The MagazineWatch the BirdieGolf as sport and theater of human nature.Nov 21, 2011, Vol. 17, No. 10
• By EDWIN M. YODER JR.
 In How the Scots Invented the Modern World, Arthur Herman posed a bold but credible claim. But there was a major omission: The game of golf, which, with steam engines and classical economics, also originated in the foggy reaches of the Celtic fringe. The royal and ancient game, moreover, suffers from being more joked about than any other sport—“a good walk ruined,” etc., whoever among many claimants first said that. “No one guilty of golf,” pronounced H. L. Mencken, “should be eligible to any office of profit or trust.”  If I were prescribing a cure for those who deny themselves the game’s pleasures and miseries, if only as students or spectators, I would recommend a double dose of Mark Frost. In two eloquent chronicles of historic matches, Frost brings a remarkable humanism to the cliché-ridden world of sportswriting. His long suit is a grasp of its personalities, the forces that shaped them, and the tense interaction of human temperament with tricky terrain. From its earliest arrival on these shores—late 19th/early 20th centuries—golf’s patrons and their governing organization, the United States Golf Association, insisted that it must remain a game for gentlemen amateurs. It is a mark of that snobbery that at the U.S. Open of 1913, the dramatic centerpiece of the first of these two books, amateurs were accorded the honorific “Mr.” on the entry lists while professionals, many of them club-affiliated (in the days before tours) and recent immigrants from Great Britain, were denied it—and even the privilege of changing shoes in clubhouse locker rooms. To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber We're Sorry,
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