Great Golf Stories

C. Stephen Gray is Director of Information Services, Institute of
Chartered Accountants of Ontario.

This is a handsome book — well put together, carefully edited, and appealingly laid out. Its selections will fascinate golfers of all styles and abilities, from the scratch club champion to the Sunday duffer. A journey through these pages offers the imaginative reader the golfing vacation of a lifetime, as he plays St. Andrews, Pinehurst, Pebble Beach, and Augusta — and scores of other names sacred to lovers of the royal and ancient game.

Robert T. Jones, himself one of the most influential golf course architects in history, brings to his editing task a love and respect for the game that has dominated his life for almost all of its 77 years. And if the book’s selections show a bias toward course design and architecture, what of it? Most serious golfers will admit that, in golf, the course is virtually everything — without it, the actual striking of the ball would have little appeal.

One criticism is worth mentioning: in a collection of this size and scope, it is a great disappointment to note the absence of anything by P.G. Wodehouse, surely one of the funniest writers on this subject. Wodehouse, like Jones, loved to slash his way around the links, and referred to golf as “the Great Mystery, in which the lowest scorer wins; which, like haggis, came from Scotland; like cancer, eats into the soul; and, like death, levels.” I can think of no higher tribute to this collection than to offer the opinion that it is a volume in which Wodehouse would have been proud to be included. Reading this book is, like golf, an enjoyable experience; but compared to 1983 green fees, it’s a bargain.