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Golf Biographies: Featured Book!
| Ben Hogan: An American Life | | By James Dodson |
Ben Hogan is widely credited with ushering in the modern era of golf. His legendary practice sessions, intense perfectionism and iron determination helped turn a lazy gentleman's game into a high-stakes, competitive sport. Yet Hogan's unprecedented achievements on the golf course were often overshadowed by his fierce demeanor and public reticence, which fueled wild speculations about every aspect of his guarded life and gave birth to countless myths and misrepresentations. This book provides the most intimate and richly textured portrait of the famous golfer to date. Reared in Depression-era Texas, nine-year-old Hogan witnessed his father's suicide, a formative event that the author believes spurred Hogan's prodigious ambition and drive, as well as his compulsive tendencies and extreme need for privacy. All the mesmerizing stories -- including Hogan's near-miraculous comeback and triumph at the 1950 U.S. Open after a debilitating car crash -- are related in lush and loving detail, without overlooking anecdotes about the era's other great players and colorful personalities, such as Sam Snead, Byron Nelson and Jimmy Demaret. As much about the game as about Hogan himself, Dodson's nuanced and engrossing biography adds new depth to a figure who has been excessively scrutinized but rarely understood. | List Price: $16.95
New: $9.99
Used: $5.90 | | Order your copy today! |
More Excellent Golf Biographies
| | Down the Fairway
Robert T. Jones
If you could buy only one book about golf, this is it. Published in 1927 when Jones was just 25, three years before he won "The Grand Slam", this is a book in which Jones invites his reader to accompany him "down the fairway" of a life as well as a game. Included in the work are stirring chapters recounting some of Jones' greatest victories and toughest losses. And throughout the book, Jones shares just about everything he has learned (to that point) about the mental as well as physical skills needed to play golf well. He discusses putting ("a game within a game"), the pitch shot ("a mystery"), iron play ("I like it"), "the heavy artillery" (woods), miscellaneous shots ("and trouble"), and much more. Three years after sharing these thoughts, Jones won the Grand Slam and then retired from tournament competition. > Buy Now | List Price: $24.95
New: $15.96
Used: $19.13
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| | A Golfer's Life
Arnold Palmer, James Dodson
From his first steps onto the public stage, this true icon of sport exuded an aura more inviting than off-putting, and his substantial record--92 titles worldwide, four Masters championships, a U.S. Open crown, and back-to-back British Open victories--speaks for itself. So does his autobiography. It is friendly, chatty, honest, passionate, long on spirit, and deft with the anecdotes it shares. As a storyteller, Palmer is as down the middle with the failures and hard times as he is with the remarkable triumphs. He writes thrillingly about golf at its most competitive; probingly about his rivals, particularly Ben Hogan and Jack Nicklaus; revealingly about the extended slump that followed the '64 Masters, his last win in a major; fairly and nobly about his own legendary status; emotionally about his family and his complex relationship with his father; and quite movingly about both his and his wife's battles with cancer. In the end, the volume's real appeal isn't just the charismatic persona of Palmer himself--it's his ability to take aim at the birdies and bogeys of a full life on and off the course and assess them with clarity, charm, equanimity, and wit. > Buy Now | List Price: $26.95
New: $3.91
Used: $0.01
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