The Bluffer's Guide to Golf - Tapa blanda

Peter Gammond's qualifications to write a book about golf could quite easily be questioned. His evasive answer is that anyone who has lived is entitled to write a novel about it. The present book is not, in any case, a technical treatise. How could anyone who is incapable of stringing more than three good shots together (and those on different holes) embark on that anyway. But it is, so the author claims, a philosophical view of golf expressing thoughts which he sincerely believes he shares with thousands of others who have suffered with him.

Born not far from a golf course, he did not strike a ball in earnest until invited to play in Oxford in 1943. The very first ball he hit went straight down the fairway and he decided there and then to take up the game. The second, third and subsequent hits made him reverse this decision; and it was not until 1962 that he again approached golf, having by that time been forced to give up more active sports such as Darts and Shove-ha'penny. He joined a Surrey golf club that year along with his friend Alf. It was only Alf's constant encouragement (by always playing rather worse than he did) that has kept him at the game ever since.

Peter Gammond, F.R.S.G.R., S.H.A.G.S* keeps his golf clubs in the garden shed in the hope that one day someone will come and pinch them. He can then collect the insurance money and retire from the game.

* Fellow of the Royal Society of Golfing Rabbits, Member of the Surrey & Hounslow Ambulatory Golfing Society.