Winners see what they want.  Losers see what they don’t want…….  (Golf is) hitting an object to a defined target area with the least amount of effort and an alert attitude of indifference.

Moe Norman

As related by Lorne Rubenstein

Moe & Me (2012)

The first time I visited a Municipal Course, I was astounded by the fury of the battle……
The gameness and concentration of those golfers was as fine a test of sportsmanship as I ever saw.  Everyone who aspires to concentration should play such a course.  These was no nonsense as “Please move your shadow off the line of my putt” or “Stand still while I play this shot”….It was an endurance contest, and it was played with perfect indifference to outside influence.

George C. Thomas
Architect of Riviera Country Club
Golf Architecture in America (1927)

At the end of our round we return to the clubhouse, flushed with healthy exercise, with a full and particular knowledge of the bunkers of the course, but with the proud consciousness………. that we have faithfully replaced every divot.

Bernard Darwin

Portrait of a High Handicap Golfer

We may not think that in the coming year we are going to be better than ever we were, but we are sure that we are going to be better than last year.  That pleasantly fatuous belief never really leaves us, but it flames up more brightly than usual on the first of January, because that day is like the ninth hole in a round.

How often when we start playing very badly we say that we shall do better after the turn, and how often our words come true.  We want just that definite turning point to set us on the right road and the New Year supplies us with it.  On any ordinary summer day of the year if we go to bed slicers we do not expect to wake up driving with a slight, beautiful and controlled shaded draw; but as we take our bedroom candlestick with yawn on the night of December thirty-first, there seems nothing in the least improbable about such a miracle.

Bernard Darwin

New Year’s Eve Cheer

American Golfer, 1933

When you go hit balls to prepare for a round is it to loosen your muscles or to unload all the bad shots before you play?

K. Eig

December, 2011

December always holds some mild-enough days. Sunshine glints like a thin shell of ice on the upper side of the bare gray twigs, the sky is striped like blue bacon, a tardy line of Canadian geese wobbles its way south, and the air is delighted to be providing oxygen to some plucky sportsmen.

The foursome, thinned perhaps to a mere threesome or twosome, meets by the boarded-up clubhouse, exhilarated to have an entire golf course to itself. There are no tee markers, no starting times, no scorecards, no gasoline carts — just golf-mad men, wearing wool hats and two sweaters each, moving on their feet. The season’s handicap computer has been disconnected, so the sole spur to good play is rudimentary human competition — a simple best-ball nassau or 50-cent game of skins, its running tally carried in the head of the accountant or retired banker in the group. You seem to be, in December golf, reinventing the game, in some rough realm predating its modern refinements.

The ball even smartly struck, has a deadish sound…..The balls themselves are apt to be those at the bottom of the golf bag pocket, the scarred and dirty orphans of the season……  Excuses abound, in short, for not playing very well, and the well-struck shot has a heightened lustre as it climbs through the heavy air and loses itself in the dazzle of the low hibernal sun.  Winter rules legitimize generous relocations on the fairway, and with the grass all dead and matted who can say where the fairway ends.

A lovely leniency, that is, prevails in December golf, as a reward for our being out there at all……There is a misty woodsmoke feeling to the round, the savor of last things.

…….. By then the nassau has been decided, and dusk has crept out of the woods into the fairways…..Ice has found its way into your golf shoes; the fingers on your right hand have no feel; your face hurts.  Time to pack it in…..

The last swing feels effortless, and the ball vanishes dead ahead, gray lost in gray, right where the 18th flag would be. The secret of golf has been found at last, after eight months of futilely chasing it. Now, the trick is to hold it in mind, all the indoor months ahead, without its melting away.

John Updike

December Golf

Golf Dreams-Writings On Golf

Being Homo Sapiens, we all of us have an instinct to seize a stout stick and give an inanimate movable object a jolly good clout….  There is an element of menace in such an act, perhaps a practice run for the real thing of enforcing our will on defenseless rivals.  Yet as we became more sophisticated, we might have settled for a less lethal contest of strength, taking out our anger and fear on a more suitable sphere than an opponent’s head, indulging in what we now call ‘sport’.

Peter Thomson

Forward

Golf Through The Ages

Michael Flannery and Richard Leech (2004)

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 (1865-1936)

Golf Through The Ages

Michael Flannery and Richard Leech (2004)

The difficulty is, all swing thoughts decay, like radium. What burned up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday. Yet it does not do to have a blank mind: The terrible hugeness of the course will rush into the vacuum, and the ball will spray like a thing berserk. A swing thought is the golfer’s equivalent of the rock climber’s Don’t look down. With it, we reduce the huge circumambient room for error to a manageable somatic circumference. The score, the stakes, the beer in the clubhouse should all be ousted by some swing thought — which is a swing thought in itself.

John Updike

Swing Thoughts

Golf Dreams-Writings On Golf (1984)

Judgement is everything while playing a links (course).  With judgement comes feel and with feel comes improvisation.

Paul Daley

Links Golf-The Inside Story (2000)