Play better golf with the swing you already have.

The Five Inch Course on sale at Amazon.Com

The Five Inch Course is GolfBlogger’s new ebook, aimed at mid- to high- handicappers who would like to improve their scores, but who lack the time and money to commit to making serious swing changes.

Bobby Jones once said that “competitive golf is played on a five and a half inch course: the space between your ears.” It is with this in mind that The Five Inch Course offers more than a hundred tips for improving your golf score by playing smarter, more strategic golf. By putting just a few of these tips into play,  even weekend hackers can dramatically improve their scores without improving their swings.

For the cover price of a single issue of a golf magazine, The Five Inch Course can have you playing better golf almost immediately.

In 1960, the average golf score was 100. Fifty years later, with all the innovations in clubs, balls and instruction, the average golf score is ... still 100. In fact, only 20 percent of all golfers will ever (honestly) break that mark. However, this doesn’t mean that lower scores are out of reach. The Five Inch Course can get you there.

It is with a great deal of pride—and more than a little trepidation—that I officially announce the publication of the first GolfBlogger book: The Five Inch Course. It is available now as an ebook through Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Smashwords. A print edition is in the works.

The title is a reference to Bobby Jones’ quote that “competitive golf is played on a five and a half inch course: the space between your ears.”

The Five Inch Course is a collection of more than a hundred short essays designed to help players lower their scores by playing smarter golf. Reading The Five Inch Course won’t result in extra yards or a cure for your slice. Rather, the aim of the book is to help you play better with the swing you already have.

It’s a “mental game” book, but the one thing that distinguishes this work others of its ilk is that The Five Inch Course offers concrete strategies you can put into play immediately. There’s none of the Zen or mumbo jumbo that seems to dominate the “mental game.” Any player—from the occasional duffer to the scratch golfer—should be able to pick an idea or two and put them into play on their very next round.

I have been collecting these tips for years, and versions of many of them have appeared on this blog in the regular “Mental Mondays” column. They’re short, to the point and I think, easily digestible.

Here’s the blurb from the book jacket:

The Five Inch Course: Play better golf with the swing you already have.

In 1960, the average golf score was 100. Fifty years later, with all the innovations in clubs, balls and instruction, the average golf score is ... still 100. In fact, only 20 percent of all golfers will ever (honestly) break that mark.

More bad news: Barring a major investment in time and money, you’re stuck with the swing you have. Tips from golf magazines, your buddies—even the occasional lesson from a pro—aren’t going to result in long term improvement. Studies have shown that most players never get better than they are five years into their golfing “career.”

However, this doesn’t mean that lower scores are out of reach. The Five Inch Course offers more than a hundred strategies for improving your golf score without improving your swing. By playing smarter, more strategic golf, even weekend hackers can dramatically improve their scores without improving their swings.

The Five Inch Course currently is available on Amazon.

And at Barnes and Noble in a Nook edition.

And at Smashwords in a epub version for other ereaders.

I’ll make a further announcement when the print version is out—hopefully in time for Father’s Day.

The Big Miss: My Years Coaching Tiger Woods

Grade: A+
Teacher’s Comments: A great read with terrific insights into the game and mind of the best golfer of his generation

Hank Haney’s The Big Miss is without a doubt one of the most controversial—if not THE most controversial—golf book ever written. As it has been variously described as an expose, a scandal sheet, and a violation of teacher-student privilege, I approached the volume with some trepidation. I really have no interest in Hollywood style exposes and as a teacher, I was more than a little uncomfortable with the idea of airing out a student’s dirty laundry in public.

My worries—based on early media reports and complaints from the Tiger camp—were misplaced. I found The Big Miss to be neither scandalous nor disrespectful.

The Big Miss succeeds for me because it is nearly entirely about golf. Haney writes about Tiger’s tournament preparation, training and work habits. He dissects Tiger’s swing issues and explains the attempts to fix them. Haney dissects—from a teacher’s point of view—Tiger’s mental processes and how they both helped and hampered his winning of championships.  And he writes about his increasingly frustrating attempts to establish a personal relationship with Tiger.

Of Tiger’s marital infidelities, sex addiction and other potential scandals there is very little. Haney—like most of Tiger’s “inner circle”—seems to have known nothing about the other women. He also refutes the idea that Tiger has taken performance enhancing drugs. Haney’s discussion of the scandals is only in relation to how they apparently changed Tiger’s game and his relationship to Haney.

Perhaps most revealing is the now widely-spread story of Tiger’s obsession with the military and military-style training. Haney claims—and we may never know the full truth—that Tiger’s injuries were due to Navy SEAL style training exercises. He contends that both he and Tiger’s regular trainer argued against the high stress exercises, and against adding bulk and power lifting but were ignored.

If the Tiger camp condemns The Big Miss, it is because the book’s claims are close enough to the mark to be uncomfortable. The military training has the ring of truth. Further, the Tiger portrayed is not at all likable. Haney’s portrait of Tiger is of a man focused entirely on winning golf, to the point where his human relationships suffer. He is cold and calculating, taking much and giving little in return.

But none of that can be news to anyone who has paid attention to Tiger over the years. Media reports have been consistent with the notion that Tiger is a bit of a cold fish. The only shocking thing to me is how poorly he apparently treated Haney.

Still, Haney treats his former pupil with a great deal of respect and compassion. I actually came away from reading this book with a better understanding of—and compassion for—Tiger. He is a more sympathetic character in many ways than I had previously suspected.

The book’s title is an interesting one. On one level, it refers to a central tenet of his lessons to Tiger—to develop a swing that avoids the Big Miss. But it has many deeper meanings: Haney’s teaching … Tiger’s life …

Highly Recommended.

Weight Training For Golf: The Ultimate Guide

Grade: A
Teacher’s Comments: Just what I was looking for.

There was a time—not that long ago—when the very idea of weight training for golf would have been summarily dismissed. Although Gary Player has extolled the virtues of such throughout his long career, his was a lone voice in the wilderness, and like many prophets largely ignored.

Like so many things in golf, Tiger seems to have changed that. Many (most?) professional golfers participate in weight and fitness training and the penguin shaped golfer on Tour has been replaced largely by a newer, buffer specimen.

Tour players have the advantage of travelling fitness trailers and on-site training gurus. The rest of us are largely left to our own devices.

Weight Training for Golf is a primer for amateur golfers who realize that fitness is a key to improving their own games. The volume is written by Kai Fusser, whose credentials include time as Annika Sorenstam’s personal trainer, and his work with Graeme McDowell, and 15 other PGA and LPGA golfers. He currently serves as Director of Fitness at the Annika Academy in Orlando.

I have been thinking recently about adding light weight training to my own morning stationary bike routine, but have balked because I really had no idea what exercises to do or how to do them. The last thing I wanted to do was to hurt myself trying to get fit. I also have been loathe to purchase an expensive exercise machine; too many of those are sitting dormant in friends’ basements.

Fusser’s book has solved my dilemma on several levels.

The book begins with a nice discussion of equipment, weight training goals and basic training principles. A nice touch is the chapter on nutrition. The early part of the book also discusses specific applications of weight training, such as strengthening abs and relieving back pain.

The second half of the book covers the details of the various exercises. It’s clearly illustrated with step by step photos, simple descriptive text and charts.

The good news about the equipment is that its all fairly inexpensive. The vast majority of the exercises are done with resistance bands, core balls and dumbells. A few require a simple weight bench. No heavy equipment here—the goal is to get fit and trim, not bulked up.

Part three offers exercises to fix swing faults, while the last has charts of programs.

Overall, I think that this is exactly the book I wanted to help me get my golfing muscle tone to where it needs to be.

Recommended

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”

Mastering Golf’s Toughest Shots, The World’s Best Caddies Share Their Secrets of Success

Grade: A
Teachers’ Comments: Lots of helpful advice on how to think your way past the rubs of the green.

Mastering Golf’s Toughest shots is an unusual golf instruction book in that the advice comes not from the perspective of Tour players or high end teachers, but from caddies. Among the caddies who contributed their thoughts to the work are Steve Williams, Alfred Dyer (Gary Player), Montana Thompson (Billy Mayfair), Tim Thalmueller (Tom Watson, Mark O’Meara others), Mike Atchatz (Rocco Mediate) and Ruden Yorio (Angel Cabrera).

Edited by James Bartlett, who has a long history as a golf writer and editor, the book offers advice for various situations that both professional and amateur golfers routinely face. For each, the focus is on how to analyze the situation, gather the necessary information, and then act on it. There also are a lot of good illustrative stories told by caddies about their golfers and their experiences.

The most interesting thing I found in the book is a mnemonic based on the five fingers of your hand. Your thumb—the most important digit— should remind you of the target, the most important thing in golf. With the first finger, point at the ball and consider the lie. With the middle (the longest), think about the distance. The ring finger is for the conditions. Finally, the pinky is for the situation.

There’s an awful lot in this book to absorb, but I think if a player would just absorb the parts about the shots that trouble them the most, better scoring would result.

True Boo: Gator Catchin’, Orangutan Boxin’, and My Wild Ride to the PGA Tour

Grade: B
Teachers’ Comments: This is the story of perhaps the most unusual star on today’s PGA Tour.

It is too much of a stretch to call Boo Weekley a latter day Sam Snead. Snead is one of the three or four best players ever on Tour, while Boo has struggled throughout his career. There is, however, an undeniable similarity in their backwoods, country-boy approach.

True Boo recounts Boo’s journey from backwoods Florida (for those of you who have ever only been to Orlando, yes, there is a backwoods Florida). Weekley was a good high school player, but somewhat unmotivated. He flunked out of college, worked at various industrial facilities, tried the mini tours, played high stakes gambler’s golf, made the PGA Tour, fell out again, played on the Nationwide, then went back to the bigs. It’s quite a journey, actually.

Much of the narrative is concerns ways in which Boo has found himself in trouble. There’s nothing criminal, and really not much that could even be considered major, but trouble of the sort of which only a good ‘ol boy could find. A good deal of the book is humorous, but the chapter on his mishaps with his bowel movements was too much for me.

Still, bodily functions aside, it’s a pretty good read. Co-author Paul Brown has done a marvelous job capturing Weekley’s inflections, dialect and “Boo-isms.” In fact, I’m not sure he’s as much co-author as transcriber. I get the impression that Boo just started talking into a recorder from which Brown typed a manuscript.

The most interesting part of the book for me was Boo’s account of the days in which he made a living playing high stakes golf. Serious money men would paid him thousands to play in games on which they bet tens of thousands. Boo claims that there are more than a few out there making such a living. I’d love to know more about them.

True Boo was first published in 2011, capitalizing in a fashion on Weekley’s 2008 Ryder Cup performance in which he went 2-0-1 in three matches, and caught the nation’s imagination with his (arguably) over the top antics. This review is of the newly released paperback edition.