Golf:

The amount of golf books are so voluminous that it seems like a warehouse is needed to house all the titles. Any subject, no matter how tiny, seems to get made into a book.

The game naturally lends itself to prose and most of the golf books I have read over the years I have enjoyed. The history of the game should be preserved and these microcosms of the game in book form do a wonderful job of that.

Now Sports Illustrated has taken a macro look at the game, a very macro look. “Sports Illustrated The Golf Book,” which is available in local bookstores, traces the game from its roots in the 15th century all the way to the present.

As expected, Tiger Woods, who has a home in Corona del Mar, is featured pretty prominently in the 296-page homage to golf that retails for $29.95. There is a great picture of Woods and caddie Steve Williams exchanging clubs in mid-air. Of course the story that Gary Smith wrote that introduced Woods to the world is in the book and is required reading for anyone who has even a passing interest in the game’s best golfer of all time.

Thankfully it is not a book all about Woods, though I feel it doesn’t pay homage enough to the early part of the game. I would have liked to have seen more pictures, stories, etc. from pre-1954.

I understand you are trying to advance the Sports Illustrated brand and want to highlight writers and photographer’s from the magazine, but golf from 1457 to 1912 receives four pages. Old Tom Morris and Young Tom Morris barely get mentioned and they could be the most influential golfers of all time.

The stuff the book does have from the years before Sports Illustrated was published is magnificent. There is a picture of Ben Hogan in 1953 at Carnoustie, a picture from the 1940s of Sam Snead’s nose touching the grass as he contorts to line up a putt.

But those moments are few and the book seems to slip back into self promotion, giving the reader the impression that the magazine was the only one ever to cover the sport.

Granted, having someone like Grantland Rice penning the first golf story ever in the magazine is definitely worthy of the page it occupies, but do I need a supposed profile on Donald Trump that spends the first three lengthy paragraphs as a first-person, “This is what I was supposed to write about?”

Hunter S. Thompson wrote first-person the best and others have been trying to copy him since, mostly failing.

There was another first-person by a different SI writer talking about his experiment in getting a hole in one that the writer even admits is a “seemingly pointless endeavor.”

The pictures are what save this book and again the shots are both majestic and surprising at times. There is a classic picture of Cuba’s Fidel Castro on a green watching Che Guevara putt. A shot of W.C. Fields using his driver as a fishing pole is pretty unique and I had never seen the shot of a young Sean Connery toting golf clubs.

The most enjoyable photographs to me though are the aerial shots. The overheads of the Church pews at Oakmont, the desolation that surrounds Shadow Creek in Las Vegas and the splendor that engulfs St. Andrews show what the magazine’s best strength can be.

The writing is also strong in spots with authors such as Rice, Dan Jenkins, Rick Reilly and Smith. Their work gives only snippets of what should have been in a book that is too top-heavy on the last decade and illustrates how far the magazine has slipped in quality.