![\"Book](\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/thebookofgolfdisasters.jpg\")
You might remember, gentle reader, I read a couple of golf books last October (The Downhill Lie<\/a><\/em> by Carl Hiaasen and The Bogey Man<\/a><\/em> by George Plimpton). So I came across this book and thought it’s too bad I didn’t read it then, but the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge<\/a> has a Sports category, so it’s game on (although it does not actually clarify when I might get to the Bob Hope golf book I’ve also uncovered while combing the stacks for prospects for the Winter Reading Challenge).<\/p>\nSo: The book comes out not quite in-between the other golf books (seventeen years after The Bogey Man<\/em>, 21 years before The Downhill Lie<\/em>), but the book reads a lot more like the former rather than the latter. Dobereiner was a golf writer for British papers and Golf Digest<\/em>, so he covered a lot of tournaments before this, his third book, came out. He was also steeped in the history of the game, so he refers to a lot of the old timey players from the early part of the 20th century (although not necessarily that<\/em> old timey in 1986). We get mentions of Sam Snead. Arnold Palmer is still very big in the game along with Jack Nicklaus. Names that still resonate, I suppose, but as old timey now.<\/p>\n The book has several chapters that collect small anecdotes about bad shots, errors, bad luck, and that sort of thing grouped by…. Well, the chapters are “Defeat snatched from the jaws of victory”, “On the wrong side of the law”, “Bundles and bunches”, “One of those days”, “All God’s creatures”, “The law according to Murphy”, and “Just whose side are you on?” Okay, I guess the chapter titles are not that descriptive, but they’re grouped by mistakes that cost tournaments, rules violations or rulings, animal encounters, and that sort of thing. Each anecdote is maybe a couple of paragraphs with some connective tissue philosophizing.<\/p>\n It clocks in at 180 pages, and it’s somewhere between the two books topically as well. The Downhill Lie<\/em> is mostly about Hiaasen’s personal experiences; The Bogey Man<\/em> is Plimpton’s experience on the Tour leavened with stories about golf history and the books about golf he’s reading; this book pretty much omits any personal experience, certainly golfing, and goes right to the stories about others. Of course, that was to be expected as the author is a golf writer, not a writer golfing.<\/p>\n A quick enough read, and something that got me ever closer to my goal of completing all 15 categories of the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge. At this pace, I’ll be done sometime at the end of the month, which will leave my February reading open for maybe the Bob Hope golf book (and other Bob Hope books, of which I seem to have several).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You might remember, gentle reader, I read a couple of golf books last October (The Downhill Lie by Carl Hiaasen and The Bogey Man by George Plimpton). So I came across this book and thought it’s too bad I didn’t read it then, but the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge has a Sports category, so it’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33428"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33429,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33428\/revisions\/33429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}