Golf Quotes

GOLF

Too few of us realise what we have in golf, a game that provides small miracles of pleasure almost from the cradle to the grave.
- Hugh McIlvanney

Golf, like Art, is a goddess whom we must woo from an early youth if we would win her; we must even be born to her worship.
- H Rider Haggard

Stroke play is a better test of golf, but match play is a better test of character.
- Joe Carr

Everyone is studying golf technique like mad. Every young lad now aspires to be another Palmer or Nicklaus. We may go centuries before we produce another playwright.
- Joe Carr, in the 1960s

The least thing upset him on the links. He missed short putts because of the uproar of butterflies in the adjoining meadows.
- PG Wodehouse

The number of shots taken by an opponent out of sight is equal to the square root of the number of curses heard plus the number of swishes.
- Michael Green

I need 2 sherpas, one to carry my clubs, the other to carry me.
- Brian Barnes before the '91 German Open on the hot, mountainy Dusseldorf course

I couldn't live anywhere other than Britain, but I'd quite like it parked off the coast of Australia.
- Mark James

I really don't enjoy playing this game at all anymore. You would have to be a pervert to enjoy the sort of feelings that I went through out there.
- David Feherty, after winning the BMW International in 1987

I considered beating the living daylights out of it but its probably got a wife and snakelets to look after.
- David Feherty, after being bitten by an adder at the PGA Championship

David Feherty once trained as an opera singer with a Polish woman in Belfast.
David Feherty is fed up being reminded that he once trained as an opera singer with a Polish woman in Belfast.
Were he allowed to rewrite the Rules of Golf he would insert a new rule, 'You are allowed to tackle your opponent.'
Any Jack Nicklaus designed golf course is his definition of 'Hell on Earth'.
After he won the Italian Open in 1986, he sang a sparkling rendition of 'Just One Cornetto' on BBC Radio 2's Sunday Sport.
- What You Ought To Know About David Feherty

"The purpose of the game is to shoot your opponent’s high-flying golf ball out of the air with a finely-tuned 12-gauge shotgun."
- Hunter S. Thompson, describing a game of "Shotgun Golf"

"I can't believe you're watching an old golf game instead of eating dinner with your family. You already know how it’s going to turn out!"
"Well, that never stopped people going to see 'Hamlet'."
- Emily and Richard Gilmore, "The Gilmore Girls"

In golf, Americans support America, Europeans support their own. The Brits follow Montgomerie on the circuit, we support Clarke and Harrington and McGinley, the Spaniards Garcia and Olazabal. Sport, like politics, is local. The players come together once every two years under the Europe flag, but it's a flag of convenience for the week of the Ryder Cup and after that, Europe recedes again into that amorphous identity that doesn't really hold any claim on our loyalties. Any professional golfer this side of the pond will say it's a life's ambition to play in the Ryder Cup. You will rarely hear them say it's a life's ambition to play for Europe. In fact, if any flag has bonded the players together over the years, it hasn't been the Europe flag but the flag of the United States. They might all be millionaires but when faced by the superpower they have reacted like downtrodden underdogs and raised their game.
Perversely, while American players have had no similar identity issues, their patriotic solidarity hasn't always translated into superiority on the golf course. The improbable irony is that European Ryder Cup teams, by virtue of their weak political identity and strong team ethic, have managed to make the point that sport is about people first and flags second. Which is more than anyone could have hoped for from an event that has become the epitome of corporate, fat-cat sport. One of Sky Sports' reporters went looking for excitement on the streets and didn't find much. 'I couldn't,' he said, 'even find any excitement in Naas'.
- Tommy Conlon, as Ireland hosts the 2006 Ryder Cup, "The Irish Independent"