Copyright © John Coyne. Used with permission.
METAPHORICALLY SPEAKING, WE MIGHT SAY golf literature is like one of Bubba Watson's famous drives: long and high and very deep. Great golf prose has been with us since the days when Mary, Queen of Scots, first played the game as a school girl in France.
The earliest recorded golf prose was the verse Glotta, written in 1721 by another Scotsman, James Arbuckle. Two decades later came Thomas Mathison's The Goff, "a Heroic-comical Poem in Three Cantos."
The late George Plimpton, who wrote about golf in his best selling 1968 book The Bogey Man, said that while baseball has produced some interesting books, golf books were better written because of golf’s "popularity among the educated classes.