Bobby Jones on Golf: The Classic Instructional by Golf's Greatest Legend

Here's the bad news: "Golf," suggests the great Bobby Jones, the largest shadow ever cast on a fairway, "is the one game which becomes more and more difficult the longer one plays it." Here's the good news: If his classic instructional can't change the diagnosis, it may at least ease the pain. Written by the master himself--no ghost ever stepped between Jones and his ball--as a series of twice-weekly newspaper columns between 1927 and 1935, the collection of tips and ideas moves from the simple ("Nobody ever swung a golf club too slowly") to the complex ("The art of appraising slope and speed--that is, of reading a green, can be derived only from experience"), the physical to the mental, the obvious to the arcane, and is penned with an elegance as smooth and fluid as Jones' liquid swing. Some of it, especially to golf's newcomers, will seem out of date--the game has changed much through the years--but that's OK; this is a book to savor as much as learn from. It's biggest drawback is its lack of illustrations, but the recent uncovering of a cache of unpublished photographs and tips--available in Jones' Classic Instruction--repairs that divot. Indeed, taken together, Jones' On Golf and Classic Instruction should cure several Royal and Ancient disorders. --Jeff Silverman