As all golfers know, there are really only two golf stories. The first relates how, after a disastrous tee-shot, the teller rescued the situation with a brilliant second shot. The other story relates how, after a brilliant tee-shot, he screwed it up with a lousy second shot.

But now comes a third story — that the Chinese invented golf! Here’s an excerpt from the Times report…

More than 400 years before Scottish shepherds began tapping a ball across the grass at St Andrews, the Mongol emperors of China were swinging their clubs in the game of “hit ball”, the Chinese Golf Association announced yesterday, in a ceremony at the Great Hall of the People where China’s leaders receive visiting heads of state and the parliament gathers once a year.

Experts from the Palace Museum, China’s most prestigious, and from Peking University were on hand to reveal their findings after more than two years of research. To back up their case, they showed off a replica set of clubs, re-created from ancient paintings that show the emperor at play…

Hoots, mon!

The nicest book of golf stories I’ve come across, btw, is John Updike’s Golf Dreams.

Do you know that song, ‘Guantanamera’? It actually means ‘pretty girl from Guantanamo Bay’. It used to be an especially idyllic beauty spot in Cuba which was supposed to have lots of pretty girls. Now the Americans torture people there. Isn’t that ironic?

Screenwriter Andrew Davies, interviewed in today’s Observer Magazine.

The Guardian published a nice obit of Earl Woods, Tiger’s dad. It contains the following stories:

His faith [in Tiger’s potential] took hold when Tiger was aged one. Earl was practising golf in the garage as the tot watched from a high chair. Then he descended, took the club and hit the ball into the net his father had strung up. “I was flabbergasted,” Earl recalled. “It was the most frightening thing I had ever seen.”

At 18 months, he took Tiger to a golf course for the first time and let him play a hole. The toddler shot an 11 on the 410-yard par four, with eight shots to the green and three putts. When he was 11 he first beat his father, who never won against him afterwards…

Now I agree that Tiger is a truly wonderful golfer. I can also imagine that he must have been a child prodigy. But playing a par four in 11 shots at 18 months? Surely this is urban myth territory.

By far the best obit of John Kenneth Galbraith, IMHO, was the Economist‘s.

Bons mots … seemed to come naturally to him. “Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas; most make those of their graduate days last a lifetime.” “Wealth is not without its advantages, and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.” As Kennedy’s ambassador to India, Mr Galbraith preferred to write to the president direct: sending letters through the State Department, he told Kennedy, was “like fornicating through a mattress”….

The piece also reminds one that Galbraith’s effortless style was the product of a good deal of work.

Mr Galbraith strove to perfect his prose, reworking each passage at least five times. “It was usually on about the fourth day that I put in that note of spontaneity for which I am known,” he once admitted.

As Sam Johnson said, “nothing that is read with pleasure was written without pain”.