Bunker Mulligan "Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry." ~Mark Twain

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t read golf books or magazines to improve my mechanics. I find that most are simply repeats of the same information, presented in a different fashion. And sometimes the advice is simply bad. Learning from a book is often the best way to gain an insight into the skills required for some activity, but the golf swing requires a second set of eyes to see what is going on. Even when you feel like you’re “in the groove”, your senses are very deceiving.

With my iron play being what it has been of late, I’ve been thinking of going back to all irons in my bag for a few weeks like I did last summer. Then, I was hitting my 1-iron farther than my playing partners were hitting drivers, and all my iron shots were crisp.

I also think I’ll go back and do some reading on the two books that have actually helped me in the past:

The Nicklaus book is very well done, and written when Jack was at the top of his game. It is simple, and has beautiful illustrations. My game has always improved after I’ve gone through his lessons because my swing thoughts settle down and I play smarter golf. Nothing more exotic than that. No drills. Just good advice.

The second appeals to my analytical side. It is, to my knowledge, the only book on the golf swing based on solid research. For any beginner, this book is the perfect gift. And for old duffers like me, it brings the basics into focus with simple explanations about what is actually happening during those two short seconds of the swing. While this book is great for any beginner, the Nicklaus book would be more appealing to the youth golfer because of the artistic presentation. of course, they’ll get some laughs when they see 1970s golf attire. Well, so will some adults who actually wore stuff like that!

After mentioning the analytical side of the golf game, I have to point out two heavily researched books on the scoring part of the game:

Dave Pelz spent years charting shots by PGA tours, and has worked with some of the best on tour to improve their short games. Lee Janzen, Payne Stewart, and Phil Mickelson are just three who benefitted from his advice. Dave presents statistical evidence of where good scores come from, and how best to take advantage of that information.

That’s where I’ve lost a lot of strokes, and balls, lately.

Golf magazine has a short preview of The Masters this month. One thing that caught my interest was the jacket. Its color, Masters Green, is Pantone Green 342. Hmmm…. My site background is green. What would it look like using Masters Green?

So I did a little detective work on the web to find the hexadecimal conversion for Pantone Green 342. The color is R0 G107 B84 in RGB and #006B54 in hex. An interesting tidbit I found during my search is that this is a popular color for plastic bag decoration, and is an official highway sign color.

Just a point of trivia, Sam Snead was the first Masters Champion to be given a green jacket. Previous winners were then also presented jackets as the tradition began.

Golf has a rich history of literature, and baseball is probably the only sport to compare in that regard. Not that golf is any more spectacular than the rest, but that the writers of golf are of a class shared only by baseball. Names like Henry Longhurst (quoted above), Bernard Darwin, Henry Warren Wind, John Updike, and Grantland Rice grace the pages of golf story collections. It has to do with the pace of golf and the people involved I would guess.

I have been building my personal library of golf books, and adding many of these classics. I don’t collect how-to books, but rather enjoy the reading of histories, personal stories, and tall tales. I have two golf books by P. G. Wodehouse, best known for the “Jeeves and Wooster” books. The first is The Golf Omnibus, of which I have an old, well-read copy from a used book store. The second is a new one I just received, The Clicking of Cuthbert.

It was Wodehouse’s first golf collection, originally published in 1922, and regales us with tales spun by The Oldest Member to those unwary souls who stumbled into his presence on the clubhouse porch and are too polite to extricate themselves from the encounter.

As a simple appetizer from Omnibus:

Archibald Mealing was one of those golfers in whom desire outruns performance. Nobody could have been more willing than Archibald. He tried, and tried hard. Every morning before he took his bath he would stand in front of his mirrror and practise swings. Every night before he went to bed he would read the golden words of some master on the subject of putting, driving, or approaching. Yet on the links most of his time was spent in retrieving lost balls or replacing America.

Many golfers share Archibald’s enthusiasm. I do. But I also share the desire to write as well as people like Wodehouse.

Great. I just find Jay’s site, and he moves. Not just from Blogspot to his own domain, but to TravelGolf.com, along with several other golf travel writers.

You just can’t trust lawyers or accountants on the golf course. They’re shifty and bear watching!

Jay has a great review of the course, and all its amenities.

Myrtle Beach hosts an annual Military Retiree tournament. Dad and I have considered it before, and perhaps need to make the trip. Caledonia would definitely be on my list of one of the 100+ courses to play in the area.

I’ve done a fair amount of club fabricating and assembling. I really appreciate the skill involved in creating a golf club. I first started by trying to recreate a wood putter to replace my Wood Wand that Dad gave me for Christmas many years ago. After thousands of putts in all kinds of weather, the wood face of the putter had lost its resiliency, and no longer had the feel I loved. But I never created a new putter with the same characteristics.

There was a Golfsmith store near my home in Dallas, and I spent a lot of time there looking at and buying components. I assembled clubs for friends, and created a few unique models for myself. I refurbished quite a few persimmon drivers, and still keep one to use when the mood strikes me. I hit it as far as I do my metal driver, but can’t convince myself to use it regularly. I love the sound of a ball off that phenolic face and the reverberation from the persimmon.

In the last century, persimmon was the Cadillac of woods for golf club manufacture. Cheaper brands used laminated maple, and that sufficed for most of us. But good players–and all players who wanted to be good and could afford it–had persimmon. Now, persimmon clubs are throw-aways.

Not for everyone. I have a tournament tomorrow, and I haven’t been hitting my 2-iron well of late. So this afternoon I decided I really need my 4-wood. The head came loose some time ago, and I’ve just never gotten around to repairing it. So I got out my epoxy and crocus cloth, burnished the shaft tip, applied some epoxy, slipped the head back on, and whipped the hosel.

Yep. It is a persimmon head. It is a Golfsmith head on a True Temper Dynalite steel shaft. The persimmon head is solid, and glides through rough well due to its small size. I’ve often swapped it out with a 1-iron, using the wood on courses with heavy rough and the iron when winds were up. This week, I’m taking it instead of the 2-iron.

It will be good having the old friend in the bag tomorrow.

Tiger is #1 again.

The ranking system for Tour players is quite complex, and apparently pretty invalid. All it took for Tiger to regain his position at the top of the golf world was a single win. It took Vijay Singh ten wins to overcome Tiger’s lead last year due to built-in inertia of the system accounting for wins in previous seasons.

Yeah, I’d say Tiger is the best player in golf. But do rankings mean anything to any of us, or are they simply scorecards for advertisers and sponsors to use in bidding for the services of the current leading pros?

The latter.