In the closing ceremonies at the 2012 Ryder Club held at Medinah Country Club it seemed as if everyone in Chicago was thanked for staging, attending and promoting the sports event in Illinois. But, in my opinion, perhaps the most important person in Chicagoland golf wasn’t even mentioned at any of the ceremonies, though he
Month: January 2014
This novel is short, just 90,000 words. However, the story spans thirty-five years, and it is played out on three continents and in seven cities. One of the locales is Menorca, Spain. The plot can be best summed up by this quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes: The life of an individual is in many respects
The hardest part about writing a novel is writing a novel. Now that’s a declarative sentence! But it is so true. To write a novel you need a structure. A beginning, middle, and end. You need characters. Plot. Scenes. Most importantly, you need a spine the length of the book on which you can hang
TIME Magazine in their July 2, 2007 issue features JFK with the cover line: What We Can Learn From JFK. It is the 6th Annual Making of America Issue of the magazine. Now, Richard Stengel, the Managing Editor, writes in his note to readers, “With the U.S. in a pivotal moment similar to the one
A player never wins the Masters on his own, as those of us who follow golf know well enough. But in all honesty, when I look back at my week in Georgia, I don’t know which one of those golfing legends helped me the most. Of course, my caddie played a part—that young kid who
This is the week of the British Open, known as the “Open.” It is being held at Carnoustie. [The nick name for the course is Carnasty; it is called one of the toughest courses to hold the Open.] This is the 7th time the Open has been held at Carnoustie. It is the course where Ben
While it is true that most golfers have, from time to time, “a horrible round of golf,” what is not clear is how a “horror writer” ends up writing a golf novel! In the 1970s and ‘80s I wrote a series of horror novels (The Piercing, Hobgoblin, The Shroud, The Legacy) and others, several of which
In October of 1960 when John F. Kennedy was campaigning for the presidency, he spoke after midnight on the campus of the University of Michigan and mentioned the idea of a Peace Corps. I was one of the first students to be swept up by his challenge to go to Asia, Africa, and Latin America
I was reminded the other day while watching the US Open at Oakmont how the great golfers of today do not come out of the caddie yard. They have not spent their adolescent years looping at private country clubs the way pros once learned the game. Walter Hagen was a caddie, Ben Hogan, Gene Sarazen,
At times Trent Jones’s chief obstacle was not the landscape, but the club membership. “When you have 400 members,” Trent said, “you have 400 architects. Everyone wants the course adapted or built to handle their game. If someone is a natural hooker, he wants no ponds or out-of-bounds to the left. And they especially don’t
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