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.
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 the verse Glotta, written in 1721 by another Scotsman, James Arbuckle. Two decades later came Thomas Mathison’s The Goff, “a Heroic-comical Poem in Three Cantos.”
The late George Plimpton, who wrote about golf in his best selling 1968 book The Bogey Man, said that while baseball has produced some interesting books, golf books were better written because of golf’s “popularity among the educated classes.”
You have heard of the writer James Patterson. You have, I’m guessing, read at least one of his books. He’s the most popular and prolific writer to come along in the last decade. An estimated one out of every 17 hardcover novels purchased in the United States is his, dwarfing the sales of both Harry Potter and the Twilight vampires. To put it another way, James Patterson’s books account for one out of every 17 hardcover novels purchased in the United States. He is certainly the ‘king’ of summertime beach reading.
Now that we are back at the Masters for 2014, it is time to remember the great players, great shots, and great Masters. This is the one tournament of the year that brings golf home to the masses. And much of it is because of Gene Sarazen, the second Masters held in 1935, and the “shot heard around the world”.
Gene Sarazen is, in many ways, the most unlikely of golf heroes. In fact, his name wasn’t even Gene Sarazen. He was born Eugenio Saraceni, but changed it because, as he said, his real name sounded more like that of a violinist.
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 had a direct connection to 1) golf in Chicago and 2) Scotland, the site for the 2014 Ryder Cup to be held at the Gleneagles Hotel in Perth & Kinross, Scotland. Not only did this man first learn the game as a teenager at golf’s historic St. Andrews, he was the person most responsible for the game being played in the Mid-West before the turn of the last century…………. Charles Blair Macdonald.
Robert Trent Jones went to Cornell to become a golf architect, at a time when no one in golf saw a connection between golf and higher education. He spent three and a half years studying in Cornell’s various undergraduate and graduate schools. His special curriculum in “golf architecture” was made up of courses in surveying, hydraulics, landscape architecture, horticulture, agronomy, economics, chemistry, public speaking and journalism.
As you might have guessed, I collect stories about great players from the past. Stories from when golf was more of a game, less of a television show. Here’s one about Johnny McDermott, the first American to win the U.S. Open, in 1911 and 1912. This week, as you may know, the 2007 U.S. Open begins at the Oakmont Country Club in Oakmont, PA., so if nothing else this is a timely tale.
Following his U.S. Open wins, Johnny McDermott, our first “homebred” U. S. Open winner, entered the 1914 British Open, but because of travel delays he arrived too late to tee off. Returning home to the States his ship, the Kaiser Wilhelm II, collided with an English ship and sank. He drifted in a lifeboat in the middle of the Atlantic for over twenty-four hours before being rescued.
Castles in the air need solid foundations. Every year graduates of MFA programs, returning Peace Corps Volunteers, and people changing careers decide that publishing is for them! They love books and magazines and want to have a line of work that matches their love of literature and language. They just want to sit around and read all day and get paid for it, or so they hope.