Ruck - The Bluffers Guide to Golf

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First published 1987
This edition published 2013
Copyright Bluffers 2013

Publisher: Thomas Drewry
Publishing Director: Brooke McDonald

Series Editor: David Allsop
Design and Illustration by Jim Shannon
With kind acknowledgments to Peter Gammond,
author of earlier editions of The Bluffers Guide to Golf

All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Bluffers.

A CIP Catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.

Bluffers Guide, Bluffers and Bluff Your Way
are registered trademarks.

Golfers can be quite difficult, withdrawn and hard to talk to, especially in the build-up, during and after an important game in other words, all the time.

Y ou may think you understand what PG Wodehouse described as that never-ending pageant, which men call Golf well enough to hold your own when conversation around the dinner table settles on the games inexhaustible fascination. Dont get over-confident nobody fully understands golf.

Mark Twain is credited with describing it as a good walk spoiled, but he might have missed the point. Its not just about spending long hours tramping around an elaborate obstacle course competing to hit a small ball into a series of small holes.

Golf is the bluffers game par excellence at all levels of ability and experience. At its simplest, it is about pretending to be a better golfer than you are. At its most advanced and calculating, it is about bluffing your way to victory, or at least a less ignominious defeat, in any number of ways that come under the broad umbrella of psychological warfare. Your greatest strength is the extent to which you are successful in reading and playing your opponent (not the ball).

By your words, actions, body language, deployment of the rule book and even your choice of outfit, you can bluff your adversary into using the wrong club, conceding a putt or accepting a penalty. You can inspire in him thoughts of self-fulfilling defeatism or lift him up to an exalted plane of fatal over-confidence. You may even be able to bluff yourself into playing a better shot. All of these invaluable tricks of the trade will be explained in the pages that follow, along with the basic technical and background information about golf and its culture required for the armchair golfer to pass muster in polite society.

Becoming proficient at golf requires an investment of more time and money than most of us can justify.

Will golf make you a better person? Nothing could be less certain. It may well have the opposite effect, rendering you disappointed, bitter and considerably poorer than you might otherwise have been when you count the cost of membership subscriptions, green fees, Kevlar-reinforced rescue clubs, self-propelling electric trolleys, miracle-fibre breathable waterproofs, lost bets, hefty supplements for air travel, divorces and missed opportunities to earn an honest living. Golfers can be quite difficult, withdrawn and hard to talk to, especially in the build-up, during and after an important game in other words, all the time.

They say golf reveals character like no other sport; they being people who are good at golf and inclined to win. Those who are less good at the game find this so-called truth less convincing, or at least less comfortable. Golf doesnt reveal character so much as the injustice of life, the world, everything really.

But there is an undeniable correspondence between a players behaviour during the course of a golf match and his real self. Are you a bag half-full sort of golfer, or bag half-empty? If the jury had played golf with OJ Simpson (see ), would it have seen the real person and would its verdict have therefore been different? Does the sight of your ball in an awkward position that could easily be improved by a discreet nudge of the toecap make you wonder if anyone is watching and think: why not?

In the end, it matters little if golf does or does not reveal character accurately. It is widely believed to do so, and it follows that the better you are perceived to be at golf, the more favourably people will look on you.

Unfortunately, becoming proficient at golf requires an investment of more time and money than most of us can justify, as well as an early start in life, as enjoyed by Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy and other child prodigies whose mothers fed them baby food with a cut-down spoon or wedge. (As you are about to find out, these are both names for lofted clubs deemed to be among the easiest to use). If you are reading this book, as opposed to having it read to you as a child, it is almost certainly too late to take up the game with any hope of satisfaction.

So, like the rest of us, you will have to bluff. And here you enter perilous territory, which is where this short guide can offer invaluable help. It sets out to conduct you through the main danger zones encountered in discussions about golf, and to equip you with a vocabulary and evasive technique that will minimise the risk of being rumbled as a bluffer. It will give you a few easy-tolearn hints and methods that might even allow you to be accepted as a golfer of rare ability and experience. But it will do more. It will give you the tools to impress legions of marvelling listeners with your knowledge and insight without anyone discovering that, until you read it, you probably didnt know the difference between a Scargill and a Brazilian.

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Gender matters. Golf is a game of few words, or should be. It is in this spirit of economy, and not out of any gender bias, that we have employed the shorter and simpler forms he, him and man in preference to the longer he and/or she, him and/or her and man and/or woman. As any bluffer will tell you, egalitarianism is alive and well on the golf course. Though not necessarily in the clubhouse

G olfs origins are shrouded in the mists and mishits of time and need not detain the bluffer long. It is polite to affect a respectful awareness of the history of the game, but too close a preoccupation may mark you out as a nerd.

Nonetheless, you should have a certain basic familiarity with its origins. Golf began in Scotland, and remains a Scottish verb to golf. It is an essentially Scottish game which should be played in a stiff breeze over nice firm turf on the cusp between pasture and tundra at a pace sufficient to keep the blood flowing but without excessive wind chill. One of the games great drawbacks is the amount of space required per player many thousands of square feet compared with bridge (3 sq ft) or squash (just under 700 sq ft). You might mention the latter if only to provide an opportunity to quote the modern American satirist PJ ORourke who, in pointing out that golf is a superior game to squash, observed that: You can smoke or drink on a golf course without interrupting the game, and you can take a leak something you cant do on a squash court and shouldnt do in a swimming pool.