Category: Golf

Bobby Locke Statue Unveiled in South Africa

SOUTH AFRICAN GOLF WRITER DAN RETIEF sent me word that in Johannesburg, South Africa, this month, the Parkview Golf Club unveiled a bronze statue of Bobby Locke as the first step of their centenary celebrations in 2016. It stands outside the clubhouse, overlooking the practice putting green. Dan wrote in South African Golf Digest that

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Golf’s Long and Rich Literary Tradition

By John Coyne METAPHORICALLY SPEAKING, WE MIGHT SAY golf literature is like one of Bubba Watson’s famous drives: long and high and very deep. Great golf prose has been with us since the days when Mary, Queen of Scots, first played the game as a school girl in France. The earliest recorded golf prose was

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JFK the golfer

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

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Excerpt from The Caddie Who Won The Masters

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

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Hogan at Carnoustie

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

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Horror Golf!

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

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Caddie Days On The PGA Tour

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,

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Not Giving the Membership What They Want

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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“Doctor” Jones Makes PGA Pros Take His Medicine

Not all players, especially touring professionals, appreciated Trent’s doctoring of golf courses. Beginning in the 1950s, the USGA and PGA asked Jones to make the sites for their championships true competitive tests. And he did! Trent Jones’s most famous confrontation with professionals over his ‘doctoring’ came in the remodeling of Oakland Hills Country Club in

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Robert Trent Jones, Sr. Champions Heroic golf!

A heroic golf course offers a great reward for a tremendous shot. It also means disaster for a misplayed shot. As Robert Trent Jones explained it: A player stands on the tee and weighs risk against benefit. If he decides to bite off a slice of pond on a par-5, so that he has a

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