6 golf books: Swing into spring with these new titles

As fairways green up in the Northern hemisphere, here are a handful of recent releases that golfers may reach for between rounds.

1. "Men in Green," by Michael Bamberger

Michael Bamberger, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, undertakes an unusual road trip to visit golfers he wanted to meet across the United States – nine “living legends," including Arnold Palmer and Tom Watson, and nine “secret legends,” golfers who excelled beyond the limelight in other aspects of the sport, as a teaching pro, tournament director, tour caddie, and other positions. The trek takes Bamberger and a sidekick from a trailer park in northern California to Arnold Palmer’s private warehouse in Latrobe, Pa.

Here’s an excerpt from “Men in Green”:

“Jack [Nicklaus] was a plodding player, often annoyingly so. But he was also careful, and he was never involved in any sort of rules dispute. He called penalties on himself in the rare instance when something went wrong, but there was never a time when anybody accused him of being anything less than completely faithful to the rule book. Hundreds of thousands of shots, and never an issue.

“ ‘When you start playing as a kid, your dad teaches you good sportsmanship and to live by the rules,’ Jack told us. ‘That’s what my dad taught me, and I’m sure that’s what Arnold’s dad taught him. The rules are the rules. That’s golf.’ "

1 of 6

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.