Elizabeth Nelson, future likely MacArthur Award winner as a big-time music critic, musician, essayist, and civil servant, is also a golf enthusiast. She's got a band called the Paranoid Style, which resonates with me because her band and my view of history were forged by Richard Hofstadter's essential 1964 book, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Elizabeth also writes musical koans on Twitter (as of this writing), miniature epiphanies about the unexpected intersectionality of rock music: "The Proustian-beauty of early Van Morrison meets the haunted-post war anxiety of The Kink’s ‘Arthur’, John Cale’s 'Paris 1919' LP is one of rock’s strangest and most transporting gestures. Nine songs over thirty minutes which weirdly summarize the global sweep of human history."
We don't always agree, but Christgau's Consumer Guide gave the Paranoid Style's latest album, "For Executive Meeting" (Bar None) an "A"; Nick Paumgarten wrote about the band this summer for the New Yorker; and I gave their 2019 album, "A Goddamn Impossible Way of Life" a lifetime achievement award simply for titling one song, "That's Guy's in Rammstein." She also writes a Substack called "Please Take My Advice," notable for the way she casually dismisses the requirement that any reader take her advice. I usually do take her advice, oblique as it may be, and many months ago, when I told her that I once wrote about golf books for ESPNet Sportszone, she said, show it, so I'm showing it. It appeared on the website in 1996, so I guess this is it’s first print appearance. Informational note: I used to enjoy mini-golf, and usually make or break par on the Mac game Par 72 Golf IV.
Elizabeth Nelson of the Paranoid Style in her green jacket as she studies up on improving her swing, or maybe her short game? Photo courtesy Bar None Records.
GOLF IS NOT ONLY FOR DUMMIES
by Wayne Robins
The whole idea of a book called "Golf for Dummies," once would have seemed totally redundant.
I mean, when we were jaded, hairy hippies a few months back, nothing seemed dumber than some crewcut square in a tam o'shanter, Lacoste shirt, and lime green pants thwacking at a pockmarked sphere and chasing it, like a common hound, across hundreds of yards of grass and dune in the broiling sun.
But we all grow -- if not up than out -- and I've grown out of sneering at golf. A few weeks ago, I was exhausted by relentless participation in viewing a series of basketball, baseball and soccer games. God invented the remote control so that during timeouts or commercials in sports that require so many calories to watch, one can relax and watch some golf. (It's best if you have a caddy to refill your beer or iced-tea glass while you watch, but it isn't mandatory.)
Then, of course, came the Great Golf Apocalypse, Greg "The Shark" Norman's phenomenal self-immolation at the 1996 Masters. Most of the pundits said Norman choked. But they were wrong. Norman did not choke. Norman played poorly enough to blow a huge lead in the final round, but that is not choking, that is golf. Norman proved that golf is actually the most difficult sport in either hemisphere. Golf is like playing chess against the laws of gravity, with your ego as a pawn.
But the relentless post-mortems also made me appreciate that golf is our most literate sport. It has been said that they had to build an entire wing of the Library of Congress just to hold all the books about golf. (It has also been said that the moon is made of green cheese, but neither is true.) John Updike has a book about golf coming out this fall, which makes sense, since John Updike has probably played golf more often than Joyce Carol Oates has boxed. Don't get me wrong: I would never have the guts to get in the ring with Prof. Oates: She's such a prolific writer she must have carpal tunnels of steel.
Golf, like boxing, is probably more fun to read about than to actually play. The game's poet laureate is, of course, Dan Jenkins, who is dead-solid perfect whenever he writes about the game. [ed. note: Dan is also perfectly dead since 2019, and this was my attempt at channeling his style.]
Golf had a Texan Zen master, too: Harvey Penick, the late (died 1995) wizened pro whose 1992 book, ''Harvey Penick's Little Red Book: Lessons and Teachings from a Lifetime in Golf' (Simon and Schuster, 1992) has sold more copies in clubhouses around the United States than Chairman Mao's has in China. It is no coincidence that "Little Red Book" and Penick's subsequent missives have been written with Bud Shrake, who also co-wrote Willie Nelson's autobiography. Penick was writing about how he holds a golf club whenever he does a speaking engagement or seminar. "I heard one of the pros say, 'Look at Harvey. He holds that club like it's a fine musical instrument.' That's how a golf club feels to me: like a fine musical instrument."
That might explain why Alice Cooper, Glenn Frey, and Huey Lewis are avid golfers: They're all hoping it'll make them better musicians. Willie Nelson, I believe, has his own golf course out there in the Texas Hill Country, and he must know that if he could play golf as well as he can sing and write, he would have a closet full of those green Masters jackets.
Jeff MacNelly, the late Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist and comic strip composer, was author and artist of "A Golf Handbook: All I Ever Learned I Forgot by the Third Fairway." (Triumph Books, Chicago). MacNelly, wisely, aims at the reader has no more intention of actually getting near a golf course than the average Calvin and Hobbes reader has of going to taxidermy school. MacNelly has been courteous enough to include a glossary. "A sand trap," writes MacNelly, is "the place your ball goes to hide when it gets too close to the green." Maybe in his next volume he'll tell me what a "green" is.
Wayne Robins. former music critic for Newsday, writes wrote about the entertainment of sport for ESPNET SportsZone.
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