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Golf was once described by Mark Twain as a good walk
spoiled by a little white ball. There’s a lot of truth in that simple statement. Golf
courses tend to be splendid canvases of nature, with tall majestic trees, lush green
grass, rolling hills, clear ponds, and bubbling brooks across them. But instead of being
able to enjoy them, the average golfer is busy trying to avoid the water and woods, all
the while cursing the tall lush grass in the rough.
Ben Hogan was perhaps
the greatest golfer in America during the first half of the last century. He was so
good, in fact, that Sports Illustrated sought him out to help write articles about
the basic things a golfer could do improve their game. Now, it’s not like Hogan was God
or anything, but on the golf course, he was definitely a slightly lesser deity. He was
one of the few golfers who could truthfully say that they owned their swing and that it
would be there for them every day, no matter what. Even Tiger Woods won’t make that
claim.
The core idea of this book is that every golfer, no matter how
average, can build a repeatable swing and break 80 every game. Breaking 80 is huge for
the weekend golfer. To think that a book with fewer than 150 pages could do that is
amazing, and this one comes close.
Hogan covers the fundamentals of
grip, stance, back swing, and down swing. His pointers are clear, if a bit simply put
for today’s reader, and as precise as his game was. Reading this book is like getting a
private lesson from the Master. Hogan’s lessons are illustrated by Anthony Ravielli, one
of the men whose artwork made Sports Illustrated a must-read magazine long before
the discovery of the bikini.
This is the book that should be the anchor of
any golfer’s library. If you’ve been playing all your life, or if you’ve just picked up
your first club, this is a book you must own. Every golf pro recommends it, and every
American player on the tour owns a copy. It may not be the Holy Bible, but in
golf it’s a very close second.
