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From Section 1: It's Only a Game

The Game

It's not your life, it's not your wife, it's only a game.

-- Lloyd Mangrum

It takes longer to kill the golf in a man than it does to breed it.

-- Harry Vardon

Golf is very healthy; it is better to swat pills than to swallow them.

-- Ted Osborne

Tennis players don't sleep in parking lots on Saturday night.

-- David Owen

Confidence, of course, is an admirable asset to a golfer, but it should be an unspoken confidence. It is perilous to put it into speech. The gods of golf lie in wait to chasten the presumptuous.

-- P. G. Wodehouse

People often ask me, "Why can't I play golf the same every day?" Well, what can you do the same every day? I don't even get out of bed the same way.

-- Jackie Burke, Jr.

Few things draw two men together more surely than a mutual inability to master golf, coupled with an intense and ever-increasing love for the game.

-- P. G. Wodehouse

Most of us have a real warped idea of the amount of control we have over anything. It's not that we can't control certain aspects of this game, it's that we think we can control everything. That's where our error is. Then God says, "Wait a minute, just so you don't forget." A fleck of grass throws a putt off-line, the ball is stuck in a tree or shoots this way or that. The elements, variables, the unexpected. That's golf.

-- Annette Thompson

Golf teaches success and failure. Neither lasts long.

-- Glenn Kummer

Three things are as unfathomable as they are fascinating: metaphysics, golf, and the feminine heart. The Germans, I believe, pretend to have solved some of the riddles of the first, and the French to have unravelled some of the intricacies of the last; will someone tell us wherein lies the extraordinary fascination of golf?

-- Arnold Haultain

There is no type of miracle that can't happen at least once in golf.

-- Grantland Rice

On the golf course, a man may be the dogged victim of inexorable fate, be struck down by an appalling stroke of tragedy, become the hero of unbelievable melodrama, or the clown in a side-splitting comedy.

-- Bobby Jones

In golf you've got two continuously merciless competitors: yourself and the course.

-- Tommy Armour

The trouble with all of us, who grumble over the game and thus spoil an otherwise pleasant afternoon with congenial friends, is that we do not understand the game, nor ourselves. In this, we could take a number of lessons from the [hacker]. For no matter how good we may be, if we should fancy that we have mastered golf to the extent that we can go out day after day and play as we please, then we are greater fools than ought to be left at large.

-- Bobby Jones

A good round of golf is if you can hit about three shots that turn out exactly as you planned them.

-- Ben Hogan

The score is important, of course. And the discovery that you are superior to another golfer is satisfying. But when your score is bad and the other fellow beats you, golf still has been a blessing to you. The score isn't the "be all and end all."

-- Tommy Armour

There is no shape nor size of body, no awkwardness nor ungainliness, which puts good golf beyond reach. There are good golfers with spectacles, with one eye, with one leg, even with one arm. In golf, while there is life there is hope.

-- Sir Walter Simpson

The mere test of strength or of skill is one of the most subordinate of the elements of golf; much more important is the test of what goes by the name of "nerve," that quiet self-confidence which no ghastly phantasms can shake.... So many golfers forget this. "If I had not done this, that, or the other stupid thing," they say, "my score would have been so-and-so." My dear sir, it is just those stupid things that make the game.

-- Arnold Haultain

Copyright © 2000 by Randy Voorhees