The Rotary Swing
by Chuck Quinton

Grade: B
Teacher’s Comments: A good volume, but much of the philosophy can be found in other books.

Chuck Quinton’s The Rotary Swing is a slender volume with big ideas. A teacher from Windemere, Florida, Quinton believes that his Rotary Swing offers a set of simple fundamentals that can make golf easier and more fun for the masses.

In many ways, the Rotary Swing resembles Jim Hardy’s “One Plane Swing”: There’s the well balanced stance, with the shoulders moving fairly level, and no pronounced tilt. And there is the basic idea of rotating the body, with the arms and hands following the rotation, not initiating it.

Quinton’s approach to learning the swing is somewhat different, however. He begins with the idea of a swing in motion. It’s not until more than halfway through the book that he turns to the issues of grip, ball position and stance.

Golf, he says, is not a series of static positions, but a dynamic motion. “Always Be Turning”—ABT—is his oft repeated mantra.

That make sense to me. My best shots always seem to come when I forget about all those ball, body and club positions and just swing through.

As thin as it is, the book is quite wordy, but Quinton thankfully offers some very good drills to help you “feel” your way through his ideas. It also includes a smattering of photographs.

Production values on the book are not the greatest. The cover just screams “self-published, with its weirdly distorted photos of a guy at the top of his swing. (It’s also an interesting photo, since Quinton has de-emphasized set positions in favor of ABT). The internal photos also are not particularly good, tending toward the dark.

I was intrigued by Quinton’s thoughts. I’ve wasted the last several summers switching back and forth between the more traditional two-plane, and the one-plane swings. Both work for me, but only for little while. Neither has permanently elevated my game.

Chuck Quinton’s Rotary Swing manual has me almost convinced that I should make a permanent switch back to the one plane. It’s simple and powerful. I just wonder how my 46-year-old body will stand up to that motion. I’m very fit and flexible now ... but for how long?

What I really need to do is to find a teacher who can take a look at what I’ve got physically and tell me which one I should pursue. It’s too bad Quinton is in Florida. I have a feeling he could do the job.

Maybe he has a disciple in Michigan ...

The Golfers Game Book: A Manual of Golf Games and Side Bets
by Bridget Logan

Grade: A
Teachers’ Comments: There are more games and side bets here than you could possibly use in a lifetime.

The Golfer’s Game Book is a compendium of 238 different golf games, alternate scoring formats, practice exercises and side bets, all compiled into a neat little spiral bound book. Each game has its own little entry describing how to play, and offering variants where appropriate.

Some of the games listed are common. Regular alternate scoring formats are described, such as best ball, alternate shot and match play. So are typical betting formats, such as the Nassau and Calcutta. The Golfers Game Book also described a few less common—but still familiar—ones like the Callaway System for handicapping a match.

But there are also a couple of hundred games that I have never encountered. For example, there’s a golf wordsearch, which is played on a practice green. Low Ball - High Ball is offered as a game played by teams of two, in which low and high balls are counted. Best At Something (aka Garbage, Trash, Goodies, Junk) is a side bet in which players add or subtract points for various categories during a round, such as drives in the fairway and lost balls.

Finding an appropriate game, bet or practice exercise is made easy by a reference chart / table of contents at the beginning of the book. The chart makes it easy to find solo games, games for your and your partner, your threesome, foursome, or larger groups. It also identifies practice games and side bets.

If I have one criticism of the book, it’s that the typesetting and layout are amateurishly done. I rather suspect the entire thing was done in Microsoft Word. But that’s not a deal breaker—just an observation from an old print designer and typesetter.

This is a book that at least one member of every regular foursome should acquire.  The amazing variety of games should ensure that your Saturday morning get-togethers never grow stale.

The Mysterious Montague: A True Tale of Hollywood, Golf, and Armed Robbery

Grade: B
Teacher’s Comments: A good read, as much a true crime story as it is about golf.

There seems to be a natural affinity between golf and mystery literature. Perhaps it’s the mysterious nature of the game itself—how it can seem so easy, and yet be so difficult; how players can find and lose their swings in a matter of moments; and all of the other seeming contradictions.

Golf mysteries from authors such as Roberta Isleib are among my favorite summer reading material. 

In The Mysterious Montague, Leigh Montville takes the golfing mystery to the realm of the real-life crime and trial drama.

The mysterious John Montague first surfaces in Hollywood in 1932 at the Lakeside club, a golfer of prodigious strength and surprisingly deft touch. (The descriptions immediately reminded me of John Daly.) He played with clubs so large no one else could swing them, producing drives of 300, 350 yards.

The Caddie Who Played with Hickory
Grade: A
Teacher’s Comments: It’s a good story, but even better in the way it evokes a particular time and place.

With The Caddie Who Played With Hickory, John Coyne returns to the world of the Midlothian Country Club. As in his earlier golf novel, the Caddie Who Knew Ben Hogan, the focus is not on the members, but on the caddies, wait staff and other help who keep the place running. It’s a wonderful read, and manages to convey a strong impression of time and place.

The year is 1946, and with that summer comes the news that the legendary Walter Hagen will return to Midlothian to commemorate his 1914 US Open victory at the Club. The game of golf has changed greatly in those thirty years, but for this event, Hagen will return to playing the hickory shafted clubs with which he made his mark.

Hagen’s return offers an opportunity for two caddies at the club: Tom O’Shea, who needs to find a way to get through college; and Harrison Cornell, a mysterious older newcomer who is somehow linked to Hagen’s past. Cornell teaches O’Shea to play with hickory shafted clubs, and together they plot to have him play a match against The Haig.

A terrific writer, Coyne has a particular skill for crafting interesting and believable characters. I think he could write a book about virtually every one of the characters in “Hickory.” Oddly though, for me the least believable character in the book also was one of the two around whom it revolves: Harrison Cornell. Coyne’s other characters might have been people he actually met; Cornell was someone he made up, and never quite got to know.

Coyne obviously is a fan and a player of the game of golf. His descriptions of play and on-course strategies are for me dead on.  He also has apparently played with hickory, for his descriptions of how to play those old shafts are very informative.  I’ve never played with hickory (nor likely ever will), but from Coyne’s descriptions, it seems as though it would be like playing with a graphite shaft that has too much flex.

Another strong theme in the book is one you’d expect—that of class consciousness in the late 1940s and 1950s. O’Shea, the other caddies and the “help” live in an entirely different world from the members. And O’Shea’s interest in one of the members’ daughters presents an interesting thread throughout. Coyne, I am certain has experienced these distinctions himself.

I enjoyed the book so much (and also his first golf book, The Caddy Who Knew Ben Hogan) that I am hoping that Coyne has another “caddy” book in his bag. The first two were so good, that a “trilogy” seems a natural.

First Sunday in April: The Masters
Grade: A

The GolfBlogger is a voracious reader, with an oeuvre that covers a wide range of topics: economics, history, science, medicine (yes, Mrs. GolfBlogger thinks this is weird, too), politics, the classics, science fiction, modern thrillers, and of course, sports. In short, I’ll read practically anything I can get my hands on, typically working through fifty or more books in a year. I just finished Julius Caesar’s Commentaries, and soon will start working on a biography of Thomas Moore.

One thing I’ve noticed in my literary travels is just how rich a body of work has grown up around the sport of golf. From Bernard Darwin, to Bobby Jones, P.G. Wodehouse, Herbert Warren Wind, Feinstein, Dodson, Jenkins and others, golf seems to inspire great writing. I think it’s in the very nature of the game—the way it lays bare our humanity. A round of golf can take a man from the depths of despair to the very heights of joy. It brings out the very worst, and the very best.

And perhaps nothing does it like the Masters at Augusta National. Indeed, with its legendary back nine, Augusta was specifically designed for triumph and disaster.

First Sunday in April: The Masters is a collection of stories, articles and reminisces of that legendary golf tournament. With contributions from professional writers, as well as from players, it is divided into sections: The Tradition, The Personalities, The Course, The Background, The Caddies, The Moments and The Controversies. For any one of these, the editors would have been able to put together enough to fill the book. It had to have been a hard task to choose a five to seven piece representative sample.

I enjoyed each of the pieces in the book—and all the more so because none was particularly long. They were perfectly suited for a few minutes read just before going to sleep. The breadth also was nice in that the book avoided being repetitive. The tone of the pieces range form humorous to serious to sentimental. Again, all welcome changes of pace.

The title of the book has been the bone of some contention in some circles: The first Sunday in April is actually the last day of the Houston Open, and the climax of the Masters is the second. But the book’s editors have a point, I think, in that the Masters is more than a Sunday; it’s a whole week of talk and prediction and preparation which just happens to culminate on the second Sunday. And in choosing such a wide variety of topics

That said, perhaps a better title would have been “One Week In April: The Masters”