Great little golf book for the easily distracted

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the folks at Comedy Central ran a popular program called "Short Attention Span Theater." Hosted by comedians such as Jon Stewart, Patty Rosborough, and Brian Regan, the show featured movie clips from HBO and Cinemax, stand-up bits from comedians, and a mix of entertainment news and commentary by the host.

It was a great show for the easily distracted, because no one segment lasted more than a few minutes.

Scott Martin adopted that same approach in his newest offering, The Golf Bag Book, which should appear on the nation’s bookshelves in November (Burford Books, $14.95 SRP). I think this attention deficit-oriented approach should work out well for him as well.

The book runs a slim 140 pages total, not counting the index. No segment runs longer than 10 pages, and most are a single page or two.

Into this short space Martin manages to say something pithy, useful, and entertaining about thirty-seven different golf-related topics. As he says,

It’s not a rules book. It’s not a golf joke book. It’s not a book about Caddyshack. It’s not an etiquette book. It’s simply a companion on the golf course…when it comes to real-life issues, problems, and situations that routinely occur….

He’s got that right. If you’re wondering why your putts are pushing right or pulling left, instead of going in the hole, there are a couple quick hints about what to do about it. If someone in your group is trying some gamesmanship during what turns out to be a less than friendly round, Martin has some good advice for you, and some needles for you to use in response. For some of the more common rules situations that come up during a game, his solutions are far easier to comprehend than trying to flip through the USGA Rules of Golf on the fly.

At several points in this little gem, Martin reminds golfers of the need to manage their expectations to their actual playing level. The issue comes up in a piece about playing in the rain, a piece about club selection, and a short essay about playing hard holes, among other places.

It’s one thing to watch Phil Mickelson hit a wedge shot under one tree and over the next, onto the green for a classic escape from jail and a win in the Colonial. It’s a whole ‘nother thing to watch one of us regular types try the same thing, with predictably bad results. In the segments about playing out of trouble, Martin stresses the advantages of accepting a bogey from a bad shot, instead of making double or triple bogey by following one bad shot with one or two more.

Here’s what he says about expectations, in a passage most of us should commit to memory:

A good player (handicap plus to 5) should aim to birdie every hole. A decent player (handicap 5 to 12) should aim to par or birdie the easier holes but be happy with a bogey on a very hard hole. The average player (12 to 20) should be happy with the occasional par and a bogey on most holes. The ‘improving’ golfer (20 and above) should throw a party after a par and be delighted with bogey.

If more high-strung golfers would keep those ranges in mind, they might be far more pleasant playing companions.

Other portions of the book are just as enjoyable, although not perhaps as central to the playing experience. Martin gives readers a short primer on some of the more influential golf course architects, enough to keep a conversation going about golf course design if it comes up during a round. He also discusses some of the better golf writers of yore, such as Bernard Darwin and Peter Dobereiner, while suggesting that the modern crop of golf writers includes too many Darwin or Dobereiner imitators (present company excluded, I hope).

This was a fun read. It should be on the early shopping lists for the upcoming holiday season for the golfers you know.

Back to basics, on a new platform

The middle of the golf season sometimes takes golfers by surprise.

After a perhaps shaky start in the early spring, many golfers rediscover what works for them. Their scores begin to come down toward the handicap they had last fall.

As the summer heats up, however, these same golfers may suffer through a slump or two. Tee shots that were so impressive a few weeks ago now seem only to have eyes for the rough. Approach shots to the greens fall short, into bunkers that were easily cleared in mid-June.

When your game takes an unexpected trip south for a spell, it’s always a good idea to go back to the fundamentals on the practice range, and reconnect with what it takes to make a good swing at that infuriating little ball.

Bob Mullen is a Master Teaching Professional at the United States Golf Teachers Federation. After years of service to golfers on an individual basis, Mullen decided to set out some of his best lessons for the rest of us. His new book, Golf from the Ground Up, should be useful not only for golfers in the midseason doldrums, but also for those who have just taken up the game—especially the adults among them. (Burford Books; $16.95 SRP).

Mullen describes how mature students learn differently than junior golfers, and aims his book squarely at the older audience. He emphasizes that motor skills of the type used in golf are usually best learned one at a time. In addition, the time to learn and incorporate those new skills into our old brains can take four weeks or so. In other words, there are no quick fixes, but with the right approach to learning slowly, real progress can be made.

As with most such instruction books, Mullen’s lessons in the fundamentals include extensive passages dealing with the grip, alignment, stance, and ball position. In addition, however, Mullen emphasizes what he calls the platform. In addition to those first four issues, he also teaches the importance of good footwork, the proper rotation of the body, and a new way of thinking about alignment.

For each part of the golf swing, Mullens describes the basics, shows why and how they work together, and then gives the reader some handy drills to enhance the learning process.

It’s true, for example, that some people can learn a new skill just by reading about it. Far more of us, however, learn better by doing. Mullen’s drills, such as those intended to impart an understanding of the importance of the weight shift during the swing, should be really helpful to many struggling golfers.

The illustrations accompanying Mullen’s text may remind some readers of another significant book on the golf swing, Ben Hogan’s "Five Lessons". That may have been deliberate, as Mullen also has some very definite ideas about what Hogan was really doing in his swing, compared to what he told his fans in his famous bestseller.

For the more deeply analytical among us, Mullen delves into the physics of the golf swing. He stresses the need to begin the golf swing with a weight shift to the left side (for righthanders), before beginning the hip rotation and shoulder swing portions of the maneuver. As he sees it, the failure to begin the swing from the ground up is the major reason why so many golfers slice the ball, hitting it weakly from the outside in and off to the right.

Mullen also provides some additional tips for other common swing errors that should help both experienced and novice golfers. Personally, I’m hoping that his guidance for those with excess backswings will pay off soon.

The last section of the book is about managing your way around the course, and will provoke some knowing grins from experienced golfers. It’s aimed at helping to avoid the sudden attacks of stupid that can ruin a game, and how to spot the warning signs in time to keep them at bay.

This book should be a welcome addition to any golfer’s library.

Review date: August 7, 2009

There’s something to be said for going on a long walk, with someone else taking the lead.

Your own preference for maintaining a sense of order, of staying on a particular path all the way until its completion, is completely subject to the whims of another.

You’re not sure where you’ll be going next, but you might enjoy the trip all the same.

That’s the sense I had when I completed the meandering path laid by longtime Sports Illustrated writer John Garrity, in his new book, Ancestral Links (New American Library; $24.95 SRP).

Depending on the chapter, this is a travelogue, an autobiography, a study of an American family’s roots, or an elegy for family members who have gone before.

There’s even more to this book, but those are a few of the highlights.

Garrity is part Irish, part Scottish, and all raconteur. The book opens with a funeral ceremony for his father, combined with an altogether different sort of memorial service, held at his father’s old home course in New Richmond, Wisconsin. The action then shifts abruptly to Carne Golf Links, in County Mayo, well north of Galway on Ireland’s west coast.

It seems that the Garrity clan emigrated from that part of Ireland, and so he travels there to see what he can find about his family and why it came to America. It just so happens that Carne is also a beautiful, challenging links course, which Garrity’s older brother Tommy once praised to high heaven.

Tom Garrity, several years older than John, had a short spell on the PGA Tour, and was his younger brother’s idol. In one particularly poignant recollection, Garrity recalls a PGA Tour event in south Florida, when the younger brother lived with their divorced mother, and the older brother drove into town for the tournament. Decades later, Tommy also played Carne, and his reverie about the seventeenth hole inspires John to set a unique scoring goal, using just this one hole for all eighteen.

His repeated attempts form one of the repeating strands throughout the book.

When not trying to break 90 on the seventeenth, Garrity’s continues his search for a connection between his family’s love of golf and their origins in the old country. It takes him through much of northwest Ireland, and also over to Scotland. It seems that his mother was also a very good golfer in her own right. Her side of the family also has an old connection to golf, but in Scotland. Garrity’s efforts in Machrihanish and points west of Edinburgh are less successful than in Ireland, however.

Sprinkled throughout the book are other bits and pieces of his family history, not all of it happy. His parents’ divorce was not accompanied by attempts to make him pick sides, thankfully, but there’s a certain melancholy running through these passages.

On the other hand, the passages dealing with his Irish friends and their lives are often sprightly by comparison. His description of some of the drinking establishments he visits will be completely familiar to readers who also have had a pint or dram in a warm little place in a tiny Irish village—the kind with seven houses, a church, a store, and two pubs.

There’s no one thing to recommend about this intriguing, deeply personal story. None of its parts would have been enough for a book-length treatment. Put together, however, they make for an interesting, often compelling combination, well worth your reading.

A Routine Par

Christopher Merrick sent in a short note about his buddy Dan Iezzi’s recent round at the River Marsh course near Cambridge, Maryland.

Iezzi whipped his 3-wood on the long par-3 17^th hole, but it landed in the adjacent river. Iezzi then re-teed, and his next shot rolled right into the cup.

Not your everyday par, but as Merrick also noted, it also won all the bets.

Sometimes it’s just about the number on the card, and not how that number got there.