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Golfing Life

Shoot for a hole-in-one this Father's Day

By LOGAN MABE
Published June 9, 2006

Father's Day is coming up, which means a lot of well-meaning kids and their moms are going to be scurrying around trying to find the perfect gift for the most imperfect of men.

Aside from the questionable necktie, the time-honored traditional gift can usually be found in the golf realm.

You might opt for a chic Greg Norman golf shirt. Or maybe a dozen golf balls that are almost, but not really, like the ones Tiger Woods uses. And there's always the goofy training practice device that looks like it came from The Todd on Nebraska Avenue.

Those are all fine ideas, but I have a better one. Get Dad a great golf book.

Two excellent books go straight to the heart of the golf-dad dichotomy. The first is Every Shot I Take, Lessons Learned About Golf, Life, and a Father's Love, by PGA Tour player Davis Love III. It's a touching love letter from son to father, a remembrance filled with wisdom and gratitude.

Love's father, Davis Love Jr., died in a small plane crash in 1988 while on his way to the Innisbrook resort in Palm Harbor. Every Shot I Take captures the essence of everything father and son shared - on and off the golf course - until that day.

Another sweet homage to golf and fatherhood is James Dodson's Final Rounds, a Father, a Son, the Golf Journey of a Lifetime.

Dodson, a masterful golf writer and a pretty good player of the game, chronicles an amazing golfing journey he took with his father during the last days of his life. None of the lessons shared in this beautifully crafted book are about golf. And that's the best part.

Harvey Penick, who rose from caddy to head golf pro at the Austin Country Club, has been a father figure and inspiration to generations of golfers. But few outside the insular embrace of that southwest Texas world knew of Penick's unique wisdom until 1992 when he authored his first book, Harvey Penick's Little Red Book.

That's when the world of literary golf instruction changed, and changed for the better. For decades, golfers had been inundated with glossy magazine pages filled with advice such as "72 Ways To Shoot Par," "Taming Your Left Elbow," and "Preturnatural Putting."

Penick, who schooled scores of local, regional and national champions including Ben Crenshaw and Tom Kite, relied more on simple, homespun homilies to get his point across.

He told his golf students to "take dead aim," "hit it hard," and my favorite, "give luck a chance."

Penick, along with co-author Bud Shrake, wrote four books before Penick's death in 1995 (the same year Crenshaw won his second Masters Tournament and the last significant championship of his career).

All of those books - and they are slim tomes - are collected in one masterpiece called The Wisdom of Harvey Penick. This is the one every golfing dad should have in his lap.

Penick was brilliant in teaching the game of golf, but he was also keenly insightful when it came to how golf comes to play in the game of life.

"God made what is called the lifeline in the right palm of a human being for one special reason. It fits perfectly against the left thumb in a good golf grip," Penick wrote.

My favorite golf book, though, is Michael Murphy's Golf in the Kingdom. It's a sort of Wizard of Oz story that has a young man on the road to a far-off destination, who is exposed to great revelations about life and golf (in that order) after meeting a reclusive and wizardly golf teacher.

I can't say enough about this book, which was first published in 1972. This Magical Mystery Tour of a golf odyssey follows Murphy from his home in the United States to his destination of an ashram in India.

But along the way, Murphy discovers true enlightenment through an encounter with Shivas Irons, a golf teacher at a mythical Scottish course. "Between the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Tay," the book begins, "lies the Kingdom of Fife - known to certain lovers of that land simply as 'The Kingdom.' "

Reading this book changed my whole perception of the game I had devoted so much time and energy to. It gave new meaning to me.

The first chapters are a recounting of Murphy's memorable round of golf played with Shivas Irons, a round that opened his eyes to new ways of seeing everything from the ball to the beauty of the world around him.

The following chapters break down golf's relationships to the world at large and its true meaning.

"The Whiteness of the Ball," for example, posits that there is an almost religious relationship between the golfer and the ball he hopes to command.

"For a while on the links we can lord it over our tiny solar system and pretend we are God: no wonder then that we suffer so deeply when our planet goes astray."

That certainly puts a fine point on putting a Titleist into the woods.

Another short chapter, "Replacing the Divot," speaks to the gentle civility of golf and how its rules, written and assumed, translate to life off the course. "In a golf club everyone knows the player who does not replace his divot. One can guess how he leads the rest of his life."

As most of us know, golf is hard. But reading about golf is easy, and fun, if you have a good book that enriches the soul.

Logan Mabe lives in Northdale and plays as much golf as he can afford. You can contact him or share your golfing life stories at LDMabeaol.com.

[Last modified June 9, 2006, 08:45:12]