A Line O' Gowf or Two

Bert Leston Taylor discovered golf late in life, and like all late converts, he became absolutely terrified of it. This 1923 collection of essays and verse captures the peculiar madness of a game that turns otherwise reasonable people into obsessed lunatics who will spend four hours chasing a small ball across grass, only to write it off as 'a lovely walk ruined.' Taylor observes fellow golfers with the amused tenderness of a man who recognizes his own affliction: the endless seek for the perfect swing, the useless advice from strangers, the elaborate excuses, the quiet despair of the eighteen-hole catastrophe. His mock dialogue between a Golfator and an eager Scholarparodies the earnest instructional manuals of the era, extracting every ounce of pomposity from the sport's more deluded practitioners. But beneath the gentle mockery lies genuine affection for golf's peculiar pleasures. The writing crackles with early 20th-century wit, the kind that lands with a dry thud. For anyone who has ever gripped a club with white-knuckled determination and then watched in horror as the ball did something completely unexpected, this book is a quiet companion, saying what we've all thought: perhaps the problem is the clubs. Perhaps it's the shoes. It is almost certainly not us.