Tiptoeing Through Hell: Playing the U.S. Open on Golf's Most Treacherous Courses FROM OUR EDITORS
The Barnes & Noble Review
While prized golf courses reduce duffers to tears, professionals generally pepper them with birdies. Not so at the U.S. Open. In Tiptoeing Through Hell, John Strege reveals in delicious detail how the USGA conjures up absurd challenges for the pros on Open courses, exacting a little revenge on those accustomed to shooting under par.
At the 1970 Open at the Hazeltine National Golf Club in Minnesota, severe doglegs kept players in the dark regarding the flagsticks' whereabouts. In addition, said pro golfer Frank Beard, "The greens look as though somebody buried a bunch of elephants in them." The scoring average for the first round of the tournament was a horrendous 79.1.
More famous but no less challenging than Hazeltine is Pebble Beach Golf Links in California. At the memorable 1972 Open, in which Jack Nicklaus outdueled Arnold Palmer before a live television audience, Nicklaus's winning tournament score was two over par. The rest of the field finished five over or higher.
The USGA inflates scores by narrowing fairways, keeping the rough high, and assigning par-four status to previously par-five holes. Professional golfers retaliate with vicious verbal slices at the USGA and the course designers. And the high-society shenanigans are uproarious -- they are captured elegantly by Strege, an author with a wicked sense of humor. (Brenn Jones)
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Once a year, when the U.S. Open is played, the United States Golf Association picks a course and then modifies it wickedly so that even the world's best golfers often scramble to avoid triple-bogeys. Now Golf Digest writer John Strege reveals how over the past fifty years the USGA has venomously transformed already difficult courses into "monsters." With relish, he tells what happened to the pros -- Nicklaus, Palmer, Player, Woods, Snead, Hogan, among others -- who hooked shots into the rough, missed putts and routinely finished over par in this grueling annual competition.
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
Strege, a writer for Golf Digest and the author of Tiger: A Biography of Tiger Woods, examines how the United States Golf Association (USGA) has made the U.S. Open a supreme test for top golfers. In golf, unlike many other sports, the test is not only of player against player but of player against the course. With the United States Open, the course is prepared to make any challenge to par a difficult proposition: the layout is lengthened, the fairways narrowed, the greens made faster. And, as if that were not enough, the USGA has been known to employ artifice: the Hinkle tree was an overnight answer to a gap in the trees that allowed Lon Hinkle to play the eighth hole at Inverness by way of the 17th. Strege's book provides a context for understanding the U.S. Open in terms of its yearly change of venue. It is a narrative history, with a cast ranging from Sam Snead to Tiger Woods, that includes flashbacks to the previous year's tournament or to the last Open held at this particular venue. Of particular interest is the chapter on Bethpage Black, in Farmingdale, NY, the first truly public course to host a U.S. Open. Both entertaining and informative, this book belongs on the shelf alongside recent titles like John Feinstein's The Majors: In Pursuit of Golf's Holy Grail and Salvatore Johnson's The Official U.S. Open Almanac. Steven Silkunas, North Wales, PA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
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