Enjoy a game…subject to choosing the correct teeing ground to play from and then playing within one’s skill level.  If you choose the wrong tees, please call it suicide rather than murder.

Pat Ruddy

The European Club

On a placid day on the west coast of Ireland, the wind was only going 25 mph steady, we were playing the Connemara Golf Club with a couple of 19 year olds as caddies.  As usual, good players, golf smart, very funny.

Five times in the first seven holes I seemed to ignore the obvious effect wind has on your putting when playing a links course and left very good efforts staring in the front door of the hole.  On the eighth hole I did it again, leaving a 25 footer at 24 feet 9 inches.

At that point, John, the college educated one on a golf scholarship at the University of Rhode Island, scratches his chin and says to me quite wryly, “Moe, there is a saying shared among the older caddies, ‘It is a rare day that the hole ever moves closer to your ball’ ”.

Nuff said.

John

Summer, 2002

And how beautiful the vacated links at dawn, when the dew gleams untrodden beneath the pendant flags and the long shadows lie quite on the green; when no caddie intrudes upon the still and silent lawns, and you stroll from hole to hole and drink in the beauties of a land to which you know you will be all too blind when the sun mounts high and you toss for the honour!

Arnold Haultain

The Mystery of Golf (1908)

We share a golf match, which is part hike, part contest, part demonstration, and part lesson. The good will induced by the perilous joint venture leads to a mutual solicitude: advice and praise are offered to an opponent as freely as to a partner.  The trend of golfing rules and custom…….is toward elaborate niceness; we repress our coughs while others are swinging, we join in the hopeless hunt for another’s lost ball, and on the green we avoid stepping in another’s putting lines in a veritable Morris dance of exaggerated courtesy.  Our behavior is better here than elsewhere, because we are happier there than elsewhere. Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence; fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somewhere together where non-golfers never go.

John Updike

The Camaraderie of Golf-I

Golf Dreams-Writings On Golf

The inexhaustible competitive charm of golf lies in its handicap strokes, whereby all players are theoretically equalized and an underdog can become, with a small shift of fortunes, a top dog.  Drama is a key word, for golf is, within the arena of the foursome, not only a war but theatre; each player has a golf persona, a predictable character, which the hazards of play subject to unpredictable shifts of fate by turns hilarious, thrilling, heroic, and pathetic.  We are actors and audience in swift alternation; our love of one another is the love that enthralled spectators bear toward performers, heightened by the circumstance that the spotlight visits everyone, as the honor falls.

John Updike

The Camaraderie of Golf-II

Golf Dreams-Writings on Golf

The Scots will tell you that a hole is only blind once and that a player need only decide upon a line and hit the shot. But then again the Scots never worry about fairness; they just play the game as it comes.

Ian Andrew

Blindness-an architectural failing or charm?

Better identified by what he does rather than by what he is.  He never misses an opportunity for a game of golf, births, deaths, and marriages excepted.  Weather is no consideration, but, oddly enough, the quality and design of a course are of paramount importance.  Many a Real Golfer has sat on the beach or watched a football match on a sunny day with a third rate course convenient to him.  But the same gent would travel miles out of his way to get a game on a first-class course in the most appalling conditions and in the face of the most rabid domestic dissension.

G.A. Finn

Lazy Days At Lahinch

Own your defeats and you will be defined by your victories.

Oakley Golf Ad featuring Rory McIlroy

June 2011