Golf in the Library
How to Play Your Best Golf All the Time. By Tommy Armour' (Hodder and Stoughton. 12s. 6d.) This is Golf. By Louis T. Stanley. (W. H. Allen. 16s.) To judge from the publishers' lists, arcilliterate would never get do'a; to scratch. Par golf, power golf, winning golf, golf for the weekell player and for the middle-aged, golf seen this way, that way, anu from every possible angle—a cataract of theory has poured over the heads of tyro and tiger alike. Younger professionals tend to publish a textbook after winning e tournament. Mr. Armour's book is all the better for his having, scorned until now the suggestion that he should write it. F!' decades, and resting only on the Sabbath, he has analysed from be" neath his vast sun-umbrella at the Boca Raton Club in Florida, ill. 'faults of Knerations of assorted pupils. If he is, as Gene Sarazets claims, "the slowest player in the entire world," he does not davit° on the printed page. Having swallowed his objections to author' ship, he sets about coaching the unseen with a Scottish-America! lack of frills and a great deal of healthy intolerance. (There are a' least six golfers who want to be taught, he observes sourly, for ever,' one who wants to learn.)
His title, though unwieldy, is a shrewd one. Every golfer knows he is capable of beating Ben Hogan, having played all the required shots. His only difficulty is how to corral these shots into three hours instead of scattering them over as many months. Mr. Armour helps him by ramming home the essentials (first essentials are printed In red), and by refusing to adorn the text with anything more elabo- rate than diagrams. He advises the elimination of bad shots rather than a striving for great ones, and adds that the shot to play should always be the one that makes the next shot easy. On putting, he limits himself to two precepts—head still and club-blade along the correct path. Grip, stance, or club-head design are unimportant. Elsewhere in the book his explanation of why shots are topped even though the player's eye remaihs fixed on the ball is probably what many a golfing tycoon has travelled all the way to Florida to find out.
In Chapter 2 Mr. Armour comes near to reviewing Mr. Stanley's book himself, when he says: "I've observed that almost all aspiring golfers fail to see the real story in action-photographs of expert players."
What Mr. Stanley has produced is a photographic souvenir of both 1953 Ryder Cup teams at practice. Not for the first time the pen has been spared and the camera worked to death, and whether the rabbit can reproduce these spectacular contortions, even with Mr. Stanley's footnotes to guide him, is a doubt many of us must share with the Sage of Boca Raton.
FRANK LITTLER
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