Legendary journalist and beloved TV host Alistair Cooke shares his life-long passion for golf in this stunning collection of his best writing on the sport he loved most. On a fateful day in 1964, Alistair Cooke was dragged into Van Cortland Park in New York City to play his first game of golf. He was immediately hooked, and golf became his greatest passion, even though he called it a method of self-torture, disguised as a game.” No one has written more brilliantly or more lovingly about g...

The Masters golf tournament weaves a hypnotic spell. It is the toughest ticket in sports, with black-market tickets selling for $10,000 and more. Success at Augusta National breeds legends, while failure can overshadow even the most brilliant of careers. But as Curt Sampson, author of the bestselling Hogan, reveals in The Masters, a cold heart beats behind the warm antebellum façade of this famous Augusta course. And that heart belongs to the man who killed himself on the grounds ...

Ben Hogan is up with Jack Nicklaus as one of the greatest golfers of all time. He equalled the record of four US Open wins, once won five out of six major tournaments in one season, and is credited with effectively defining the modern game of golf. James Dodson’s magisterial biography, written by the bestselling author of Final Rounds, is the first to be authorised by Hogan’s family, and reveals the complex character behind a golfer legendary for his inscrutable, steely public persona....

Was there ever a year in golf like 1960?It was the year that the sport and its vivid personalities exploded on the consciousness of the nation, when the past, present, and future of the sport collided. Here was Arnold Palmer, the workingman’s hero, “sweating, chain-smoking, shirt-tail flying”; Ben Hogan, the greatest player of the fifties, a perfectionist battling twin demons of age and nerves; and, making his big-time debut, a crew-cut college kid who seemed to have the makings of...

Last year Stephen Pile attempted to deliver a daring blow to the success ethic that so pervades Western culture. To his dismay, The Ultimate Book of Heroic Failures sold many copies and even became the Sunday Times 'Humour Book of the Year.'Nothing daunted, Stephen returns with a new selection which brings together the very best of his original classic titles - The Book of Heroic Failures and The Return of Heroic Failures.The heartwarmin...

Sam Torrance is British golf's greatest personality and in Out of Bounds he has drawn together his favourite golfing stories. Well known and loved for his insights and anecdotes in his commentary, he divulges tall tales from the great, the good and the not-so-good in the world of golf, from Ryder Cup-clinching moments to what really goes on in the clubhouse bar. Torrance's book will have golf fans reminiscing and guffawing from one moment to the next.Packed with some of th...

During the Golden Age of Sports in the 1920s, Walter Hagen was to golf what Babe Ruth was to baseball. The first professional golfer to make his living playing the game rather than teaching it, Hagen won eleven major professional tournaments over his long career -- two U.S. Opens, four British Opens, and five PGA Championships (including an amazing streak of four consecutive PGA wins) -- a record surpassed only by Jack Nicklaus. Hagen was also influential in helping to fou...

Lorne Rubenstein is the preeminent figure in the world of Canadian golf journalism and a member of the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame. He has been reporting on golf for more than thirty years, and this is a collection of Rubenstein’s best and favourite pieces from 1993 to 2008, selected from thousands of newspaper, magazine, and Internet articles. In this book, readers will revel in the wide range of subjects, including course design; swing techniques (such as the stack and tilt); famous peopl...

Gary Wolstenholme has dedicated his life to amateur golf, winning The Amateur Championship twice and becoming Great Britain and Ireland's leading point scorer in the Walker Cup. He has recently turned professional and intends to play on the European Seniors Tour. He lives near Morecambe.

“What is gamesmanship? Most difficult of questions to answer briefly. 'The Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating' – that is my personal 'working definition'. What is its object? There have been five hundred books written on the subject of games. Five hundred books on play and the tactics of play. Not one on the art of winning.”Stephen Potter has used his extensive experience as a master gamesman to compile this instructional text on the techniques, strategies and e...

As a serious player, a high handicapper, or simply a baffled onlooker to the awesome nonsense that is golf, have you ever wondered why, say, the golf balls have dimples, and the tee is both the thing you stick in the ground and the place you hit from, and the hole is so small, and the courses have all these big pits full of sand where any sane person would put grass?Well, so did noted humor writer and avid hacker Henry Beard, who brought twenty-first-century computer search-engine ...

The Old Course at St. Andrews is to golfers what St. Peter's is to Catholics or the Western Wall is to Jews: hallowed ground, the course every golfer longs to play -- and master. In 1983 George Peper was playing the Old Course when he hit a slice so hideous that he never found the ball. But in looking for it, he came across a For Sale sign on a stone town house alongside the famed eighteenth hole. Two months later he and his wife, Libby, became the proud owners of 9A Gibson Place.I...