Lost Balls: Great Holes, Tough Shots, and Bad Lies

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Overview

A unique and colorful collection of photographs featuring the under-celebrated wayward shot, its landing locale and the unexpected encounters with wildlife on and off the green.

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More About This Book

Overview

A unique and colorful collection of photographs featuring the under-celebrated wayward shot, its landing locale and the unexpected encounters with wildlife on and off the green.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780821261859
  • Publisher: Bulfinch
  • Publication date: 5/4/2005
  • Pages: 128
  • Sales rank: 73,367
  • Product dimensions: 10.50 (w) x 10.25 (h) x 0.75 (d)

Meet the Author

Charles Lindsay has made a career of photographing the intersection of nature and culture. Whether living with a rain-forest tribe, exploring the world of fly-fishing, or turning the game of golf on its head, Lindsay has focused on our complex relationship to the natural world. He is the author of Lost Balls: Great Holes, Tough Shots, and Bad Lies; Upstream: Fly-Fishing in the American West; Turtle Islands: Balinese Ritual and the Green Turtle; and Mentawai Shaman: Keeper of the Rain Forest. Between journeys he resides in New York City; Sun Valley, Idaho; and in the northern Catskills.

Read an Excerpt

Lost Balls

By Charles Lindsay

Bulfinch Press

Copyright © 2005 John Updike
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-821-26185-1

Foreword

John Updike

And the wind shall say: "Here were decent godless people Their only monument the asphalt road And a thousand lost golf balls." -T. S. Eliot, chorus to The Rock

I have seen news videos of outfielders rummaging for a baseball lost in the ivy on the quaintly leafy wall at Wrigley Field, and I have experienced mis-hit tennis balls flying over the court fence deep into an impenetrable grove beyond; but no sport offers the sensation of lostness as often and enragingly as does golf. The damn thing has to be here, we think as we thrash at a clump of blueberry bushes or buffalo grass with the 7-iron we hopefully brought with us into the wilderness. Our obliging partners tramp in circles with us for a few minutes, peeking into drainage ditches and under fallen palm fronds, but their hearts aren't in it the way ours are; this lost ball represents two strokes, and two extra strokes could mean the hole and even, it could be, the match, the entire outing, the day itself. Why me? one wonders. It was just a little slice, a tiny tail probably induced by the wind. It carried only a tad, a mere yard or two, into the woods, or the marsh, or the tall grass. Why couldn't it have been the other fellow, the loudmouth buddy smugly announcing, "O.K., we've given it five minutes, let's get a move on. It's getting dark, guys"? Not as dark, actually, as the inner weather as one trudges along, dragging like the foursome's crippled foot, "out of the hole" as they say, headed for an ignominious triple bogey, a condescending, token "paper seven."

The whereabouts of the ball are in a sense the key to every ball game, but the whereabouts are most picturesque in golf. Tangles of running raspberry, shadowy depths of a deep sand bunker, sandy beds of shallow little watercress-choked creeks, weedy lees of lichen-laden stone walls, snake-infested moonscapes of pre-Cambrian basalt just off the plush watered fairways of a desert course, the pulpy flesh of a venerable saguaro cactus, the leaf-mulched floor of a hushed beech forest, the squishy tummocks of a reedy marsh, the hot and sere macadam of the club parking lot, the concrete curb next to the snack shop, the bed of petunias and pansies lifted up on creosoted railroad ties beside the eleventh tee-all these nasty patches of environment can play host to a misplayed golf ball. We have been there.

And others have been there before us. All but buried in the sun-dried mud of a bygone spring day, an ancient cut-up Acushnet glimmers to catch the golfer's cruising eye. Or perhaps, in a patch of low-lying, seldom-visited bog, a waffle-patterned gutta-percha antique comes to light, browned on its underside by its ages-long bath in the slow-acting acids of Mother Earth. For every lost ball, there was a forlorn search, perfunctory or thorough; these questing ghosts haunt the course, hovering at the juncture of their interrupted game. "Found it!" one wants to cry out in triumph, though the loser has been decades in his grave. Golf thus leaves a residue, thin but detectable, on the hundreds of acres set aside for play. Not only lost golf balls but broken tees, detached cleats, withered gloves, and the occasional broken shaft, petulantly snapped in two, mingle their mournful testimony with the silent turf.

A player interacts with the landscape at a visceral level, his natural difficulties translating into rage and even tears. At times, analyzing the niceties of a "close lie," he takes a worm's-eye view of the ball as it nestles amid pebbles and tufts; at others, his eye soars like that of a lordly hawk, seeking the telltale glint of his ball in a wide, wind-whitened world of rough. Goose feathers and dandelion polls and balled-up Kleenexes cruelly tease him with optical illusions. Nature is his companion, but, like a nagging wife, she persistently points out his inadequacies and cloaks her scenic beauties in the ongoing quarrel of the game itself. We struggle to experience the course as something other than an enemy challenging and taunting us at every swing-to experience it instead as a site of seduction, of artful landscaping, of birdsong and wild berry and pale blossom and scarlet autumnal leaf, all tamed to our use in an enchanted blend of natural creation and human recreation. But a greenside bunker pounces on a singing 9-iron and shatters our mood, narrowing our perspective to a square foot of damp sand.

The camera of Charles Lindsay knows how to see the game. It not only sees the variety of turf and the luxuriant obduracy of rough but it hears the plip of the sadly underclubbed approach as it sends out the ripples from its irrevocable submersion, and it smells the tonic freshness of morning dew and rising mist, and it feels the effort of a sand wedge digging deep to lift the ball over the trap's hairy, tawny lip. From Ireland to Arizona and back his camera has journeyed to record golf's sensations-the weave of interlocking incident that makes up a round. Some golf balls are lost, and with the things now retailing for twenty dollars for a sleeve of three Pro V-1s, this borders on tragedy. But some are found, right where we thought we had looked a half dozen times before. Not only is it ours (a theatrical examination, sans touche, confirms it) but it is sitting up on a bed of pine needles. There is an opening back to the fairway. There is even a shot-a long shot, with a deliberate slice, cunningly controlled-at the green. So keep your head down and swing easy. Golf may not be a lost cause after all.

(Continues...)


Excerpted from Lost Balls by Charles Lindsay Copyright © 2005 by John Updike. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating 3.5
( 12 )

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  • Anonymous

    Posted June 14, 2005

    Fun for the whole family. . .

    This is THE gift book of the season. Not only fabulous for golf afficianados, Lost Balls is the perfect gift for partners and family members who desire a point of access to the obsession that is golf. Lindsay's rich, engaging images will make you laugh, cringe, mourn and celebrate the chance moments of golf and life.

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted April 17, 2005

    Better than 'How To Line Up Your 4th Putt'

    Charlie Lindsay in an irreverant guy with a great eye. This book of spectacular pictures uses out of bounds golf balls as the starting point for an adventure in nature where balls wind up in a bird's nest, under a plop of cow poop and where golf shoes are hanging from a tombstone. From Scotland and Ireland to Arizona, Charlie brings the joy of discovery to all of us in an exhuberant book that will make a fabulous fabulous gift. Run out and buy it now......what am I saying?.......click and buy now!!

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted April 10, 2010

    Fun, Humorous and Beautiful

    "Lost Balls" was purchased as a birthday gift for a golfer. However, golfers and non-golfers alike have chuckled at the photographs, the quotes and the location information. At the birthday party the book was in constant circulation, with pictures being shared with others and quotes read aloud. The photographs are sharp and beautifully shot. The large format adds to the humor or the composition of the photo. Another appreciated feature was the fact that the pictures were taken in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland as well as the "New World;" across the US as far as Hawaii. This is an entertaining book!

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted January 2, 2010

    Interesting and thought provoking

    Plain and simple, no nonsense text. Interesting pictures and quotes if your a golfer, interested in golf or work in the golfing industry. A good library and or coffee table book of illustrations to spark off a conversation or two of memories past or present. Good book as a gift for the discerning golfer in the household.

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  • Posted March 31, 2009

    Half Done

    The first portion of this book featuring English, Scottish, and Irish courses and stories is very well done. The 2nd portion featuring American courses and stories, while lovely just doesn't have the punch.

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    Posted January 18, 2010

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    Posted October 23, 2009

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    Posted December 11, 2009

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    Posted December 8, 2009

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    Posted October 24, 2010

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    Posted November 8, 2009

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