How to Win at Golf without Actually Playing Well

A humorous guide to playing and winning the game of golf offers golfers plentiful tips, quotes, and anecdotes from the game's great artisans. 30,000 first printing.

Foreword

Golf is a cruel game. It is so exacting that even its masters never master it, so intricate that most golfers never achieve consistency. One's command of the swing is so precarious that imperceptible changes in pulse, blood pressure, or body chemistry can ruin everything. You play badly and you don't know why; you play well and you don't know why or, worse, you think you know why (the golf gods reserve special humiliation for those who think they've discovered the Secret). You strive and struggle, and just when you've made a little progress, golf humbles you yet again.

All golfers, from leading money-winners to Sunday hackers, measure success not by positive accomplishment, but in limiting mistakes: "Don't press, don't dip, don't peek, don't lunge, don't quit, don't sway, don't hook, don't slice, don't shank, etc., etc., etc." Even the scoring system is negative: The object is to achieve the absence of something, i.e., strokes. (In a "B.C." comic strip, a cave woman about to tee off with a crude golf club says to her male companion, "Let me get this straight, the less I hit the ball the better I am doing." "That's right," he replies. "Then why do it at all?" she asks. In the last frame, night has fallen, and the man is still standing there, repeating to himself: "Why . . . do it . . . at . . . all? . . .")

Sad to say, golf excellence is a horizon that recedes as you approach it. The odds are, you'll never reach the point where you're satisfied with your game, and in the unlikely event you do, you'll soon want to play better. And there will lie the seeds of your discontent, because golf isn't cumulative. You don't ratchet yourself upward to ever greater proficiency, you play well one day and poorly the next. You hit one or two or eight or twelve decent shots a round, and many more awful ones.

No, you simply can't play well consistently.

But you can win consistently. You cannot master the game, but you can dominate your opponents. Not by outplaying them, by outthinking them.

Golf gamesmen everywhere are indebted to the British satirist Stephen Potter (1900-1969) for the essential vocabulary of the discipline, including, of course, the neologism "gamesmanship." By the time Potter's Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship, published in the United States in 1948, had gone through a dozen hardcover printings, the word had found its way into both the English and American lexicons. Potter also published Lifemanship and One-Upmanship in the 1950s, but it was his seminal Golfmanship, published here in 1968, that inspired my own efforts in the field. (Potter called golf "the gamesgame of gamesgames.") Long out of print, Golfmanship is Potter at his best: diabolically droll and oh-so-British:Encyclopaedias and museums can sap, in junior players, the desire to win. If a youth can be made to feel that his match with you is part of a Nordic ritual which has been going on for centuries, it may act as a depressant. The encyclopaedic approach ("first played in 4th century Alexandria"), could dilute, however slightly, the spirit of attack if this fact is first mentioned in a gloomy changing room. Say "Apparently Aubrey writes of the 'games of clout and blatherball' -- this would be about 1656." Say this if guest is expecting to be offered a drink. Pictures of Dutch burghers forcing a quoit or disk to slide on ice can make even a scratch player feel momentarily as if he were floundering about in historical gravy. "Curious old print" you can suddenly say to your opponent, in the afternoon round.Potter relied on the British traditions of amateurism and fair play, so most of his "flurries," "gambits," "hampers," and "ploys" would be lost on contemporary golfers. Hence the present volume, inspired by the principles of golfmanship enunciated by Potter and others, and designed to establish a modern discipline to serve practitioners well into the twenty-first century.
Caveats and Disclaimers

This book is intended to serve as both a sword and a shield. A sword to attack superior players, a shield to protect against other gamesmen. But if your idea of golf is a few clubs in a canvas bag and the glory of a golden afternoon, if you consider golf a sacrament to be played for the sheer uplift, you won't need it. If, on the other hand, you venture an occasional wager on the game, you have a healthy will to win, and you aren't averse to psychological combat, this book will show you How.

If the Rules of Golf weigh heavily on your conscience, if you're imbued with the lore and tradition of the Royal and Ancient Game, you too need this book, because sooner or later you're bound to come up against a gamesman, and you'll want to know how to defend yourself. And if your idea of gamesmanship is jangling your pocket change or ripping the Velcro on your glove to distract your opponent, you really need this book.

In the event you find yourself matched against someone who has apparently also read this book, cease all hostilities immediately. Identify yourselves to each other by means of the code words "Titanic Thompson." Then bow out of the match or, if that isn't possible, reduce the stakes. This will avert an internecine struggle, and you'll both have found a future partner.

The exclusive use of the masculine pronoun throughout is not intended to discourage women from reading and profiting from this book. On the contrary: Most of the techniques are not gender-specific, and a few are even designed to take advantage of male weaknesses (e.g., Ego Play). Nor is it meant to suggest that female opponents should be given more quarter than their male counterparts. An opponent is an opponent regardless of gender, race, or national origin. I just wanted to avoid such awkward locutions as "him or her, "his or hers," "he or she," the even more disagreeable "he/she," and the unthinkable "gamespersonship."