Golf famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
-
The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief - call it what you will - than any book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counterattractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course.
-- A. A. Milne -
Elderly gentlemen, gentle in all respects, kind to animals, beloved by children, and fond of music, are found in lonely corners of the downs, hacking at sandpits or tussocks of grass, and muttering in a blind, ungovernable fury elaborate maledictions which could not be extracted from them by robbery or murder. Men who would face torture without a word become blasphemous at the short fourteenth. It is clear that the game of golf may well be included in that category of intolerable provocations which may legally excuse or mitigate behavior not otherwise excusable.
-- A. P. Herbert -
Men who would face torture without a word become blasphemous at the short fourteenth. It is clear that the game of golf may well be included in that category of intolerable provocations which may legally excuse or mitigate behaviour not otherwise excusable.
-- A. P. Herbert -
My ball is in a bunch of fern, A jolly place to be; An angry man is close astern- He waves his club at me. Well, let him wave-the sky is blue; Go on, old ball, we are but two-We may be down in three, Or nine-or ten-or twenty-five-It matters not; to be alive, Is good enough for me.
-- A. P. Herbert -
Little Bobby Jones of Atlanta is really a fine player, and shows every indication of becoming a tremendous great one, once he is master of himself, which must come with maturity.
-- A. W. Tillinghast -
If some hole does not possess striking individuality through some gift of nature, it must be given as much as possible artificially, and the artifice must be introduced in so subtle a manner as to make it seem natural.
-- A. W. Tillinghast -
Extremely large greens breed slovenly play. When any green ceases to command respect, it loses its value as a test of that rarest of all strokes, the shot home.
-- A. W. Tillinghast -
Once you have your practice and you have your mechanics, you must be able to go out there and trust your mechanics.
-- Aaron Baddeley -
Playing the game I have learned the meaning of humility. It has given me an understanding of futility of the human effort.
-- Abba Eban -
I just picked up golf, it was good, give me a chance to play golf.
-- Abdullah Ahmad Badawi -
If you've driven over to the gay section of Los Angeles, it's like a golf course... Real estate values go 'boom!'
-- Adam Carolla -
I think dates considered super corny and cheesy - whether it's going bowling or miniature golf or something where you can be competitive and just have fun with each other - those always make the most memorable dates!
-- Aimee Teegarden -
The best stroked putt in a lifetime does not bring the aesthetic satisfaction of a perfectly hit wood or iron shot. There is nothing to match the whoosh and soar, the almost magical flight of a beautifully hit drive or 5-iron.
-- Al Barkow -
I didn't realize at the moment exactly what I had done...I only realized the enormity of it when I walked into the press room and got a long standing ovation.It wasn't until I came out of my daze that I began to appreciate my accomplishment.
-- Al Geiberger -
I've come to realize that I perform best when I'm letting my subconscious mind hit the ball and my conscious mind is otherwise occupied.
-- Al Geiberger -
It's so ridiculous to see a golfer with a one foot putt and everybody is saying "Shhh" and not moving a muscle. Then we allow nineteen year-old kids to face a game-deciding free throw with seventeen thousand people yelling.
-- Al McGuire -
I always wanted to be a golfer, only I realised that if I'd played golf I would have been skint.
-- Alan Hansen -
I've got two girls. I like to play golf. Apart from that there's not a lot goes on in my life. So I am boring, aren't I?
-- Alan Shearer -
I spend time with my family. I have got two daughters who are too young to know their Dad's a footballer. They just want to play with their Dad. I like to play golf, too, but apart from that, that's me, I'm afraid.
-- Alan Shearer -
Unfortunately, the suit is so stiff, I can't do this with two hands, but I'm going to try a little sand-trap shot here.
-- Alan Shepard -
The suit was so clumsy, being pressurized, it was impossible to get two hands comfortably on the handle and it's impossible to make any kind of a turn. It was kind of a one-handed chili-dip.
-- Alan Shepard -
Then I thought, with the same clubhead speed, the ball's going to go at least six times as far. There's absolutely no drag, so if you do happen to spin it, it won't slice or hook 'cause there's no atmosphere to make it turn.
-- Alan Shepard -
Because of the suit I was wearing, I couldn't make a good pivot on the swing. And I had to hit the ball with one hand.
-- Alan Shepard -
Being a Scotsman, I am naturally opposed to water in its undiluted state.
-- Alastair Mackenzie -
Fifty years ago, 100 white men chasing one black man across a field was called the Ku Klux Klan. Today it's called the PGA Tour.
-- Alex Hay -
My best score ever was 103, but I've only been playing 15 years.
-- Alex Karras -
I am always working out, whether I am on vacation or at home. When in La Jolla, I like to surf, play tennis, and golf - but surfing is definitely my favorite.
-- Alexander Ludwig -
Mistakes are part of the game. It's how well you recover from them, that's the mark of a great player.
-- Alice Cooper -
What most people don't understand is that UFOs are on a cosmic tourist route. That's why they're always seen in Arizona, Scotland, and New Mexico. Another thing to consider is that all three of those destinations are good places to play golf. So there's possibly some connection between aliens and golf.
-- Alice Cooper -
On stage, I'm this figure, this actor, who does things that people aren't used to seeing and I relish in that reaction. In real life, though, I play golf, I shop and I walk around with no makeup on and my hair in a ponytail. I may not be the typical middle-aged Joe, but I'm closer to normal than you think.
-- Alice Cooper -
The best thing about Eisenhower's Presidency was his Jeffersonian conviction that there should be as little government and as much golf as possible.
-- Alistair Cooke -
In golf, humiliations are the essence of the game.
-- Alistair Cooke -
Americans are less mystical about what produced their inland or meadow courses; they are the product of the bulldozerm rotary ploughs, mowers, sprinkler systems and alarmingly generous wads of folding money.
-- Alistair Cooke -
Sir Guy Campbell's classic account of the formation of the links, beginning with Genesis and moving step by step to the thrilling arrival of 'tilth' on the fingers of coastal land, suggests that such notable features of our planet as dinosaurs, the prairies, the Himalayas, the seagull, the female of the species herself, were accidental by-products of the Almighty's preoccupation with the creation of the Old Course at St. Andrews.
-- Alistair Cooke -
It rose slowly like a gull sensing a reckless blue fish to close to the surface, and then it dived relentlessly for the green, kicked and stopped three feet short of the flag.
-- Alistair Cooke -
I hasten to say to snobs from the Surrey pine-and-sand country that no invention since the corn plaster or the electric toothbrush has brought greater balm to the extremities of the senior golfer than the golfmobile, a word that will have to do for want of a better.
-- Alistair Cooke -
[Golfers] are a special kind of moral relist who nips the normal romantic and idealstic yearnings in the bud by proving once or twice a week that life is unconquerable but endurable.
-- Alistair Cooke -
I wrote to Mr. McEnroe, Senior. I said: "Here is the sentence once written by the immortal Bobby Jones. I thought you might like to have it done in needlepoint and mounted in a suitable frame to hang over Little John's bed. It says, The rewards of golf - and of life, too, I expect - are worth very little if you don't play the game by the etiquette as well as by the rules." I never heard from Mr. McEnroe, Senior. I can only conclude that the letter went astray.
-- Alistair Cooke -
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.
-- Alistair Cooke -
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.
-- Alistair Cooke -
To get an elementary grasp of the game of golf, a human must learn, by endless practice, a continuous and subtle series of highly unnatural movements, involving about sixty-four muscles, that result in a seemingly natural swing, taking two seconds to begin and end.
-- Alistair Cooke -
Golf is an open exhibition of overweening ambition, courage deflated by stupidity, skill soured by a whiff of arrogance.
-- Alistair Cooke -
The Masters is more like a vast Edwardian garden party than a golf tournament.
-- Alistair Cooke -
The Scots say that Nature itself dictated that golf should be played by the seashore. Rather, the Scots saw in the eroded sea coasts a cheap battleground on which they could whip their fellow men in a game based on the Calvinist doctrine that man is meant to suffer here below and never more than when he goes out to enjoy himself.
-- Alistair Cooke -
I have an insane desire to shave a stroke or two off my handicap.
-- Alistair Cooke -
They have been playing golf for 800 years and nobody has satisfactorily said why.
-- Alistair Cooke -
The emblem on the necktie reserved for the members of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews - The Vatican of golf - is of St. Andrew himself bearing the slatier cross on which, once he was captured at Patras, he was to be stretched before he was crucified.Only the Scots would have thought of celebrating a national game with the figure of a tortured saint.
-- Alistair Cooke -
So the British, of all ages, still walk the course. On trips to Florida or the American desert, they still marvel, or shudder, at the fleets of electric carts going off in the morning like the first assault wave at the Battle of El Alamein. It is unlikely, for some time, that a Briton will come across in his native land such a scorecard as Henry Longhurst rescued from a California club and cherished till the day he died. The last on its list of local rules printed the firm warning "A Player on Foot Has No Standing on the Course."
-- Alistair Cooke -
For many years I had an impression of my golf swing, which was that I vividly resembled Tom Weiskopf in the takeaway and Dave Marr on the downswing. Unfortunately, there came a day when I was invited to have my golf swing filmed via a video camera. Something I will never do again. When it was played back, what I saw - what you would have seen - was not Weiskopf and Marr but a man simultaneously climbing into a sweater and falling out of a tree.
-- Alistair Cooke -
When that happens [the demise of golf], old men will furtively beckon to their sons and, like fugitives from the guillotine recalling the elegant orgies at the court of Louis XV, will recite the glories of Portmarnock and Merion, of the Road Hole at St. Andrews, the sixth at Seminole, the eighteenth at Pebble Beach. They will take out this volume from its secret hiding place and they will say: "There is no question, son, that these were unholy places in an evil age. Unfortunately, I had a whale of a time."
-- Alistair Cooke -
On the value of blind shots to golf course design.
-- Alister MacKenzie -
One of the reasons why I, 'a medical man' decided to give up medicine was a firm conviction of the extraordinary influence on health of pleasurable excitement, especially when combined with fresh air and exercise. How frequently have I, with great difficulty, persuaded patients who were never off my doorsteps to take up golf, and how rarely, if ever, I have seen them in my consulting room again.
-- Alister MacKenzie -
There may be a certain amount of pleasurable excitement in running up to the top of a hillock in the hope of seeing your ball near the flag, but this kind of thing one gets tired of as one grows older.
-- Alister MacKenzie -
I try to build courses for the most enjoyment by the greatest number.
-- Alister MacKenzie -
Golf courses are becoming far too long. Twenty years ago we played three rounds of golf a day and considered we had taken an interminably long time if we took more than two hours to play a round. Today it not infrequently takes over three hours.
-- Alister MacKenzie -
Golf is a game, and talk and discussion is all to the interests of the game. Anything that keeps the game alive and prevents us being bored with it is an advantage. Anything that makes us think about it, talk about it, and dream about it is all to the good and prevents the game becoming dead.
-- Alister MacKenzie -
The chief object of every golf architect or greenkeeper worth his salt is to imitate the beauties of nature so closely as to make his work indistinguishable from nature itself.
-- Alister MacKenzie -
I have always wanted to live where one could practice (golf) shots in one's pajamas before breakfast.
-- Alister MacKenzie -
A good golf course is like good music. It does not necessarily appeal the first time one plays it.
-- Alister MacKenzie -
In Hollywood, we have some of the richest unemployed people in the world. They have sun tans. Some of them have chauffeurs in Rolls-Royces waiting outside. They have their golf clubs ready in the car. There is no law that says you cannot play golf while being unemployed.
-- Allan Sherman -
Keep your sense of humor. There's enough stress in the rest of your life not to let bad shots ruin a game you're supposed to enjoy.
-- Amy Alcott -
Golf is a spiritual game. It's like Zen. You have to let your mind take over.
-- Amy Alcott -
Golf isn't just about hitting a lot of drivers. I grew up playing on my front lawn, chipping and putting into soup cans, out of the ivy and over rose bushes and hedges - the little Alcott Golf and Country Club. I just loved having a wedge in my hands.
-- Amy Alcott -
What makes a great golf course is continuity and variety: right-to-left holes, left-to-right holes.
-- Amy Alcott -
I don't think the philosophy really changes between men and women. I think golf courses need to become more distance-friendly overall. I think golf courses almost need to develop a more generic set of tees instead of calling them black, blue, red or whatever.
-- Amy Alcott -
You could argue that if the average golfer plays a golf course with 430-yard par 4s and they always miss the green, that's good practice. It's definitely great practice to play a course that's too long for you.
-- Amy Alcott -
Golf is an indispensable adjunct to high civilisation.
-- Andrew Carnegie -
Among other things, neuroplasticity means that emotions such as happiness and compassion can be cultivated in much the same way that a person can learn through repetition to play golf and basketball or master a musical instrument, and that such practice changes the activity and physical aspects of specific brain areas.
-- Andrew Weil -
Now I do bowling, golf, and tennis. I want to be a good bowler.
-- Andy Lau -
I had a very detailed retirement plan, and I feel like I've met every aspect of it: a lot of golf, a lot of carbs, a lot of fried food, and some booze, occasionally - I've been completely committed... The results have shown.
-- Andy Roddick -
Anyone who watches golf on television would enjoy watching the grass grow on the greens.
-- Andy Rooney -
For as long as I could remember, he had never worn a single piece of clothing that could be considered casual. Khaki shorts and golf shirts, to Umberto, were the garments of men who have no virtues left, not even shame.
-- Anne Fortier -
emerald as heavy as a golf course, ruby as dark as an afterbirth, diamond as white as sun on the sea...
-- Anne Sexton -
Golf seems to me an arduous way to go for a walk. I prefer to take the dogs out.
-- Anne, Princess Royal -
I told my caddie today that I am in the position that I want to be in. That this is what I have been waiting for, to win my tenth victory. I said that I am going to do everything that I can do today and that nothing is going to stop me.
-- Annika Sorenstam -
Ron Sirak, a golf writer and friend, was quoted as saying, "Annika is no longer a female golfer. She's a golfer." That's truly all I ever aspired to be.
-- Annika Sorenstam -
A lot of people think I am cold and have no feelings. But I do. I just try very hard to focus and not let my emotions take over on the golf course.
-- Annika Sorenstam -
I've been playing golf as long as I've been dancing, since I was 13 or 14. I play off six. I like to get out on a golf course as often as I can.
-- Anton du Beke -
Golf gives no margin: either you win or you fail. You cannot hedge; you cannot bluff; you cannot give a stop order. One chance is given you, and you hit or miss. There is nothing more rigid in life. And it is this ultra and extreme rigidity that makes golf so intensely interesting.
-- Arnold Haultain -
Most of the difficult things in golf are mental, not physical. Are subjective, not objective. Are the created phantasms of the mind, not the veritable realities of the course.
-- Arnold Haultain -
Golf is more exacting than racing, cards, speculation, or matrimony. In almost all other games you pit yourself against a mortal foe; in golf it is yourself against the world: no human being stays your progress as you drive your ball over the face of the globe.
-- Arnold Haultain -
There are more 'Don'ts' in golf than there are in any other avocation in life.
-- Arnold Haultain -
Don't worry about your caddie. He may be an irritating little wretch, but for eighteen holes he is your caddie.
-- Arnold Haultain -
Golf is a game in which attitude of mind counts for incomparably more than mightiness of muscle.
-- Arnold Haultain -
Golf is not a wrestle with Bogey; it is not a struggle with your mortal foe; it is a physiological, psychological and moral fight with your self; it is a test of mastery over self; and the ultimate and irreducible element of the game is to determine which of the players is the more worthy combatant.
-- Arnold Haultain -
The most rewarding things you do in life are often the ones that look like they cannot be done.
-- Arnold Palmer -
There's no question that the galleries still like to see birdies and eagles. If you take them all away, it takes some of the dramatics, the excitement of a golf tournament and we [people] don't want to do that.
-- Arnold Palmer -
There's some good news, too, and the good news is that the players [finally] have become more aware of the fact that we [in golf] need sponsors, and we need the good will that is created by the players being, let's say, cooperative with the sponsors - meaning friendly.
-- Arnold Palmer -
It's a funny thing, the more I practice the luckier I get.
-- Arnold Palmer -
I was playing golf in Palm Springs and after a round I asked the waitress in a restaurant to bring me a glass of iced tea and lemonade. A lady sitting nearby heard me and asked the waitress to bring her a "Palmer," too. The name caught on and the beverage quickly spread around the country.
-- Arnold Palmer -
Every day I play golf, that's my goal. To break 70 the other way. To shoot 70 or better.
-- Arnold Palmer -
I've noticed the sound of the golf ball being hit by the golf club is different, and much more realistic, with the hearing aids. The sound with the hearing aids makes sense, and better represents what I know is happening to the golf ball. So you could say that the hearing aids help give me confidence regarding my golf game.
-- Arnold Palmer -
I can sum it up like this: Thank God for the game of golf.
-- Arnold Palmer -
How did I make a twelve on a par five hole? It's simple - I missed a four foot putt for an eleven.
-- Arnold Palmer -
Trouble is bad to get into but fun to get out of. If you're in trouble, eighty percent of the time there's a way out. If you can see the ball, you can probably hit it; and if you can hit it, you can move it; and if you can move it, you might be able to knock it in the hole. At least it's fun to try.
-- Arnold Palmer -
Golf is deceptively simple and endlessly complicated.
-- Arnold Palmer
