This pandemic winter, when even golf is not possible in Minnesota, I have been spending many days with my butt firmly planted in the southwest corner of the couch in our family room, catching up on my reading (chronically neglected during the golf season).
Mostly I've been reading backward through The New Yorkers that piled up from April forward, but yesterday and this morning I took a break to read Brad Klein's "Wide Open Fairways: A Journey Across the Landscapes of Modern Golf," which is eight years old now.
Better late than never!
The book is a meandering (literally and figuratively) series of essays, alternately lyrical and hard-headed — ranging from a meditation on the Nebraska Sandhills that have inspired both Willa Cather and William Coore (among many, many others, including your humble correspondent) to a withering look at the process that led to what's-his-name's Ferry Point.
There's a wonderful, long chapter about the design process, with Klein as a consultant, that produced Old Macdonald, at Bandon Dunes; a report on the effort to salvage a happy future for the community course at Los Alamos; a piece on the bare-bones golf (and otherwise) culture in North Dakota; and a fond (in retrospect) look back at the innumerable hassles of creating the poorly named (I agree) Wintonbury Hills course in Brad's adoptive hometown of Bloomfield, Connecticut.
The book opens with an intensely personal essay about Brad's family, and how it connected with his love of the game's Wide Open Fairways; it ends with a clear-eyed, occasionally witty Restorationist Manifesto. ("There are always some recalcitrant, bullheaded members who will never be convinced of anything. Instead of wasting its time trying to convince them, the green committee needs to create a consenting majority so that the prevailing terms of discussion sway from the naysayers to the restorationists. In this way the green committee, through its educational efforts, can cultivate an informed general audience of golfers while isolating the recalcitrant minority of cranks found at any club. They should be isolated and allowed to be ignored, never to be convinced. Let the club move on without their assent. The result should be a supportive rhetorical community in which the critics are relegated to the periphery as marginal observers. Their comments will not go away, but it would be ideal if they'd confine their sphere of action to the locker room or nineteenth hole." Having served on the Green Committee at Midland Hills before and during our brand-new restoration/renovation by Jim Urbina, I can attest to the wisdom of Brad's observations!)
"Wide Open Fairways" distinguishes itself, for me, in several other ways — beyond the fact that, really, it is much more than a "golf book":
(1) I didn't feel the urge to re-edit it. This is extraordinarily rare, for me.
(2) It contained only a few copy-editing/proofreading errors. This is extraordinarily rare, period.
(3) Brad managed to write a couple of hundred pages of literate prose with only one or two uses of the ubiquitous word "iconic." The saints be praised!
All of this is just to say: If you, too, have missed this book till now, try not to miss it much longer.