The title of this post is actually the title of a book by Lorne Rubenstein and Jeff Neuman that my brother-in-law gave me for my birthday, along with a volume of golf short stories edited by William Hallberg called Perfect Lies.
A Disorderly Compendium of Golf is a random collection of anecdotes, trivia, rules, tricks, nicknames, history, quotes and more. As the authors write in the introduction, “We … share a fascination for the minutiae of the game.”
Examples?
How about Three-Hanky Golf, touching vignettes that would make the biggest golf sourpuss wail like a newborn, or the Ten Most Memorable Lines from Caddyshack (“I tell you, this steak still has marks from where the jockey was hittin’ it”), or Famous Collapses in Majors (Sam Snead, Arnold Palmer, etc., etc.), or How to Rake a Bunker Like a Professional Caddie (which I attempted this fall during an outing with Orville Moody), or What Nobody Ever Tells You About Augusta National and Beyond the Green Jacket.
And, one of my favorites, Most Famous Shots by Club, including honorable mentions.
You get the idea. Not just any minutiae, but a goldmine of golf minutiae. Stuff you don’t know or haven’t heard, and some you have but don’t mind revisiting.
I know of Lorne Rubenstein, an author of eight books and a golf columnist for The Globe and Mail of Canada. I will try to reach Mr. Rubenstein to see if he will grant a Q&A. He sounds like my kind of golf guy.
The Armchair Golfer