There is even - as with no other game - a fascinating detective literature, a wry commentary on the human comedy, implicit in the book of rules.

It is a wonderful tribute to the game or to the dottiness of the people who play it that for some people somewhere there is no such thing as an insurmountable obstacle, an unplayable course, the wrong time of the day or year.

In golf, humiliations are the essence of the game.

As always, the British especially shudder at the latest American vulgarity, and then they embrace it with enthusiasm two years later

These doomsday warriors look no more like soldiers than the soldiers of the Second World War looked like conquistadors. The more expert they become the more they look like lab assistants in small colleges

[Golfers] are a special kind of moral realist who nips the normal romantic and idealistic yearnings in the bud by proving once or twice a week that life is unconquerable but endurable.

No myth dies harder, and none is more regularly debunked by the facts, than the one about international sports contributing to international friendship.