 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
I’ve been playing golf for more years than even I can remember—longer than I’ve been teaching, longer, in fact, than any other single thing I’ve done. Since it’s been so big a part of my life, it really has to be represented on this site. So, this page is devoted to golf miscellany, of no particular order or importance—except for the picture below, of the 18th fairway at St Andrews golf course in Scotland, the course, tradition has it, where the game began. I was able to take this picture in the spring of 1995.
Winter Golf in Seattle, February, 2009
Up to the third at West Seattle with snow threatening
West Seattle Backside Tees
Seventeenth Fairway under Seattle gray skies
Poems and Other Useless Stuff about Golf
Who Taught Caddies to Count? or A Burnt Golfer Fears the Child, by Ogden Nash
Seaside Golf, by John Betjeman
The Golf Links, by Sarah N. Cleghorn
Know any other golf poems, or have one of your own? Click here to send it in.
Who Taught Caddies to Count? or A Burnt Golfer Fears the Child, by Ogden Nash
I never beheld you, O pawky Scot,
And I only guess your name,
Who first propounded the popular rot
That golf is a humbling game.
You putted perhaps with a mutton bone,
And hammered a gutty ball;
But I think you sat in the bar alone,
And never played at all.
Ye hae spoken a braw bricht mouthfu’, Jamie,
Ye didna ken ye erred;
Ye’re richt that golf is a something gamie,
But humble is not the word.
Try arrogant, insolent, supercilious,
And if invention fades,
Add uppity, hoity-toity, bilious,
And double them all in spades.
Oh pride of rank is a fearsome thing,
And pride of riches a bore;
But both of them bow on lea and ling
To the Prussian pride of score.
Better the beggars with fleas to scratch
Then the unassuming dub
Trying to pick up a Saturday match
In the locker room of the club.
Seaside Golf, by John Betjeman
How straight it flew, how long it flew,
It clear'd the rutty track,
And soaring, disappeared from view
Beyond the bunker's back -
A glorious sailing bounding drive
That made me glad I was alive.
And down the fairway, far along
It glowed a lonely white;
I played an iron sure and strong
And clipp'd it out of sight,
And spite of grassy banks between
I knew I'd find it on the green.
And so I did. It lay content
Two paces from the pin;
A steady putt and then it went
Oh, most securely in.
The very turf rejoiced to see
That quite unprecedented three.
Ah! seaweed smells from sandy caves
And thyme and mist in whiffs,
In-coming tide, Atlantic waves
Slapping the sunny cliffs,
Lark song and sea sounds in the air
And splendour, splendour everywhere.
The Golf Links, by Sarah N. Cleghorn
The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.
Back to Miscellaneous Golf Links
Home | A&S Writing | Classes | PSWP | SoTL | London | Vita | About Me | Golf | Contact Info