Down the Fairway

If you haven't read Down the Fairway, by Bobby Jones and O.B. Keeler, you have really missed a treat.  I've started reading it again and am amazed at the insight provided by Bobby Jones, who wrote this at the age of 25.  

Here's an interesting sample to perhaps whet your appetite:

  "A fourth round of 72 would have won me the first open championship in which I played, and doubtless would have ruined me utterly.  Of all the luck I've had, and I've had a lot, the best luck is that I didn't win at Merion as a kid of 14 in my first amateur championship, or at Inverness, in my first open... But that tremendous finish at Inverness hypnotized me.  Think of it--five players having a chance to win, right up to the seventy-second green!  I concluded right there that the open championship was the thing.... I confess it still is my idea of a tournament.... I watched Leo Diegel play the last three holes, and I remember wondering why his face was so gray and sort of fallen in... I found out, for myself, later."

There virtually isn't a word, or a page, not worth reading in this wonderful book.  If you get a chance, I urge you to grab a copy.  This is what championship golf is all about, right from the pen of perhaps the greatest of them all.