Golfer hits ball in early morning lightDavid J. Phillip
I've been a New Yorker subscriber for decades, and I've always enjoyed the magazine's golf pieces. Nobody wrote golf with more authority and insight than the late Herbert Warren Wind, whose essays on tournaments and players could reach 15,000 words. He once said that he admires golf writers who can set a piece down in 700 words. Herb, with whom I was fortunate to share some walks and dinners at various majors, and about whom I wrote a few pieces, said, "It takes me that long to curb my throat." Many of his New Yorker essays are collected in the book Following Through.
Nobody has replaced Herb at The New Yorker as far as golf writing goes. By that I mean the sterling weekly doesn't assign a specific writer to stretch it out on tournaments. But one does see golf stories from time to time. David Owen, who knows golf and writes about it from time to time in Golf Digest, wrote a profile of Tiger Woods in the double issue of Aug. 21 and 28, 2001, called The Chosen One. John McPhee - and who writes non-fiction better than McPhee? - wrote about his return to golf after an absence of 55 years in the Aug. 6, 2007 issue, when he attended the U.S. Open that Angel Cabrera won. That was at the Oakmont Country Club near Pittsburgh. McPhee's essay is called Rip Van Golfer.
As it happens, I was standing beside the main scoreboard at that U.S. Open one day while trying to find out what Stephen Ames had shot. I turned to my left and noticed a man wearing a media badge with the name John McPhee on it. Like a star-struck teenager, I blurted out, "Are you John McPhee?" Who did I think he was? We chatted and the next day the USGA's Rand Jerris asked me if I would help McPhee with any questions he had as he prepared his piece. I was flattered that he'd want to talk golf with me, and of course I agreed.
We soon struck up an e-mail correspondence. I knew that McPhee liked single-malt whisky, from his evocative essay on the subject that's in his anthology In the Highlands and Islands. We had that in common; I'm enjoying a wee dram of Balvenie as I write (is it showing?). I'd read anything McPhee writes. Rip Van Golfer is collected in his 2010 anthology Silk Parachute. He writes about the U.S. Open, yes, but there's much more to enjoy on an autumn evening, or any evening. McPhee takes us into the world of the legendary New Yorker fact-checkers, to summer camp, to rivers and canoeing, to his family, to the world of lacrosse. Read him. You'll keep reading him.
This is all a roundabout way of referring to the fact that The New Yorker has recently published a couple of short comic takes around golf—comic takes that say a lot about a game that brings out the obsessive-compulsive in many of its advocates. The first is by Larry David, he who makes episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm so much crazy fun. Here he is on his frustration with golf, and Curb enthusiasts will of course know that the show has included many golf scenes and themes. This piece was in the July 4, 2011 issue.
There's also this jaunty piece by Ian Frazier that made me twist in my easy chair as I read it. It's in the Nov. 7 issue of The New Yorker. Golf really does translate oddly well into words, as somebody once wrote. Frazier must appreciate the grip that golf can exert upon its participants. Now, is that an overlapping, a 10-finger, or an interlocking grip? All I know is that the golf pieces in The New Yorker have had me in their grip for a long, long time.
Thanks, Herb. Thanks, John. Thanks, David, Larry, and Ian.
And finally, a note to David Remnick, the magazine's editor who knows sports—his book King of the World about Muhammad Ali is first-rate. More golf, please.
ALSO FROM LORNE RUBENSTEIN:
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Lorne Rubenstein has written a golf column for The Globe and Mail since 1980. He has played golf since the early 1960s and was the Royal Canadian Golf Association's first curator of its museum and library at the Glen Abbey Golf Club in Oakville, Ontario and the first editor of Score, Canada's Golf Magazine, where he continues to write a column and features. He has won four first-place awards from the Golf Writers Association of America, one National Magazine Award in Canada, and, most recently, he won the award for the best feature in 2009 from the Golf Journalists Association of Canada. Lorne has written 11 books, including The Natural Golf Swing, with George Knudson (1988); Links: An Insider's Tour Through the World of Golf (1990); The Swing, with Nick Price (1997); The Fundamentals of Hogan, with David Leadbetter (2000); A Season in Dornoch: Golf and Life in the Scottish Highlands (2001); Mike Weir: The Road to the Masters (2003); A Disorderly Compendium of Golf, with Jeff Neuman (2006); and his latest, This Round's on Me (2009). He is a member of the Ontario Golf Hall of Fame and the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame. Lorne can be reached at rube@sympatico.ca . You can now follow him on Twitter @lornerubenstein