Alistair Cooke Quotes
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Curiosity endows the people who have it with a generosity in argument and a serenity in their own mode of life which springs from their cheerful willingness to let life take the form it will.
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So the British, of all ages, still walk the course. On trips to Florida or the American desert, they still marvel, or shudder, at the fleets of electric carts going off in the morning like the first assault wave at the Battle of El Alamein. It is unlikely, for some time, that a Briton will come across in his native land such a scorecard as Henry Longhurst rescued from a California club and cherished till the day he died. The last on its list of local rules printed the firm warning "A Player on Foot Has No Standing on the Course."
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[Golfers] are a special kind of moral relist who nips the normal romantic and idealstic yearnings in the bud by proving once or twice a week that life is unconquerable but endurable.
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Sir Guy Campbell's classic account of the formation of the links, beginning with Genesis and moving step by step to the thrilling arrival of 'tilth' on the fingers of coastal land, suggests that such notable features of our planet as dinosaurs, the prairies, the Himalayas, the seagull, the female of the species herself, were accidental by-products of the Almighty's preoccupation with the creation of the Old Course at St. Andrews.
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There is even - as with no other game - a fascinating detective literature, a wry commentary on the human comedy, implicit in the book of rules.
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People in America, when listening to radio, like to lean forward. People in Britain like to lean back.
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Washington's birthday is as close to a secular Christmas as any Christian country dare come this side of blasphemy.
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When that happens [the demise of golf], old men will furtively beckon to their sons and, like fugitives from the guillotine recalling the elegant orgies at the court of Louis XV, will recite the glories of Portmarnock and Merion, of the Road Hole at St. Andrews, the sixth at Seminole, the eighteenth at Pebble Beach. They will take out this volume from its secret hiding place and they will say: "There is no question, son, that these were unholy places in an evil age. Unfortunately, I had a whale of a time."
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These humiliations are the essence of the game.
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A professional is a person who can do his best at a time when he doesn't particularly feel like it
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Like a christening, a wedding, a graduation ceremony, a holy war, a revolutioneven?a fireworksdisplay, agaudy promise of what life ought to be, not life itself.
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Liberty is the luxury of self-discipline, that those nations historically who have failed to discipline themselves have had discipline imposed by others.
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Authors are now marketed like promising movie starlets and must rattle around the nation's television stations to try to assert a salable identity different from that of the other starlets.
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Every sport pretends to a literature, but people don't believe it of any other sport but their own.
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They have been playing golf for 800 years and nobody has satisfactorily said why.
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In golf, humiliations are the essence of the game.
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Curiosity is free-wheeling intelligence.
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No myth dies harder, and none is more regularly debunked by the facts, than the one about international sports contributing to international friendship.
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I prefer radio to TV because the pictures are better.