By Tony Lema
The more books I read on golf - sometimes I feel I've read too many - the more convinced I become that the quality which separates the outstanding book from the good book is the time and effort that is put into it. Writing a superior book is simply a monumental undertaking and very rarely a lucrative one. This is why there are so few great books on golf.
Golfers' Gold is a very good book and, as you would expect, an immense amount of time and effort went into it. It is an in-depth study of what was, until recently, a purely American phenomenon: the professional golf tour, that perpetual-motion machine that holds out the prospect of immense riches and doles out immense punishment to those who go after it. Tony Lema was an ideal choice to tell the tour's story: he had a colorful career to put it mildly; he was bright; he was an outstanding golfer; he had a sense of humor and a quick wit; he was a highly visible presence; and above all he was willing to be honest. What skills he may have lacked in writing prose and organizing thoughts on paper were abundantly supplied by Gwilym Brown, an extremely able writer for Sports Illustrated. The result of their happy collaboration lifts Golfers' Gold well above the many other books that have been written about the tour. It is a lot of fun.
Dave Anderson, whose Afterword is characteristically entertaining and brilliant, has been with The New York Times since 1966. He got his big chance in 1968 when Joe Namath and the New York Jets and Muhammad Ali were dominating the sports pages. He made the most of it, and it quickly became clear that a major new sports writer had emerged. In 1971 he began writing a column on sports joining Red Smith and Arthur Daley. In 1981 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary. Ten or twelve of his columns from 1980 were submitted for the prize, among which was his column on Jack Nicklaus' 1980 Open victory at Baltustrol. Dave is a great lover of football and is proudest of the books he had done on professional football with John Madden. The third Madden-Anderson effort was One Size Doesn't Fit All. Good ghost writing, Dave thinks, is an art form and a neglected one. Dave is an avid golfer, has a handicap of 16 and plays at the Knickerbocker Country Club in Tenafly, New Jersey.
Foreword by Herbert Warren Wind, Afterword by Dave Anderson.
By Tony Lema The more books I read on golf - sometimes I feel I've read too many - the more convinced I become that the quality which separates the outstanding book from the good book is the time and effort that is put into it. Writing a superior book is simply a monumental undertaking and very rarely a lucrative one. This is why there are so few great books on golf. Golfers' Gold is a very good book and, as you would expect, an immense amount of time and effort went into it. It is an in-depth study of what was, until recently, a purely American phenomenon: the professional golf tour, that perpetual-motion machine that holds out the prospect of immense riches and doles out immense punishment to those who go after it. Tony Lema was an ideal choice to tell the tour's story: he had a colorful career to put it mildly; he was bright; he was an outstanding golfer; he had a sense of humor and a quick wit; he was a highly visible presence; and above all he was willing to be honest. What skills he may have lacked in writing prose and organizing thoughts on paper were abundantly supplied by Gwilym Brown, an extremely able writer for Sports Illustrated. The result of their happy collaboration lifts Golfers' Gold well above the many other books that have been written about the tour. It is a lot of fun. Dave Anderson, whose Afterword is characteristically entertaining and brilliant, has been with The New York Times since 1966. He got his big chance in 1968 when Joe Namath and the New York Jets and Muhammad Ali were dominating the sports pages. He made the most of it, and it quickly became clear that a major new sports writer had emerged. In 1971 he began writing a column on sports joining Red Smith and Arthur Daley. In 1981 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary. Ten or twelve of his columns from 1980 were submitted for the prize, among which was his column on Jack Nicklaus' 1980 Open victory at Baltustrol. Dave is a great lover of football and is proudest of the books he had done on professional football with John Madden. The third Madden-Anderson effort was One Size Doesn't Fit All. Good ghost writing, Dave thinks, is an art form and a neglected one. Dave is an avid golfer, has a handicap of 16 and plays at the Knickerbocker Country Club in Tenafly, New Jersey. Foreword by Herbert Warren Wind, Afterword by Dave Anderson.