Any and every golfer will recognise his feelings of frustration, and empathise with him. We all have our hopes and dreams when we walk onto a golf course, and few of us ever realise those dreams. His book is about far more than his personal trials and tribulations, however, and his take on golf in general is sharp and acerbic. With 50 years of golfing experience, playing at the top levels of the amateur game, he has a lot of knowledge to impart.
I don’t
necessarily agree with him – nor he with me – and his on-off-on-again love-hate
relationship with golf clubs (drivers, putters, etc.) is something I do not
understand at all, but I wholeheartedly endorse his sentiments on the
professional game, the R&A, golf courses and, particularly, the Olympics.
He gets under the skin of golf and picks away at it mercilessly. No subject is
safe.
As a
youngster, Morris had promise, that much is evident in the very opening
chapter, and he talks the reader through the years when he fiddled constantly
with the mechanics of his swing to improve his golf and to gain greater
distance. He discusses how he found his swing, lost it and found it again –
also something that most amateurs will understand after a miserable round of
golf – before realising that it wasn’t the swing that was the problem. It was Bobby
Jones who said:
“Competitive golf is played mainly on a five-and-a-half-inch course…the
space between your ears.”
It took
Morris a long time to learn that - and in those learnings the reader will
gain the greatest insights.
I have had the
privilege of playing with Ivan, and I can tell you that he does not suffer
fools gladly. He tells it how he sees it, which is remarkably refreshing when
most of us prefer to ‘beat around the bush’. He is not a man you would want to
hold up on a golf course – indeed, he blasts a few of the professionals for
their slow play.
[Photo:
Ivan ‘beats around the bush’ at The European]
Later in
the book, his thoughts come through as a series of articles, which makes it
easy to dip in and out. I read his chapter on the Olympics twice, to see if I
could have been any more dismissive about golf re-entering the ‘Games’… I
couldn’t.
It has to
be said that with so much to say and a fairly short book to say it in, some of
the chapters feel rushed – hence my comment about articles – certainly towards
the end there’s a sense he has moved on to the next chapter without fully
getting 'under the skin' of the previous one - like a thought unfinished.
Morris, I
suspect, takes a lot of pleasure in his role as crotchety-old-golf-man (he describes himself as 'glum'), but
scratch the surface and you’ll discover his frustration. He has been golfing for 50 years – I am almost up to 40 – but I
still learned a lot from the book. I see myself in many of his tales,
especially when he revisits the ‘wudda, cudda, shudda’ mentality.
At the
very end, he discusses Bob Rotella’s book ‘Golf
is not a game of perfect’, and how it would have helped his game if it had
been around in his early years. It is a book I’ve read and learned something
from, but I never understood the title fully, and certainly not when that title
could be used far more accurately for Morris’s book. Morris’s golfing life is
far from perfect and that comes through loud and clear – so clearly, in fact,
that every golfer should buy a copy and learn some of the hard-fought lessons
that make up a golfing life.
Ivan has also written:
Only Golf Spoken Here
The Life of O'Reilly
Doonbeg Ghosts
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