NEW YORK, NY – As we reach the halfway point in the year, a tiny little David has the clubhouse lead on a whole raft of Goliaths in the race for the Best Sports Journalism of the Year Award here at A Walk in the Park, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
It’s book review season and, right on cue, my desk turned into a scriptorium scene from Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.
[Author’s Note: If you didn’t get that joke, go read the book, and send me a long thank you later. It’s a life-changer.]I get plenty of manuscripts as an entertainment lawyer as it is, so add in all the books that may – or if they suck, may not – be reviewed, and I have to move piles the size of Greek columns just to use my phone, let alone work on the laptop.
In the middle of the frenzy, the good folks at a little publishing house called Union Square Press, named for the hip NYC section of Union Square, contacted me about their newly-released collection of U.S. Open stories called “One Week in June: The U.S. Open.” It’s a sequel to their book “One Week in April: The Masters” and is imprinted as a division of Sterling. I yessed them when they called…I’ll talk to anybody about everything all the time…you never know what might pan out…and they sent me a review copy.
Then the tragicomedy began! First, it gets sent to an old address. Then it gets sent to the wrong state. Then they sent it to my house, but I’m not there, and it gets sent back. It became, quite honestly, the biggest pain in the ass any book has ever been!
After two false starts, a send back, and more nonsensical mishaps than an NBC prime-time comedy, it finally arrived one May afternoon.
I almost threw it on the pile to deal with after the U.S. Open, when I said to myself…”uh…Jay, it is about the U.S. Open…let’s see if they have anything useful for your prep piece on Pebble Beach.”
And what do I find when thumbing through the table of contents? A previously out-of-print, 35-page analysis of both Pebble Beach and Tom Watson’s win in 1982 by no less a personage than Herbert Warren Wind himself…
Score!!! Cha-ching!!!
Between that terrific story, great reads on Kite’s victory in ’92 and Woods’s romp in ’00, and a 1983 article I dug out of the basement written by Watson himself, I had all kinds of history, first-hand accounts, fascinating anecdotes, and important insights for my entire week at Pebble. Suddenly “that pain in the ass book” became one of the three top resources for my entire week at Pebble and will be constantly in rotation every time I have to write about the Open.
Whether you are a journalist needing research materials or just a golf fan looking for good stories, you have a small gold mine in one tome with this book. Organized chronologically, the book traces famous Opens and champions throughout the event’s illustrious, and often bloody history. Ancient figures from the dawn of golf emerge as vividly as if they were written yesterday. Francis Ouimet discusses his miracle victory in 1913, still regarded as the greatest U.S. Open of all time, Grantland Rice materializes again from the mists of time and depicts in loving detail Bobby Jones’s winning putt in the 1929 U.S. Open at Winged Foot, and Dan Jenkins – the great golf writer of our generation – takes us back six decades to spin a yarn about Hogan’s taming Oakland Hills, “The Monster,” in 1951.
But the veritable “Who’s Who” of great golf writers continues. Two PGA of America Lifetime Achievement Award winners, Art Spander and Dick Schapp recall the massacre at Winged Foot in 1974. Rick Reilly writes about both Oakland Hills and San Francisco’s Olympic Club, that little giant-killer of the U.S. Open Rota. Meanwhile, the New York Times’s Dave Anderson depicts Opens at Shinnecock and Baltusrol.
Every great player at the Open gets some face time: Merry Mex, Byron Nelson, The Golden Bear, Woods, Bobby Jones: the entire Pantheon of Golf Royalty are showcased. All the great courses make an appearance: from Oakmont to Pebble, from Pinehurst to Cherry Hills, from The Country Club to Baltusrol.
There’s even everybody’s favorite sideshow story from any U.S. Open: The Hinkle Tree! You remember the Hinkle Tree? When the U.S.G.A. tried to close a short-cut they failed to see off the eighth tee at Inverness in 1979? “Trees sure grow fast in Ohio,” quipped Lon Hinkle as he spied the Blue Hill Spruce Mike Strantz planted in the middle of the night at the U.S.G.A.’s request. “Take down the gallery ropes.”
He made another birdie!
But Union Square Press scores an eagle with this work. If you are a sports journalist, this book is an important research resource. If you simply love golf stories, it’s terrific bedtime and bathroom reading. There is something in this book for everyone.
It may not win this years Best Sports Writing Award…David Feherty, John Garrity, and Kevin Cook all released books this summer, a bumper crop if ever there was one…but it is the leader in the clubhouse right now and an important work. It’s possible that this collection way have research value long past what even the publishers anticipated. Run, don’t walk to get your copy.
ISBN No. 9781402766299
400 pages
$19.95 (Well worth the price, and hard-cover to boot).
