Jeff Silverman - Classic Golf Stories: 26 Incredible Tales from the Links

Also edited by Jeff Silverman:

Bernard Darwin on Golf

Classic Baseball Stories

The First Chapbook for Foodies

The First Chapbook for Golfers

The Greatest Baseball Stories Ever Told

The Greatest Boxing Stories Ever Told

The Greatest Golf Stories Ever Told

Lardner on Baseball

Lardner on War

Copyright 2012 by Jeff Silverman

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file

ISBN: 978-1-61608-381-6

Printed in China

For Guy Cary,
the most classic golf story I know

The Praise and Origin of Golf
SIR W. G. SIMPSON

The Mystery of Golf
ARNOLD HAULTAIN

The Chicken; or, My First Introduction to the Ancient Game of Golf
(A Trifle after The Raven)
S. F. OUTWOOD

Miss Carringtons Professional
M. GERTRUDE CUNDILL

An Inland Voyage
A. A. MILNE

A Method of Play
J. H. TAYLOR

Even Threes
OWEN JOHNSON

Good Resolutions
BERNARD DARWIN

The Humorous Side of Golf
A. W. TILLINGHAST

A Novel Golfing Match
A. NIBLICK

A One-Ball Match
GERALD BATCHELOR

Dormie One
HOLWORTHY HALL

Mathematics for Golfers
STEPHEN LEACOCK

The Science of Golf
ANONYMOUS

Hit the Ball: A Valuable Lesson of What Concentration Really Means
EDDIE LOOS

A Lesson in Golf
ANONYMOUS

A Mixed Threesome
P. G. WODEHOUSE

Mr. Dooley on Golf
FINLEY PETER DUNNE

A Caddys Diary
RING LARDNER

How I Began to Play Golf
FRANCIS OUIMET

Shush!!! An Authority on Athaletics Makes a Suggestion
RING LARDNER

Etiquette and Behaviour
HORACE HUTCHINSON

Golf for Duffers
SIR HENRY RIDER HAGGARD

Gentlemen, You Cant Go Through!
CHARLES E. VAN LOAN

Aberdovey
BERNARD DARWIN

Winter Dreams
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Why Golf is Art and Art is Golf
We have not far to seek
So much depends upon the lie,
So much upon the cleek.

Rudyard Kipling
From Verses on Games

E ssentially, every time we set out to play golf, we set out in search of untold stories. Not every one will be a classic, of course, unless we can expand our fairways to include absurdity, burlesque, and all the other insanely hysterical things we human beings are capable of inflicting on a golf ball. Still, regardless of how well or not so well we play the game, a round of golf is plot in a nutshell with a surlyn cover. It begins, as stories do, with infinite possibilities and hopes for a happy ending. Then, along the way, all hells likely to break loose. Nature taunts us. Luck rewardsor killsus, the difference determined by silly millimeters. Hazards await us. Penalties are exacted on us. Despair moves in. Elation moves it out. Despair moves back in again. Character is tested. True character is revealed.

I remember, in college lit classes, the way professors would proudly march out the observation somewhere in a lecture that In literature, as in life... I would zone out immediately. The two are pretty much the same, I thought; after all, whats literature if not lifeor at least a few pieces of itrecorded on a page in the symbols we use to communicate? And whats golf, then, if not the most maddening endeavor ever devised by evil Druids to play out everything life can throw at us over eighteen holes of varying length and difficulty? Golf and literature go hand in hand.

Its the very nature of the gamehow we handle what golf confronts us withthats led so many superb writers over so long a time to wade into it, and retrieve so many splendid stories. Some of whichto suit the demands of the title attached to this collectionare, indeed, classic.

So what makes a golf story a classic golf story? A number of things, really, but, ultimately, I think, it comes down to this: Even if the language is a bit thick or floral by contemporary standards, even if certain aspects of the game seem a little arcane, even if the manners are as dead as the dodo and the atmosphere seems somewhat out of whack with ours, they can hold up a mirror that still offers a true reflection of who we areas men, as women, and as golfers. In short, they stand the test of timeall in this volume have been standing for at least eighty years, with several still upright into their third centuryand they continue to speak to us.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word golf was originally teed up in the written language in the 1450s, and by the mid-seventeenth century, it had bounced its way into poetry. The games first appearance in fiction came in 1771, with a brief aside on the diversion called Golf in the fields called the Links of Edinburgh in Tobias Smolletts novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. By the second half of the nineteenth century, as the game really took off through the British Isles, and sports became more fit subject matter for popular journals directed toward the moneyed, leisure class, golf, quite naturally, began developing a literatureboth fiction and nonof its own. In essence, the game, and writing about the game, began to grow up together.

With golfs arrival on American shores just before the twentieth century, American writers began getting in on the funplaying the game, and writing about it, too. As did their transplanted brethren. In 1892, when golf was still very much a novelty in the New World, Rudyard Kipling, a confirmed hacker, settled in for a few years on an estate in Vermont. One of the first things he did was establish a small course on the property.

Summer and winter alike, hed take his whacks on this makeshift layout of indeterminate par that extended from the meadow beyond his front door right to the edge of the Connecticut River. The Nobel Prize winners sojourn was wonderfully productive. Not only did he write Captains Courageous and the Jungle Books in Vermont, he also invented the red golf ball, allowing him to soldier on with his passionand keep track of his shotseven through the North American snow cover.