Golf Writing

They say that the smaller the ball, the better the writing. Seems true enough. I truly enjoy Roger Angell's pieces about baseball in The New Yorker. They're less frequent now, but I'm already looking forward to his annual spring training wrap-up, usually published in an issue near enough to baseball's Opening Day. Of the other better baseball writers working today, I think of Michael Lewis and his enlightening book "Moneyball" and Jane Kramer's biography of Sandy Koufax. Both are excellent. David Halberstam has written some good things, much of it reverential reflections of an earlier time in the game. Roger Kahn is very good. Daniel Okrent's "9 Innings" is an outstanding examination of the intricacies of the game within the context of a single contest.

So there are several admirable writers working in baseball. How about golf? With last year's passing of Herbert Warren Wind, we lost one of the best. In a USGA magazine piece about Wind's death, E.M. Swift recalls something Ben Crenshaw lovingly said about HWW. "Ben Crenshaw, who was Wind's favorite modern golfer because of his interest in the game's history, has said that a Wind article always contained a history lesson, a golf lesson and a life lesson." (I wrote about Wind last year in my golfography blog last year. You can read that here.) The game itself could be described in much the same way.

But who is writing seriously about golf today? Mark Frost's books are popular. "The Greatest Game Ever Played," the story of Francis Ouimet's unlikely 1913 U.S. Open Championship, is a masterpiece. (Here's an interview with Frost about the book.) And I still give friends a copy of Jim Dodson's "Final Rounds" because few books capture the spirit of the game for the dedicated player as well as that.

But who else? Who are the best writers in golf today working in what we might call the longer form? Since the film industry can't execute a compelling movie - even with the best stories - it would be a shame to have only the drama of The Masters on CBS to look forward to this year...