at Musselburgh in 1829
or at Royal Aberdeen in 1849, depending on which golf historian you
believe. In 1874 the Crail Golf Club introduced the metal liner,
which kept the hole from collapsing and rewarded the player with a
pleasing rattle when his ball fell into the cup. In 1891 the R&A
finally proclaimed, with a confident authority reminiscent of the old
monarchs, that the hole would hence-forth be "4 1/4 inches in
diameter and at least 4 inches deep."
These dimensions, of course, made for a hole that was too
small. Putting became disproportionately important, and fear and
anxiety were validated as elements of the game. At the 1889 Open
Championship at Musselburgh, for example, Andrew Kirkaldy made a
careless backhanded swipe at his ball, poised on the edge of the
fourteenth hole, and missed it entirely. "Did you try to putt that
ball, Andra?" a tournament official asked. Kirkaldy replied, "Yes,
and if the hole was big enough, I"d bury myself in it." The next day
he lost the Open to Willie Park Jr. in an eighteen-hole playoff.
As events would soon prove, it was not jus...

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 061814546X
• ISBN 13: 9780618145461
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: McGrath Charles, McCormick David, Garrity John