The American Spectator

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And like us, too, Jones does not measure up to the iron-man practicing regimens of Ben Hogan or Vijay Singh. "To stand upon a tee for hours banging away mechanically and monotonously at ball after ball...is exercise only in the sense that digging ditches and plowing fields is exercise....I used never to practice, simply because I could never find a way to hold my attention on what I was doing. The first dozen or so shots I would hit painstakingly and thoughtfully, and then the rest would be sent off one after the other at such a pace that soon I would be out of breath, perspiring, and wholly disgusted."

Write a sentence like that, Jack Nicklaus.

BOBBY JONES ON GOLF PROVIDES NOT ONLY the pleasure of Jones's company and friendship, but sound instruction, too, in facets of the game great and small. Written as they were in the hickory shaft era, these meditations still resonate with the modern golfer, not least because of Jones's painstaking rewriting and updating, with frequent reference to the modern steel shaft era and to golfers like Hogan, Palmer, and Nicklaus. The crippled Jones could not go out to the modern tournament, but in one of the greatest of modern tournaments, the Masters, all the players came to him at the Augusta National Golf Club. He knew everybody, right up to his death in 1972.

Once again unlike the imperious Nicklaus, Jones mentions other golfers all the time. His book is filled with good advice, with good golf stories, and with hundreds of things you didn't know. Perhaps more important, it is filled with things you do know, but tend to forget, over and over again.

"When we come to the all-important matter of getting real enjoyment out of the playing of the game...we must produce a round fairly close to our usual standard. To do this with a fair degree of consistency, no matter to which class we belong, we must avoid experiment, refuse to try anything new, and play the game instead of practicing it."

Lawrence Henry writes every week from North Andover, Massachusetts.

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