Golf: Gary Moran revisits George Plimpton's classic on the eternalstruggle with par

George Plimpton has had an interesting life. For the entire 50 years of its existence he has edited the literary magazine The Paris Review as a labour of love. That started while he was at Cambridge University, which followed on from Harvard. He has counted Muhammad Ali, Ernest Hemingway and various members of the Kennedy family among his friends. He has acted in Oscar-winning films and, spread out over almost a quarter of a century, authored a series of books that remain the standard for participatory sports journalism.

These started in 1961 with Out Of My League, in which Plimpton describes his time practising for and then pitching in an All Star baseball game at Yankee Stadium, and ended in 1985 with the superbly written Open Net, in which pre-season training with the Boston Bruins ice hockey team culminated in a brief and frightening appearance as goalminder against the Philadelphia Flyers.

Along the way Plimpton took his typewriter and golf clubs to California for a stint on the PGA Tour. To be precise, he spent a month in 1968 playing considerably worse than his 18-handicap would suggest in the Bing Crosby Pro-Am, the Bob Hope Classic and the Pro-Am of the long-defunct Lucky Tournament.

His playing experiences, the characters he met and their golfing anecdotes are recounted in The Bogey Man, which is no longer in print but can be obtained via bookselling websites such as amazon.com. The most interesting sections of the book are not those relating to the actual play. Plimpton mines a rich seam of stories in his clubhouse get-togethers with the likes of Dave Marr, Claude Harmon and Jack Nicklaus.

They make interesting reading for anyone complacent about the million-dollar purses on offer today. For example, a couple of players ended the 1967 money list with just four dollars in winnings. Caddies had to fetch balls on the practice grounds and the PGA banned players from using "tour caddies" from June to September. This was to allow local youngsters get caddying jobs then the Tour came to town.

When Billy Casper won a tournament in San Francisco he asked his local bagman what the fee was. Told it was seven dollars plus five for the play-off, Casper wrote him a cheque for $2,000.

There's a whole chapter devoted to temperamental players, including Ky Laffoon, credited as being the first to tie a misbehaving putter to the car bumper before driving out of town after a missed cut. "A private matter between me and the club," he claimed.

There are stories of gamesmanship and if you're looking for a good bustle, what about asking your opponent if he inhales or exhales during the backswing, as a spectator did to Lawson Little in the play-off for the 1940 US Open.

Helpful hints include one from a driving range professional who watched a pupil top some 20 shots in a row. "How about taking off your shoes?"

Although Nicklaus was already the better player, it is clear that Arnold Palmer was the bigger draw. Plimpton found touring the course in Arnie's Army an exhilarating experience.

The Bogey Man would have been more enjoyable, however, if his own golf had been a bit more exhilarating. By the end even Plimpton's joie de vivre had been dampened by a succession of duffs, shanks and slices. After the first round of the Hope tournament the thought kept crossing his mind that he "was having a rotten time, the steady humiliation of playing awkward and poor golf, letting my teammates down, the endless practice and reading to no avail."

We can be thankful his writing skills didn't desert him and he so creatively described the frustrations many of us often feel.

The Bogey Man: An Amateur In Professional Golf

- George Plimpton