Doug’s World

Golf Books

I’m one of those people who reads a lot about whatever I’m currently studying, so in the years after I started playing golf I acquired many golf books. I think it was about 60 books when I did a major purge a couple of years ago. I got down to 10 golf books, and I carefully picked the ones I kept.

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“Extraordinary Golf: The Art of the Possible” by Fred Shoemaker

The book I’d keep if I could only keep one is Fred Shoemaker’s “Extraordinary Golf.” It’s a book that changed the way I feel about playing golf, and after that change I played better golf than I ever had before. But, ironically, the change this book engenders is to stop caring about score and instead take pride in being part of an elite group of golfers, the ones who stand over the ball committed to swinging freely and trusting their swings.

Fred describes the culture of golfers in a way that rings true with me: a culture where the implicit social contract is “let’s all agree that there is something wrong with our swings and we want to find a way to fix it.” But suppose you just decided you have a natural genius for golf, but sometimes you think too much and prevent yourself from playing up to your potential? Suppose you just chose to feel that way every time out, and accepted the possibility that you might shoot 70 today, or you might shoot 110, and in either case you’d just trust your swing and play with joyful wreckless abandon? Suppose you embraced your inconsistency, and instead of aspiring to shoot a mediocre acceptable score every time, you were thrilled to know that everything from a pro-style shot to a complete miss were possible every time you swing a club?

Too California for some, but I loved it.

My favorite part of the book is when he shows photo sequences of the swings of a scratch player, a low-handicapper, and a high-handicapper when they’re hitting golf balls, and then when they’re throwing their golf clubs at the target. Most people take a much better swing when they throw their club at the target, releasing it in the follow-through, rather than trying to hit a ball. The high-handicapper throws clubs like the low-handicapper hits golf balls, and the low-handicapper throws clubs like the scratch player hits balls.

I strongly encourage everyone to do this whenever they can. Not just because it’s a good drill, but because it’s fun! Just go find a big open space with soft grass for your clubs to land on, and start throwing them until you can smoothly swing a club and throw it straight at the target. Then hit a golf ball with that same swing. Great stuff.

“Golf is not a Game of Perfect” by Bob Rotella

This was the big hit among the golf-psychology books of the 90s, and it led to a series of books by Rotella on the mental side of the game. I’ve read all of his books, and I think this first one covers 90% of what he has to say, and the other books re-tread this content with an occasional something extra thrown in.

At the time this book came out, many golfers didn’t know that top players are pretty serious about concepts like visualization, positive expectations (regardless of recent results), trusting their swings, and and having a calm uncluttered mind while swinging. And although that’s all common knowledge now, most golfers do these things inconsistently, if at all.

Annika Sorenstam was coming on strong when I first read this book in ‘96, and I remember seeing something really cool one day on an LPGA tournament. The commentator (I think it was Johnny Miller) showed Annika walking away from a particular green on two consecutive days: one day she eagled that hole, the other day she double-bogeyed it. She had the same pace, the same expression, the same mannerisms and tempo and demeanor, on both days. That image sums up what Rotella teaches: you can choose to have a positive upbeat attitude when you play, and doing so tends to make you play your best over time. You can squint your eyes and breathe hard and grunt your way to success in sports that are about pushing your muscles hard, but golf is about pushing your mind hard and most minds don’t acheive peak performance when they’re experiencing big surges of adrenaline and intense thoughts and moods. Easy to read, hard to put into practice.

My favorite concept in this book is “conservative strategy, cocky swing.” When I’m hitting 2-iron off the tee and talking trash to my friends with drivers in their hands, or deliberately laying up in the fairway from 150 yards, I’m trying to do what Bob taught me.

I’ve given away several copies of this book. I think it’s the best book for somebody starting out, and also for anyone who gets angry on the course about anything other than the drink-cart girl being out of their favorite beverage. But it’s not a book that helps everyone; I’ve known people who couldn’t stand Rotella’s tone and let that keep them from studying his message. You can lead a horse to water …

“Getting Up and Down” by Tom Watson

The bible of the short game, from a guy who was one of the best at those shots. Watson also hit one of the most famous chip shots of all time, holing out from the deep rough on #17 at Pebble Beach to beat Jack Nicklaus in the U.S. Open. A photo of that shot adorns the cover of the book, of course.

Anyway, Watson covers it all here: putting, chipping, pitch shots, bunker shots, trouble shots, and everything else you’d do within 50 yards of the pin. He also describes how to think your way around a golf course, setting up the shots you want to have around the green instead of aiming at the flag every time and desperately hoping for miracles.

The full swing has changed quite a bit over the years, but the fundamentals of these types of shots haven’t changed in decades. Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, and Michele Wie hit the same shots Watson hit around the green, and they’re all explained in this book. No shortcuts are provided, you just have to put in the hours, but for my money Watson covers the basics of the short game better than anyone else. I could read this book every year, and usually do when I’m playing a lot of golf.

“The Four Magic Moves to Winning Golf” by Joe Dante

This is the only book on how to swing a golf club that’s on this list. All the other books are about playing golf, but this one is about swinging a golf club. The two activites are only tangentially related.

I’m convinced that everyone’s optimum swing is unique because everyone’s body is unique, so I’m not saying this book has anything to offer anyone else, but the four moves it describes all seem to fit my swing. When I follow the instruction in this book, I hit better golf shots. In general, Dante is all about an early wrist break and a late hit (i.e., do nothing conscious with your hands in the swing), with an emphasis on timing and tempo and rhythm. My friend Tom’s swing is a good example of what Dante teaches. (Sorry to ruin the mystery for those who haven’t seen it, Tom.)

Dante’s style is very dated, not least because this book was first published in 1962. I just noticed it was re-released in 1995 when I searched for the link above, so I’ve ordered a fresh new copy.

Harvey Penick’s “Little Red Book”

A classic. Harvey Penick was an old codger in Texas who was a teacher and mentor to both Ben Crenshaw and Tom Kite. This book is full of cute little stories about lessons Harvey taught, mostly mental-game and course-management tips, but also plenty of specific instruction. Two things come to mind when I remember this book, which I’ve read a few times.

First, the time he wanted to teach students how to hit high flop shots around the green. Rather than telling them what to do, he gave them a task — a tree or something to hit over — and then made them go at it until they figured out how to get the ball up high quickly. This makes the technique the student’s own, and they’ll trust it more than something they’ve been told by a third party like a teacher. I hit a 50-foot pitch shot over a little tree next to the #5 green at Carnation last weekend, and was thinking of this lesson when I did it.

Second, I love his comment “it takes just as long to play your way out of a slump as it took to play your way into it.” That rings so true to me, and not just in golf.

“Extraordinary Putting” by Fred Shoemaker

More of Fred’s creative thinking about golf. This time he talks about putting, but as always it’s a metaphor for the full swing, and life itself. The emphasis is on awareness and being in the moment while putting, soaking up everything from the sparkle of the sun on the dimples of the golf ball to the area all around the hole (not just the area your putt will roll through) to your perception of the details of your own putting motion. I read this book in the last two weeks, and I really liked it, but that’s not too surprising since Fred’s other book is my all-time favorite golf book.

There’s a Eureka moment in this book, like throwing golf clubs in “Extraordinary Golf” — the discovery, through a drill used with hundreds of golfers at the Extraordinary Golf schools, that most people sink more short putts if the ball is moving when they hit it, rather than sitting still. Think about it: if you’re like most people, you’ll have a better chance of making a 3-footer if somebody rolls the ball toward you and you hit it while it’s moving.

Fred goes on to test this same concept with full swings, and finds that most people find the sweet spot more often if the ball is moving when they hit it. How cool is that? (It occured to me that this concept sheds interesting light on the trick that Tiger and many others do, hitting a ball out of the air while it’s falling.) Fred’s conclusion is that we need to find a way to be as loose and smooth when hitting a stationary ball as we’d be if the ball was moving, and he has some drills for working on that concept.

Anyway, I’ve not practiced my putting much since I got the clubs out of storage a month ago, but I’ve taken 12 or 13 putts in 9 holes a few times since I read this book.

“The Plane Truth for Golfers” by Jim Hardy

This is the book I’m reading right now. It’s by Jim Hardy, with a lot of support from Peter Jacobsen. Jacobsen and Fred Couples are the two PGA Tour pros close to my age who grew up in the Pacific Northwest as I did, so I’ve followed both of them pretty closely over the years.

The book covers the difference between two-plane swings, where the hands and the shoulders turn in different planes, and one-plane swings, where the hands turn in the same plane as the shoulders. The premise is that either type of swing is fine, but the author and Jacobsen have an obvious bias toward the one-plane swing. That’s OK, though: I’m a two-plane swinger and am getting a lot out of the book.

One-plane swingers include Ben Hogan and Ernie Els; two-plane swingers include pretty much everyone in the old days (Bobby Jones, Walter Hagen, Gene Sarazen, etc.) and modern players like Davis Love and Phil Mickelson. Tiger was a two-planer, but he has moved to a one-plane swing in recent years.

The key concept of this book is that you should be aware of which type of swing you have, and then that will help you know which types of swing advice to embrace or ignore. For example, a two-planer like me should never try to get the club inside the target line early in the backswing, or to lead the downswing with the shoulders. But lots of golf instructional material puts forth concepts like those as “swing fundamentals,” as if they applied to everyone.

This book is helping me understand why Ben Hogan’s “Five Lessons: the Modern Fundamentals of Golf” always screwed me up. It was such a respected book, and I’ve known players who improved by studying it, but any time I try to do anything in that book other than the grip, it makes me play worse and not better. Now I know why.

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So that’s my list of favorite golf books for now. Anybody have a golf book I should put on the reading list this year?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 1st, 2006 at 11:26 pm. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.