quotations about golf
Golf epitomizes the tame world. On a golf course nature is neutered. The grass is clean, a lawn laundry that wipes away the mud, the insect, the bramble, nettle and thistle, an Eezy-wipe lawn where nothing of life, dirty and glorious, remains. Golf turns outdoors into indoors, a prefab mat of stultified grass, processed, pesticided, herbicided, the pseudo-green of formica sterility.... The enemy of wildness, it is a demonstration of the absolute dominion of man over wild nature.
JAY GRIFFITHS
Wild: An Elemental Journey
Although practice swings
Can be helpful things,
Twere better, indeed, not take any
Than to fiddle and fret
And before playing get
Exhausted from taking too many.
RICHARD ARMOUR
"Preliminaries"
If you drink, quit. If you smoke, cut down. That covers the physical end of it. Then you've got to get your brain in shape, which is even harder to do and more important. Following the same routine every week--play Wednesday through Sunday, do your laundry on Monday, travel on Tuesday--burns a lot of guys out. Forget about hitting balls, it's the lifestyle that will get you.
LEE TREVINO
attributed, New Quotable Golfer
Golf ... is the infallible test. The man who can go into a patch of rough alone, with the knowledge that only God is watching him, and play his ball where it lies, is the man who will serve you faithfully and well.
P.G. WODEHOUSE
The Clicking of Cuthbert
Golf requires goofy pants and a fat ass. You should talk to my neighbor the accountant, probably a great golfer, huge ass.
ADAM SANDLER
Happy Gilmore
I started golf in my forties, which is the ultimate optimism.
MICHAEL J. FOX
Esquire, Dec. 2007
It took me seventeen years to get three thousand hits in baseball. I did it in one afternoon on the golf course.
HANK AARON
attributed, Why Do They Call It a Birdie?
Rail splitting produced an immortal President in Abraham Lincoln; but golf, with 20 thousand courses, hasn't produced even a good, A number-1 Congressman.
WILL ROGERS
attributed, Will Rogers' World
The ardent golfer would play Mount Everest if somebody put a flagstick on top.
PETE DYE
attributed, As Hogan Said...
In stroke play I don't particularly care what the guys I am playing with shoot or do, because you're just trying to play the course. In match play I think you find yourself rooting against your opponent a lot more, because the difference between winning a hole could be the difference between winning or losing the match.
MARCH CALCAVECCHIA
Golf Digest, 1991
The true test is against "Old Man Par" and the golf course itself.
JACQUI NICOLETTI MCSORLEY & JOHNNY GONZALES
Golf Guide for Parents and Players
I've seen lifelong friends drift apart over golf just because one could play better, but the other counted better.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
Leacock on Life
Golf is becoming a game of non-choice. It is no longer the person who knows the value of each of his clubs, and who can work out when it is proper to lay one and when to play another that succeeds at the game. Rather, it is the power hitter getting so far down the fairway that he has a privileged ease for the remainder of the hole.
GEOFFREY S. CORNISH
Golf Architecture
Regardless of how well or not so well we play the game, a round of golf is plot in a nutshell with surlyn cover. It begins, as stories do, with infinite possibilities and hopes for a happy ending. Then, along the way, all hell's likely to break loose.
JEFF SILVERMAN
introduction, Classic Golf Stories
Golf and sex are the only two things you don't have to be good at to enjoy.
KEVIN COSTNER
Tin Cup