Phil Mickelson’s Secrets of the Short Game

Grade: A
Teacher’s Comments: Clear and Concise

Phil Mickelson has had a rough start to 2010, thanks mostly to an errant driver, but he’s still regarded as one of golf’s greats from fifty yards in.  In Secrets of the Short game, Phil offers hackers one of the better basic texts I’ve seen on putting, pitching, chipping, flopping and sand play.

The book apparently is a supplement to Phil’s DVD (which I’ve not seen), but I think it works well as a stand alone text. It’s a coffee table style book, with huge, gorgeous photos and relatively short blocks of accompanying text. The brevity is a strength, however, as Phil and coauthors Guy Yocom and T.R. Reinman were wise enough to let the photos do most of the talking.

Phil begins each of the chapters with some personal reflection, recounting how he has played the shot in question in critical situations. He then gets into step-by-step procedures for each type of short game shot. Phil explains ball position, face position, angle of attack, and so on, as well as offering practice routines. The photos illustrate each point with an appropriate shot of Phil.

Much of what is in the book, I already “knew,” but had never put into so many words. It was nice to see them laid out in black and white. An example: the design of a center shafted putter requires that the stroke go straight back and straight through, while a heel shafted putter requires a stroke with an arc. Another: A fluffly lie requires a sweeping, flatter swing plane. Trying to pick it cleanly more often than not will result in a thin shot; trying to explode on the ball leaves it short.

That’s not to say the book’s material is all this obvious or simple.  There’s also an awful lot that I hadn’t really considered. But the text and photos make all of the points abundantly clear. For me, a clear advantage of the book over the DVD is that I could study each photo for as long as I wanted, paying attention to different parts of the setup, face, shaft angle and so on.

The only real flaw in the book is that the photos are all in the reverse of what I’m used to seeing, since Phil is a lefty (actually, he’s a righty, but plays left because he learned by mirroring his father’s moves). I don’t think it’s a significant flaw, though.

Recommended.

Breaking the Slump: How Great Players Survived Their Darkest Moments in Golf—and What You Can Learn from Them

Breaking The Slump
by Jimmy Roberts

Grade: B+
Teacher’s Comments: Good, but it could have been much more.

Breaking The Slump is a slim volume containing eighteen chapters on how sixteen professional golfers, one President and a professional skater first fell into—and then worked out of—a golfing slump. Written by television golf analyst Jimmy Roberts, it’s a fun, quick read, but ultimately ended up being somewhat less than I had hoped. The subtitle of the book, “How Great Players Survived Their Darkest Moments In Golf—and What You Can Learn From Them,” had led me to believe that Roberts would work harder to extend these lessons outside the world of golf. For the most part, he did not.

That said, there’s a lot here for the golfer and golf fan.

Fans and casual golfers will learn a lot about some of the most famous names in the game, including Phil Mickelson, Tom Watson, Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Steve Stricker, and David Duval.  What makes it interesting is that Roberts gets them to tell about a part of their lives that we do not normally see—their failures. You can learn a lot more about a person in the way they deal with adversity than in the way they deal with success. That each of these golfers was willing (some more than others) to let the rest of the world in on their slumps speaks volumes about their character.

More serious golfers also can glean a degree of good advice from Breaking The Slump. Most of the players interviewed identified bad mental habits as the source of their woes. David Duval says that above all, you must protect your confidence. Justin Rose tells us to avoid negative thoughts. Jack Nicklaus and Johnny Miller got better by walking away from the game for a couple of months to clear their minds. Teacher Rick Smith got Justin Leonard to refocus on making shots. Dottie Pepper went back to basics by rereading notes from her original teacher, who had since passed away. Paul Azinger learned from a carnival boxer to imagine himself winning. Greg Norman stared at clouds.

All seemed to confirm Bobby Jones dictum: Competitive golf is played mainly on a five-and-a-half-inch course ... the space between your ears.

Two of the interviews in the book struck me as a bit odd. The President is George Herbert Walker Bush (41), a dedicated golfer who serves as Honorary Chairman of the First Tee, and whose father and grandfather served as Presidents of the USGA. He’s a nice guy, and a dedicated golfer, but I would have preferred another golf pro, especially another LPGA star such as Nancy Lopez, whose long career surely has had its slumps.

Even stranger was the inclusion of Olympic Skater Dan Jansen. Roberts makes a valiant effort to compare the skills sets of top flight athletes, but it just didn’t work for me. I know that in including Bush and Jansen, Roberts was trying to extend the lessons beyond the boundaries of the course. He just didn’t have the depth of insight to do so.

So in the final analysis, I think it’s a good book, that had so much more potential. Golfers and golf fans will enjoy it, but its not for a wider audience.

The USA Today Golfer’s Encyclopedia: A Comprehensive Reference of Professional Golf, 1958 through the Present

When I was younger, one of my favorite books was the Baseball Encyclopedia, with its comprehensive data sets of players, games and transactions. I used it as the primary data reference for my Master’s Thesis on the economics of free agency in professional baseball.

I just discovered this golfer’s version in browsing through Amazon. From the publisher’s description:

The first and only comprehensive reference of statistics and biographical information on the last fifty years of golf. The USA TODAY Golfer’s Encyclopedia is an exhaustively researched statistical and biographical reference on professional golfers and their performances over the past fifty years. Including all golfers who have had a minimum of 20 starts on the PGA tour since 1958, this book is the first of its kind and an invaluable reference for golf fans and golf writers alike. Also included are special sections on the Masters, U.S. Open, British Open, and PGA Championship.

It’s on my wish list.

I was checking the Amazon previews and came across this: To Win and Die in Dixie: The Birth of the Modern Golf Swing and the Mysterious Death of Its Creator

It looks fascinating. From Publisher’s summary:

A fascinating biography of a forgotten golf legend, a riveting whodunit of a covered-up killing, a scalding exposé of a closed society—in To Win and Die in Dixie, award-winning writer Steve Eubanks weaves all these elements into a masterly book that resurrects a superb sportsman and reconstructs a startling crime.

J. Douglas Edgar was the British-born golfer who broke every record, invented the modern swing, and coached such winners as Bobby Jones, the greatest amateur in history, and Alexa Stirling, the finest female player of her day. But on August 8, 1921, he was a man dead in the middle of the road, the victim, conventional wisdom said, of a hit-and-run.

Comer Howell thought otherwise. He was an Atlanta Constitution reporter and heir to the paper’s fortune, a man frustrated by his reputation as the pampered boss’s son. To Howell, the physical evidence didn’t add up to a car accident. As he chronicled Edgar’s life, Howell discovered a working-class striver who had risen in the world through a passion to succeed, a quality the newspaperman admired. And as he investigated Edgar’s death, Howell also found a man whose recklessness may have doomed him to a violent demise.

Cutting cinematically between Howell’s present and Edgar’s championship past, To Win and Die in Dixie brilliantly portrays one man’s quest for excellence and another’s search for redemption and the truth. Their stories meet in a Southern society of plush country-club golf courses, vast wealth, and decadent secrets.

Filled with the vivid golf writing for which its author is renowned, To Win and Die in Dixie is a real-life story both shocking and inspiring, a book that propels Steve Eubanks to a new level of literary achievement.

The Kiss That Caused My Slice

By John Ducker

Grade: It’s a “B” for me, but your mileage may vary.

Poetry is a personal thing, and what one person enjoys, another thinks utter drivel. My tastes run to Kipling, for example, in spite of my favorite High School teacher’s efforts to turn me on to EE Cummings. I love Poe, but not Maya Angelou.

That said, I enjoyed The Kiss that Caused My Slice, even if the “style” of poetry isn’t my favorite. Each of Ducker’s nineteen poems is a short golf story and his passion for the game shines through any qualms I might have about the meter and rhyme. There are poems about long lost golfing partners,  a round with the mother-in-law, and a girl he met on the course who left a lasting impression. Some are whimsical fantasies; others deep introspection. All, I think, will strike a chord with nearly any serious golfer.

A nice bonus to the verse are the accompanying course photos from around the United States and Scotland. The collection has eighteen poems and one for the clubhouse, so the course photos fit right in.

It’s a worthy effort, and depending upon your appreciation of poetry, worthy of a read.