I recently received my copy of the 2008 edition of The World of Professional Golf, the comprehensive worldwide volume originated in 1967 by the late sports mega-agent Mark McCormack.  I have a more-than-sneaky feeling that like most everything else McCormack did in the late 1960s, the initial purpose of publishing this annual was to enhance his marketing of Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player and Arnold Palmer, much as the Official World Ranking was panned in later decades as a tool of McCormack’s monolithic IMG in the selling of Greg Norman.  Further, I will stipulate that in this era of professional golf – any professional golf, on any continent – being only a mouse click away, the importance of McCormack’s title must, by definition, be diminished a bit from that of its first three decades.

And yet it is still, without question, tremendous.

The format of The World of Professional Golf  hasn’t changed much over the years.  The book generally opens with an overview of the previous season worldwide, then provides long and highly detailed recaps of each of the four Major championships.  It then travels the world, tour by tour, providing somewhat more concise portraits of every single event, adding up to a uniquely descriptive (not to mention comprehensive) chronicle of the golfing year.  Finally, after providing a table of the top 200 players in the final Official World Ranking of the previous season, it offers a massive tour-by-tour appendix listing the final results of every event played – though in most cases, these ledgers only include those players making the cut.

Today, the book’s primary value is convenience; the information contained can all be found on the internet, but having it in one easy-to-reach place can come in handy.  But the older volumes – say from the 1967 debut right up into the early 1990s – represent a uniquely valuable resource, a comprehensive history of the professional game as dedicated to events played in South Africa, Japan and Australia as the United States and Europe.  It as also well worth noting that The World of Professional Golf has seldom been a dry, textbook-like read; indeed, McCormack and his team of stringers/writers/editors have generally possessed a pleasant, easy-to-read style not averse to including bits of local and tournament color.  This quality, it seems to me, has diminished a bit since McCormack’s 2003 death, but was initially strong enough to make those early volumes, even today, a pleasant, nostalgic read.

For writers, researchers and truly dedicated fans, the entire collection can be acquired – albeit piece-by-piece – from websites like abebooks.com at relatively low prices.  But clear some room on the bookshelves; most editions measure out at 500-600 pages, meaning that the full collection essentially requires a bookcase of its own.

It is a rare thing in the golf literary world when a single writer has two books published at virtually the same moment, but Vermont-based author Bob Labbance has managed to do just that.  One of the game’s great contemporary historians, Labbance has long been a first-class researcher, and his skills are amply displayed in each of these fine volumes, which carry us all the way back to, well...  My goodness, even before Tiger Woods.

The first title, co-authored with St. Andrews (NY) Golf Club curator Brian Siplo, is The Vardon Invasion: Harry’s Triumphant 1900 American Tour (Ann Arbor, MI: Sports Media Group, 204pp, 2008), and I must state up front that with Vardon standing as perhaps my all-time golfing hero, this is a book upon which I am predisposed towards looking favorably.  But that said, it is, by any measure, a really excellent work, for it chronicles King Harry’s landmark 1900 visit, a 10-month traveling extravaganza that jumpstarted the game’s popularity throughout North America.  Within its pages, we travel with Vardon to Florida, Pinehurst, the oldest-money clubs of the Northeast, New England’s famous turn-of-the-century resorts, and even on to Colorado and Canada, battling head-to-head against the finest professional and amateur competition, and spreading the gospel of the Royal & Ancient game.  Providing considerable added value are a number of biographical sidebars profiling Vardon’s most prominent opponents, as well as numerous photos and course maps, which combine to provide more than a little period ambience.  Perhaps The Vardon Invasion’s biggest accomplishment, however, is its ability to construct a highly detailed account of the tour’s day-to-day activities; believe me, having done much of the same research, I’m here to tell you that Labbance and Siplo were not exactly drowning in first-class sources.

Without a doubt, a must for anyone interested in Vardon, golf history or the game’s High Society beginnings on these shores.

Meanwhile, in the architectural realm, Labbance teamed with Kevin Mendik (a U.S. Parks Service restorationist) to produce The Life and Work of Wayne Stiles (Montpelier, VT: Notown, 304pp, 2008), a beautifully assembled retrospective on the career of one of the Golden Age’s most overlooked designers.  In the tradition of Discovering Donald Ross and The Life and Work of Dr. Alister MacKenzie, this is a comprehensive volume, covering Stiles in a biographical sense while also providing detailed profiles of his designs, including those done in partnership with John Van Kleek, Walter Hagen and others.  The amazing aspect of this book is the sheer amount of new information it offers, for Stiles was not the best-documented of men (once again, I can attest to this personally) and previous lists of his courses have long been suspect as to their comprehensiveness.  Well, those suspicions have now been confirmed, because a comparison with my own fairly exhaustive (or so I thought) records indicates at least 20 previously unknown courses in the Stiles portfolio – and that’s not counting the many planned-but-unbuilt layouts also noted herein.

This title may perhaps be a bit focused for the mass market, but architectural aficionados should not think twice.

Unfortunately, there is a tragic postscript here: Bob Labbance has recently been diagnosed with ALS, a terribly important point for potential book buyers to consider, as co-author Mendik is generously donating all proceeds to an educational fund for Labbance’s children  The book can be purchased directly (and/or additional donations can be made) at the Wayne Stiles Society.

There is, to my mind, something vaguely dissatisfying about coffee table-style volumes profiling golf courses.  Make no mistake; I own many such titles and, in an anti-intellectual sort of way, probably spend more time re-examining their photos than looking over any of my more “serious” golfing tomes.  The problem is that no matter how hard even the best of these may try, photographs are seldom capable of capturing the vast grandeur of a great golf course or, for that matter, the countless subtle, on-the-ground details that tend give the best layouts so much of their playing interest.

But collect such books we do, which leads me into an area which may interest American readers more than those residing overseas: coffee table volumes profiling courses far – and I do mean far – removed from our standard North America/United Kingdom frame of reference.  Given the game’s British roots, such titles generally have been confined to English-speaking nations such as Australia and South Africa; indeed, even as I write this, I remain puzzled that nobody has produced an English (or dual-language) text profiling the elite courses of golf-crazy Japan.  But thankfully, there is much fertile ground to cover in these former British colonies so, without further pontification, here are six modern volumes – all reasonably available on the internet – which do a particularly good job of profiling courses which the average North American golfer will never otherwise see:

One of the first such titles chronologically was Paul Daley and David Scaletti’s The Sandbelt: Melbourne’s Golfing Heaven  (Victoria, Australia: Plus Four, 140pp, 2001), an oversized title which beautifully captures this unique golfing landscape which adjoins Australia’s second largest city.  Daley, Nick Faldo, Ian Baker-Finch and Tom Doak all contribute prose but this volume is, first and foremost, about Scaletti’s wonderful ability to capture venues like Royal Melbourne, Kingston Heath, Huntingdale, etc. in their absolute best light.  If there is a flaw, it is the lack of routing maps or in-depth hole descriptions that would give the uninitiated some helpful context, but in the end this doesn’t seem too much of a handicap.  The Sandbelt is about as close to a transportive experience as a book of golf photography gets.

Somewhat broader in its scope is Darius Oliver’s fine Australia’s Finest Golf Courses (Sydney: New Holland, 160pp, 2003), another work brought to life by David Scaletti’s excellent photography.  This title highlights 67 of Oz’s elite, with each entry including a short-but-highly detailed course history and one or two images, a compact mix which makes it much more informative – if a touch less visual – than many similar volumes.

A third, more narrowly focused, Australian title is Brad McManus’s A Golfer’s View: A professional’s look at great Australian and New Zealand Golf Courses (Bath, Australia: Brown Dog, 256pp, 2005) which provides explicitly detailed profiles of 10 regional courses.  Every hole of every course features extensive imagery (including an aerial portrait) plus how-to-play tips, and while Royal Melbourne and Kingston Heath are curiously omitted, this is likely as close as many foreigners will ever get to playing courses like New South Wales, Royal Adelaide and, especially, Cape Kidnappers.

The closest thing there is to a book covering courses in Japan (or, for that matter, much of Asia) is James Spence’s The Finest Golf Courses of Asia & Australasia (Hong Kong: First Shot, 295pp, 2005), an attractively produced title highlighting 68 courses, including 11 in Japan, five in China/Hong Kong, 20 in Australia, etc.  Standing unique in its field, this is, by default, an important addition to any course collector’s library, though it is not without faults: its routing maps are at best rudimentary and its photography, while plentiful, is un-captioned, frequently leaving us to guess just which hole we might be looking at.

The lone true coffee table book to cover the links of the Cape is Stuart McLean’s South African Golf Courses: A Portrait of the Best (Cape Town: Struik, 144pp, 1993), a now-17-year-old volume but one which still comes highly recommended.  Only 25 courses are covered, allowing McLean’s text to be both detailed and historically minded, and his routing maps, though somewhat basic, are surprisingly functional.  What sells the book, though, is its splendid photography, an ample collection of color plates which seems as much about capturing South Africa’s dazzling landscape as the golf holes which occupy it. 

And finally, Darius Oliver and David Scaletti recently reunited to produce a title less specific to Asia or Africa but one which certainly provides ample coverage of faraway courses: Planet Golf: The Definitive Reference to Great Golf Courses Outside The United States of America (New York: Abrams, 416pp, 2007).  A large, glossy production, it dedicates 150 pages to the United Kingdom before covering 19 courses in continental Europe, 23 in Australia/New Zealand, 16 in Canada and South America, 14 in Asia and nine in Africa.  Planet Golf’s huge scale makes it a tad less engaging than Australia’s Finest Golf Courses, but that hardly renders it a disappointment; it is, by any measure, an impressive and eye-catching book.

THE WAR, AND ITS AFTERMATH (1940-1969)

While there can be little doubt that the life-altering upheavals of World War II derailed much of golf’s Golden Age momentum, it did not altogether sidetrack its literature, particularly in Britain.  For during those bleakest of years, a relocated Bernard Darwin penned three major retrospective works, the semi-golfing Life Is Sweet Brother (1940), the nearly golf-less Pack Clouds Away (1941) and the golf-saturated Golf Between Two Wars (1944).  Shortly after the cessation of hostilities, some small sense of normalcy was perhaps reestablished with the publication of Darwin’s first anthology in a decade, 1946’s Golfing By-Paths.  Now well into his 70s, the Dean then closed out his book-writing career with the 1952 biography James Braid, 1954’s Golf (part of the Pleasures of Life Series) and one last autobiographical work, The World That Fred Made (1955).  He would pass away, at age 85, in 1961.

Replacing the likes of a Bernard Darwin was well nigh impossible, but during this period British golfers were fortunate indeed to discover a wonderful alternative, the incomparable Henry Longhurst.  Longhurst’s ode to the pre-war years, the immensely pleasing It Was Good While It Lasted, first appeared in 1941, and was followed, post-war, by numerous anthologies and golfing travelogues.  Of these, Only on Sundays (1964) and Never on Weekdays (1968), both of which compiled decades worth of Sunday Times columns, have surely had the most lasting impact.

Several other prominent British columnists crossed over into books during and after the war including The Scotsman’s Frank Moran and the inexhaustible Louis Stanley, golf correspondent for The Field and author of nearly 20 related volumes.  For sheer output, however, one doubts if anyone will ever top the longtime editor of Golfing magazine, Robert Browning, who during this period was responsible for a dizzying 350 club handbooks or regional guides.  Guaranteeing himself acclaim for something beyond simple productivity, however, Browning also published A History of Golf (1955), one of the game’s definitive historical volumes.

From the professional ranks, it would be impossible to ignore the writing of the great mid-century British star Henry Cotton.  Strictly speaking, Cotton did publish two relatively minor volumes well before the war, but his eight major works (including This Game of Golf and My Golfing Album) ran between 1948 and 1980.  Also prominent during the 1960s were Guardian and Country Life columnist Pat Ward-Thomas and an extremely talented amateur, Sir Peter Allen, whose fine guidebooks Famous Fairways and Play The Best Courses crossed over into the modern period.

Golf writing on the west side of the Atlantic, largely on hiatus during the war years, picked up again soon thereafter, and again relied upon the game’s top players to attract an audience.  Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan and Sam Snead all obliged with high-profile instructional works, and were soon joined by Lloyd Mangrum, Cary Middlecoff, Ken Venturi, Tony Lema, Julius Boros and others.  The dominant work of the period, however, was surely Hogan’s epic Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf, a truly seminal work written with Herbert Warren Wind in 1957.

Interestingly, some of the most successful titles of the era came from the stars of yesteryear.  For example, 1956’s autobiographical The Walter Hagen Story finally recounted the Haig’s legendary career, while Bobby Jones scored with two relatively late entries, Golf Is My Game (1960) and Bobby Jones on Golf (1966).  But coming from furthest off the pace was the Silver Scot, Tommy Armour, whose last Major championship had come way back in 1931.  Some two decades later, Armour hit it big with 1953’s blockbuster How To Play Your Best Golf All The Time, then managed something of an encore with the popular A Round of Golf With Tommy Armour (1959).

This proliferation of nostalgic entries notwithstanding, however, post-war American golf writing did experience the arrival of two major new contributors.  The first was Herbert Warren Wind, simply this country’s greatest-ever chronicler of the game who would eventually ply his trade for many memorable years at the New Yorker.  Wind’s comprehensive 1948 epic The Story of American Golf remains, fully a half-century later, as the domestic golf history, having been revised and/or reprinted thrice.  Similarly, his partnerships with Gene Sarazen (1950’s Thirty Years of Championship Golf) and Jack Nicklaus (1969’s The Greatest Game of All) produced two of the finest golfing biographies of all time.

Somewhat lost in Wind’s wake was the fine scribe Charles Price, whose opus The World of Golf (1962) is another first-class historical survey.  Price’s 1964 compilation The American Golfer, an anthology of articles culled from that excellent Golden Age magazine, was another important work which enjoyed reprinting during the late 1980s.

Finally, we close out this era with an instructional volume that has turned heads for 35 years, Homer Kelley’s thoroughly unique The Golfing Machine (1969).  It’s probably just as well that this cultish legend was produced so far ahead of its time, however, for despite such a head start, I doubt that even those who started reading it in 1969 have fully digested it still.

THE MODERN ERA (1970-The Present)

The early years of the modern era represented, by any measure, a slow awakening from golf’s literary doldrums of the 1950s and 60s.  To be sure, several established writers from the past remained at the peak of their game, carrying forward the great tradition of eyewitness tournament coverage and knowledgeable, pertinent columns.  Chief among these was Herbert Warren Wind, whose twin anthologies Herbert Warren Wind’s Golf Book (1971) and Following Through (1985) are perhaps the finest general works of the period.  Also remaining highly relevant were Pat Ward-Thomas and Charles Price, who were joined in the modern pantheon by Englishman Peter Dobereiner and Texan Dan Jenkins, both popular writers with entries on their résumés prior to 1970.

But beyond this traditional, faintly nostalgic approach, things were changing.  With jet engines making the world a much smaller place, books profiling the world’s famous courses became commonplace.  Many were fairly limited volumes, designed more for the coffee table than any serious examination of great golf design.  One grand exception, however, is the superb World Atlas of Golf, a colorful volume authored jointly in 1976 by Ward-Thomas, Wind, Price and the great Australian champion Peter Thomson.  The World Atlas saw six subsequent revised editions through 2005, and is about to be re-launched as an entirely revised New World Atlas of Golf in the fall of 2008.

Additional stars among “golf course” authors include the aforementioned Sir Peter Allen, American James Finegan and architect/writer Tom Doak, whose uniquely entertaining The Confidential Guide (1996) stands as one of the more forthright golf books ever published.

The mention of Doak reminds us that for the first time since the Golden Age, course architecture has recently returned to the literary limelight.  Doak’s thorough The Anatomy of A Golf Course (1992) stands tall in this realm as do a pair of books by historian/architect Geoff Shackelford, The Golden Age of Golf Design (1999) and Grounds For Golf (2003).  As a combination historical volume and reference source, however, nothing can approach the encyclopedic The Architects of Golf, an epic 1993 effort produced by Geoffrey Cornish and Ron Whitten.  Avid readers can also locate attractive biographical works on a number of Golden Age designers, a trend which continues strong at the time of this writing.

Though the modern game seems powerfully intent upon losing touch with its past, some very thorough research has, in recent years, produced several important historical volumes.  Perhaps the most interesting (and elusive) among these is Alastair Johnston’s privately produced The Chronicles of Golf, 1457-1857 (1993), while David Stirk’s Golf: History & Tradition (1998) and David Hamilton’s more narrowly focused Golf: Scotland’s Game (1998) stand out among those commercially available.

As it ever was, instruction continues to remain the game’s most popular literary genre, with the post-1970 era producing the usual mix of excellence and silliness.  Jack Nicklaus’s Golf My Way (1974) and Byron Nelson’s Shape Your Swing The Modern Way (1976) were perhaps the era’s first standards, though a series of highly popular works by Texan Harvey Penick (beginning with 1992’s Little Red Book) contain material that the author began gathering many years earlier.  Among more recent entries, former NASA physicist Dave Pelz’s Short Game Bible (1999) and Putting Bible (2000) have been highly successful, as have several volumes produced by the chief of modern swing gurus, David Leadbetter.  Among contemporary player-authored books, Ernie Els’ How To Build A Classic Golf Swing (1996), Nick Faldo’s Faldo: A Swing For Life (1995), Tom Watson’s Getting Up and Down (1983) and Raymond Floyd’s The Elements of Scoring (1998) might be selected to head a wide and ever-growing field.

An additional area of golf literature largely new to the modern era is the club history book.  The quality and scope of these volumes generally run the gamut, from simple staple-bound pamphlets to colorful hardcovers on par with the product of major publishing houses.  For The Golfer’s Library, I have selected 25 of the very best, though it’s a good bet that these will be challenged by many attractive competitors in the years ahead.

Finally, the library of golf seems over the years to have suffered only from a lack of high-quality reference books.  However the modern era has provided a pair which I believe any avid reader will find essential: Donald Steel and Peter Ryde’s marvelous The Shell International Encyclopedia of Golf (1975) and Joseph Murdoch and Richard Donovan’s bibliographic bible The Game of Golf and The Printed Word 1566-1985 (1988).  Though not entirely current, they remain, at the time of this writing, indispensable.

Such, then, is the briefest recounting of golf literature’s evolution, one which provides only a loose framework with which to tackle this book.  We may find it worth noting, however, that as the ethos of the corporate mentality seeps into the publishing industry and increasingly more books are produced away from the major houses, certain enduring aspects of golf’s written charm still hold fast.  To wit: The Spring of 2003 saw the publication of Bernard Darwin on Golf, the 14th collection of Darwin’s work to be assembled, six of them in the modern era.  Very soon now, the great Bernardo will have more anthologies published posthumously than when he was alive — and if that sort of longevity doesn’t suggest some hope for the game’s future, I surely don’t know what does.