A Slice of Golfing Literature Part 30: Gary Moran leafs through Ivan Morris' collection of anecdotes, sub-titled 'Colourful Memoirs of an Irish Golfer'.
There is a Golf Nuts Society in America whose motto is "You've Got To Be Committed". When you read the details of some of their annual award winners you begin to wonder which sense of the word "committed" they mean.
There's Dr Howdy Giles, a dentist who has made a ball marker with the gold he has extracted over the years from Arnold Palmer's fillings; there's Merle Ball who played golf right-handed in all 50 states one year and left-handed in all 50 states the next; there's Nobby Orens, who made the Guinness Book of Records for playing 18 holes in London, New York and Los Angeles on the same day; and there's Ivan Morris, who garnered 1,000 Golf Nut points for persuading his wife to have labour induced so that he would be free to represent Munster in the Interprovincials at Royal County Down in 1980.
Playing for Munster was nothing new for Morris, but it did give him the distinction of representing the team in three different decades and avoided the wrench he would surely have felt at missing a decent championship on a decent course. As a team man, he has also won five All-Ireland medals and a European Clubs Cup with Limerick Golf Club.
He is rare amongst Irishmen in having seen Ben Hogan play in the flesh, and his own instructors have included Harry Bradshaw, John Jacobs and Eddie Hackett, who later had more success as a course architect. He was a member of Ballybunion in the days when the annual subscription was €4 and you could just turn up and blaze around 36 or 54 holes without as much as an American tourist in sight.
Morris has wilted under pressure from Joe Carr, kept score for Tiger Woods and enjoyed a brief exchange with Sam Snead in the upstairs loo at Augusta National, where he has attended the Masters with a press accreditation for the Limerick Weekly Echo.
In short, he has enjoyed a golf-saturated life and has collated some of the highs and lows, the anecdotes, the lessons and the travel experiences in Only Golf Spoken Here.
The inspiration came from the late Charles E Anderson of Portmarnock and County Sligo, who wrote the pamphlet "A Personal Account of Golfing Experiences, 1926-1986". Morris decided that as soon as he started looking back on his golfing life rather than looking forward he would follow suit.
Although he is still active on the seniors circuit, that time has come, and Morris' book was published in 2001 with the accurate sub-title "Colourful Memoirs of an Irish Golfer".
Morris gives valid views on the switch from the small to the big ball, wooden to metal drivers and the relative merits of various Irish courses. It is his "unshakeable view" that O'Connor Senior is the greatest Irish player that ever lived.
On the negative side, he clearly resented never getting the Irish senior cap which he felt he merited and which would surely have come his way if the Irish Close title or even the provincial championships had not proved so frustratingly beyond his reach.
He acknowledges that for too long he was "as famous for being a club thrower as a contender", and "was conceited enough to think that I could play perfect golf and would not tolerate anything less".
At least the experiences along the way have left us with an enjoyable book and Morris with the lesson that he admits took him too long to realise: "golf is only a game and should be played for pleasure, while always recognising that the greatest enjoyment comes from playing well".
