“I've always made a total effort, even when the odds seemed entirely against me. I never quit trying; I never felt that I didn't have a chance to win.” -Arnold Palmer
“Eighteen holes of match play will teach you more about your foe than nineteen years of dealing with him across the desk.” -Grantland Rice
“The fundamental problem with golf is that every so often, no matter how lacking you may be in the essential virtues required of a steady player, the odds are that one day you will hit the ball straight, hard, and out of sight. This is the essential frustration of this excruciating sport. For when you've done it once, you make the fundamental error of asking yourself why you can't do this all the time. The answer to this question is simple: the first time was a fluke.” -Colin Bowles
“Talking to a golf ball won't do you any good. Unless you do it while your opponent is teeing off.” -Bruce Lansky
“If you think it's hard to meet new people, try picking up the wrong golf ball.” -Jack Lemmon
“When I'm on a golf course and it starts to rain and lightning, I hold up my one iron, 'caus I know even God can't hit a one iron.” -Lee Trevino
“I'll always remember the day I broke ninety. I had a few beers in the clubhouse and was so excited I forgot to play the back nine.” -Bruce Lansky
“As you walk down the fairway of life you must smell the roses, for you only get to play one round.” -Ben Hogan
“My best score ever was 103, but I've only been playing 15 years.” -Alex Karris
“Golf is the hardest game in the world to play, and the easiest to cheat at.” -Dave Hill
“Never bet with anyone you meet on the first tee, who has a deep suntan, a one iron in his bag and squinty eyes.” -Dave Marr
“The golf swing is like sex. You can't be thinking about the mechanics of the act while you are performing.” -Dave Hill
“Golf is a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into a even smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill-designed for the purpose.” -Winston Churchill
“Relax? How can anybody relax and play golf? You have to grip the club don't you?” -Ben Hogan
“You don't know what pressure is until you've played for five dollars a hole with only two in your pocket.”-Lee Trevino
“Golf is a game in which you yell 'fore', shoot six and write down five.” -Paul Harvey
“A lot of guys who have have never choked, have never been in the position to do so.” -Tom Watson
“I'm hitting the woods just great, but I'm having a terrible time getting out of them” -Harry Tofcano
“Golf is a game where guts and blind devotion will always net you absolutely nothing but an ulcer.” -Tommy Bolt
“Golf is based on honesty, where else would you admit to a seven on a par three?” -Jimmy Demaret
“It's nice to have the opportunity to play for so much money, but it's nicer to win it.” -Patty Sheenan
“I play with friends, but we don't play friendly games.” -Ben Hogan
“Golf is an ideal diversion, but a ruinous disease.” -Bertie Forbes
“Putts get real difficult the day they hand out the money.” -Lee Trevino
“There are no points for style when it comes to putting. It's getting the ball in the cup that counts.” -Brian Swarbrick
“Golf is twenty percent mechanics and technique. The other eighty percent is philosophy, humor, tragedy, romance, melodrama, companionship, camaraderie, cussedness, and conversation.” -Grantland Rice
“The harder you work, the luckier you get.” -Gary Player “Victory is everything. You can spend the money, but you can never spend the memories.” -Ken Venturi
“Golf is 90 percent inspiration and 10 percent perspiration.” -Johnny Miller
“The number one thing about trouble is…don't get into more.” -Dave Stockton
“It's the most fun I've had with my clothes on.” -Lee Trevino
“Mulligan: invented by an Irishman who wanted to hit one more twenty yard grounder.” -Jim Bishop
“If you watch a game, it's fun. If you play it, it's recreation. If you work at it, it's golf.” -Bob Hope
“The only shots you can be sure of are those you've had already.” -Byron Nelson
“Golf and sex are about the only things you can enjoy without being good at it.” -Jimmy Demaret
“Most golfers prepare for disaster. A good golfer prepares for success.” -Bob Toski
“You've just one problem. You stand too close to the ball after you've hit it.” -Sam Snead
“The fun you get from golf is in direct ratio to the effort you don't put into it.” -Bob Allen
“Golf is good walk spoiled.” -Mark Twain
“We have fifty-one golf courses in Palm Springs. He(Gerald Ford) never decides which course he will play until after the first tee shot…At least he can't cheat on his score- because all you have to do is look back down the fairway and count the wounded.” -Bob Hope
“You can't lose an old golf ball.” -John Willis
“Indeed, the highest pleasure of golf may be that on the fairways and far from all the pressures of commerce and rationality, we can feel immortal for a few hours.” -Colman McCarthy
“My game is so bad I gotta hire three caddies- one to walk the left rough, one for the right, and one for the middle. And the one in the middle doesn't have much to do.” -Dave Hill
“When he gets the ball into a tough place, that's when he's most relaxed. I think it's because he has so much experience at it.” -Don Christopher(Jack Lemmon's Caddie)
“A professional will tell you the amount of flex you need in the shaft of your club. The more the flex, the more strength you will need to break the thing over your knees.” -Stephen Baker
“There are three ways of learning golf: by study, which is the most wearisome; by imitation, which is the most fallacious; and by experience, which is the most bitter.” -Robert Browning
“Why am I using a new putter? Because the last one didn't float too well.” -Craig Stadler
“Obviously a deer on the fairway has seen you tee off before and knows that the safest place to be when you play is right down the middle.” -Jackie Gleason
“I'd like to see the fairways more narrow. Then everybody would have to play from the rough, not just me.” -Seve Ballesteros
“We speak of eyeball-to-eyeball encounters between men great and small. Even more reaching and revealing of character is the eyeball-to-golfball confrontation, whereby our most secret natures are mercilessly tested by a small, round, whitish object with no mind or will but with a very definite life of its own, and with whims perverse and beatific.” -John Stewart Martin
“Be funny on a golf course? Do I kid my best friend's mother about her heart condition?” -Phil Silvers
“The reason the golf pro tells you to keep your head down is so you can't see him laughing.” -Phyllis Diller
“I'd give up golf if I didn't have so many sweaters.” -Bob Hope
“The person I fear most in the last two rounds is myself.” -Tom Watson
” Everybody has two swings-a beautiful practice swing and the choked-up one with with which they hit the ball. So it wouldn't do either of us a damned bit of good to look at your practice swing.” -Ed Furgol
“If your caddie coaches you on the tee, 'Hit it down the left side with a little draw,' ignore him. All you do on the tee is try not to hit the caddie.” -Jim Murray
“Always throw your clubs ahead of you. That way you don't have to waste energy going back to pick them up.” -Tommy Bolt
“Always keep in mind that if God didn't want a man to have mulligans, golf balls wouldn't come three to a sleeve.” -Dan Jenkins
“I know I'm getting better at golf because I'm hitting fewer spectators.” -Gerald Ford
“Competitive golf is played mainly on a five-and-a-half-inch course, the space between your ears.” -Bobby Jones
“Actually, the only time I ever took out a one iron was to kill a tarantula. And I took a seven to do that.” -Jim Murry
“The right way to play golf is to go up and hit the bloody thing.” -George Duncan
“If you pick up a golfer and hold it close to your ear, like a conch shell, and listen- you will hear an alibi.” -Fred Beck
“He enjoys that perfect peace, that peace beyond all understanding, which comes at its maximum only to the man who has given up golf.” -P.G. Wodehouse
“I played like s___.” -Greg Norman after the Masters.
“Every rock'n'roll band I know, guys with long hair and tattoos, plays golf now.” -Alice Cooper
“Golf tips are like aspirin. One may do you good, but if you swallow the whole bottle you will be lucky to survive.” -Harvey Penick
“Nobody asked how you looked, just what you shot.” -Sam Snead
“Happiness is a long walk with a putter.” -Greg Norman
“You know what they say about big hitters…the woods are full of them.” -Jimmy Demaret
“Golf is an easy game…It's just hard to play.” -unknown
“Playing golf is just like going to a strip club. You're all revved up, ready to go. But three hours later, you're depressed, plastered, and most of your balls are missing.” -James Clark
“The mind messes up more shots than the body.” Tommy Bolt
“In Africa some of the native tribes have a custom of beating the ground with clubs and uttering spine chilling cries. Anthropologists call this a form of self expression. In America we call it golf.”- Becker
“Golf is a sport in which the ball lies poorly but the player well" -Unknown
“They say golf is like life, but don't believe them. It's more complicated than that.” -Gardner Dickinson
“Golf is like marbles for adults“- unknown )
“In Scotland, a new game was invented. It was entitled "Gentlemen Only Ladies Forbidden". . . and thus the word GOLF entered into the English language.”- Not a quote but a word origin from J.Brown
“Golf is a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into an even smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill-designed for the purpose.” Winston Churchill
“No golfer can ever become too good to practice.” May Hezlet
“Grip it and rip it. It works for John Daly. It never worked for me. All I did was wear out golf gloves.” Chuck Stark, The Sun Link, June 17, 2003
“That's when you know you're weird.” John Ellis, UO Golfer (commenting in the Eugene Register Guard, 3/24/03, that he enjoyed golf so much, he even requested Golf Digest for bedtime stories when he was 3 years old).
“If I had cleared the trees and drove the green, it would've been a great shot.” Sam Snead
“Practice puts brains in your muscles.” Sam Snead
“Golf without Jones would be like France without Paris – leaderless, lightless and lonely.” Herbert Warren Wind, about Bobby Jones
“To be truthful, I think golfers are overpaid. It's unreal, and I have trouble dealing with the guilt sometime.” Colin Montgomerie
“If Horatio Alger Jr. were alive today, he would love to write the tale of Jose Coceres, from Argentina rags to golf riches. The 38-year-old 140-pounder just won his second PGA Tour event, raising his 2001 take to $1.49 mil. Not bad for a poor ragged kid who learned to swing with a tree limb and subsequently helped raise 10 impoverished siblings.” Blackie Sherrod, Sports Columnist for the Dallas Morning News, Scattershooting while wondering whatever happened to Artie Shaw, October 28, 2001
“Nobody ever looked up and saw a good shot.” Don Herold, Love That Golf
“Golf is no longer a game of hitting the ball, finding it, and hitting it again. There is wind to be measured, whether that means tossing blades of grass in the air or studying the gentle movement of 60-foot high branches. There are caddie conferences for even the most routine shots. There are sports psychologists who tell players not to hit until they're ready.” Doug Ferguson, Associated Press writer on the miserable state of pace of play in the PGA, “Even USGA admits it can't get golfers in gear” (Source: San Francisco Examiner)
“By the time you get to your ball, if you don't know what to do with it, try another sport.” Julius Boros, a U.S. Open and PGA champion
“Live…..Laugh…..GOLF!!!” Kathryn Schaefer Plaum
“Golf is very much like a love affair, if you don't take it seriously, it's no fun, if you do, it breaks your heart. Don't break your heart, but flirt with the possibility.” Louise Suggs
“Golf is a natural fit for us. It satisfies the spirit. You're out in the grass and the trees. You're out there with nature. You're not really competing with each other, you're competing against the golf course. I think it fits well with Native American society. Not all Native Americans get a chance to play, but I'm hoping that will change.” Derek Burshiem, four-time winner of the Oglala Nation Open
“We're so far into the long-hitting, super-equipment future, they're elongating even Augusta National, the Masters' home, an act of madness Price bemoans at age 44. Just sprinkle in some hungry fairway bunkers, he rightly contends. Don't make golf the equivalent of tennis-with-serves-only, warns the three-major-winner. He opens this PGA with 71, then bristles in his congenial way about Atlanta Athletic Club's villainous 490-yard, par-4 No. 18.” Chuck Culpepper, Oregonian sports columnist, paraphrasing golfer, Nick Price, in “Still ripping but without the gripping,” The Oregonian, 8/17/01.
“The university is about providing knowledge to anybody that requires it, and we now live in a world where leisure time is a great deal more important than it used to be….There would be a heck of a lot of unemployed people if you took away the leisure industry.” Sandy Jones, British Professional Golfers Association chief executive, commenting on the University of Birmingham's new accredited degree program in golf.
“Rhythm is best expressed in any swing directed at a cigar stump or a dandelion head.” Grantland Rice
“Swinging at daisies is like playing electric guitar with a tennis racket: if it were that easy, we could all be Jerry Garcia. The ball changes everything.” Michael Bamberger
“The number eighteen is symbolically meaningful because it is the numerical equivalent of the Hebrew word chai, which means life.” From To the Linksland by Michael Bamberger
“I'm working as hard as I can to get my life and my cash to run out at the same time. If I can just die after lunch Tuesday, everything would be perfect.” Doug Sanders, former professional golfer
“I play in the low 80's. If it's any hotter than that, I won't play.” Joe E. Louis
“When you don't play very often, you just don't know what is coming next.” Peter Thomson, playing at the millennium British Open for the four-hole Past Champions Challenge.
“Just have a Coke or something and watch the boys go past.” Sam Snead's advice to the gallery during the four-hole Past Champions Challenge Summer of 2000.
Q: “What abandoned course is that?” A: “That, sir, is no abandoned course, that is where we play the Open championship.” Sam Snead's conversation with a fellow passenger upon arriving by train at St. Andrews in 1946.
“I miss. I miss. I miss. I make.” Seve Ballestero describing his four-putt at Augusta's No. 16 in 1988.
“Papa, trust your swing.” Note written by ten year old Qass Singh pinned to Vijay Singh's golf bag during the 2000 US Masters (which Singh won).
“Golf is a game to teach you about the messages from within, about the subtle voices of the body-mind. And once you understand them you can more clearly see your 'hamartia,' the ways in which your approach to the game reflects your entire life. Nowhere does a man go so naked.” Michael Murphy (author of Golf in the Kingdom)
“Hit 'em hard. They'll land somewhere.” Stewart Maiden
“The trouble that most of us find with the modern matched sets of clubs is that they don't really seem to know any more about the game than the old one's did!” Robert Browning, A History of Golf
“Swing hard in case you hit it.” Dan Marino
“It took me seventeen years to get 3,000 hits in baseball. I did it in one afternoon on the golf course.” Hank Aaron
“Have you ever noticed what golf spells backwards?” Al Boliska
“My favorite shots are the practice swing and the conceded putt. The rest can never be mastered.” Lord Robertson
“It is nothing new or original to say that golf is played one stroke at a time. But it took me many years to realize it.” Bobby Jones
“A rough should have high grass. When you go bowling they don't give you anything for landing in the gutter, do they?” Lee Trevino
“Where do I begin to try to explain the joys of Machrihanish? It was remote and undiscovered and that implies a great deal immediately…but what else?…It was a course that brought out the best in my game, a course sublime in its natural beauty, a course that moved Old Tom Morris to say (according to Peter Kelly), 'The Almichty maun hae had gowf in his e'e when he made the place.'” Michael Bamberger, To the Linksland
“When The Haig died in 1969, Junior called me from Detroit to tell me there would be no funeral. Instead, a bunch of his cronies were going to throw a party at the Detroit Athletic Club. They thought The Haig would prefer that. I didn't go. Like Hamlet, golf's sweet prince, I thought, deserved a grander exit than that. He was splendid. They should have carried him out on a shield.” Charles Price talking about Walter Hagen
“Then I thought, with the same clubhead speed, the ball’s going to go at least six times as far. There’s absolutely no drag, so if you do happen to spin it, it won’t slice or hook 'cause there’s no atmosphere to make it turn.” Alan Shepard talking about his moon shot to Ottawa Golf magazine
“Got more dirt than ball. Here we go again.” Alan Shepard, Apollo 14 Commander, Amateur-Golfer, preparing to take another swing during his famous moon walk in 1971. “Here's a simple way to abolish golf's elitist and exclusionary image and make it a truly all-American sport: ditch that fifties-Republican-martini-drinker's green Brooks Brothers-style sport jacket and make the winner of the Masters slip on something in, say, black leather with plenty of metal studs.” Bruce McCall, “The Case Against Golf,” from Esquire.
“I am the toughest golfer mentally.” Tiger Woods
“Golf is the cruelest game, because eventually it will drag you out in front of the whole school, take your lunch money and slap you around.” Rick Reilly in “Master Strokes,” from Sports Illustrated.
“When it's breezy, hit it easy.” Davis Love, Jr.
“No game designed to be played with the aid of personal servants by right-handed men who can't even bring along their dogs can be entirely good for the soul.” Bruce McCall in “The Case Against Golf,” from Esquire.
“—not even Barbra Streisand celebrates herself as tirelessly as golf celebrates itself…” Bruce McCall in “The Case Against Golf,” from Esquire.
“I look into their eyes, shake their hand, pat their back, and wish them luck, but I am thinking, 'I am going to bury you.'” Seve Ballesteros
“I'm disappointed, but I'm not going to run around like Dennis Rodman and head-butt somebody.” Greg Norman on losing a six-stroke lead in the Masters.
“I screwed up. It's all on me. I know that. But losing this Masters is not the end of the world. I let this one get away, but I still have a pretty good life. I'll wake up tomorrow, still breathing, I hope. All these hiccups I have, they must be for a reason. All this is just a test. I just don't know what the test is yet.” Greg Norman on the 1996 Masters.
“When someone has a bad day like that on the golf course, you say, Greg, you look good, you look fantastic. I like your shoes, I like your pants, I like your…well, the hat's okay. I mean, you need to keep it light. Instead they say, Greg, what's next? Suicide? Alcoholism? Drugs?” Bill Murray on the media's bludgeoning of Greg Norman after his 1996 Masters loss.
“You create your own luck by the way you play. There is no such luck as bad luck. Fate has nothing to do with success or failure, because that is a negative philosophy that indicts one's confidence, and I'll have no part of it.” Greg Norman
“I don't know if I'll ever do it again or not, but frankly I don't really care.” Jack Nicklaus on his sixth Masters.
“He can take his game to Europe, Africa, Asia or wherever he wants and the world will follow.” Earl Wood's comment about his son, Tiger, who contemplates quitting the PGA and surrendering his card.
“He doesn't have a wife, he doesn't even have a girlfriend, so the only people he has to call on is me.” Earl Woods commenting about Tiger after the Masters in 1997.
“Greed wounds more wallets than all the dice tables and horse tracks in America.” Dan Cook, San Antonio Express-News
“I've always tried to play golf with a golf club. I have a hard time driving with my rifle. I mean, 18 is really narrow … I have no problem with the course, except for the tee shot on 18. Jack Nicklaus describing 443 yard number 18 at the 1997 Doral-Ryder Open, nicknamed Blue Monster. “The hole from hell is back … If you don't drive a golf ball at least 268 yards, you will need the U.S. Navy on your left and the French Foreign Legion on the right.” Edwin Pope, Miami Herald sports writer, describing number 18 at the 1997 Doral-Ryder Open. “The worst advice in golf is, 'Keep your head down.'” Patty Sheehan “Don't let the bad shots get to you. Don't let yourself become angry. The true scramblers are thick-skinned. And they always beat the whiners.” Paul Runyan, “Golf Digest” “You're looking up. That's your problem. Graffiti on the underside of the roof of cart 47 at Sea Scape Golf Course, Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
“Hitting a tree in west Texas is stranger than getting a hole in one.” Mancil Davis, self titled “King of Aces” of the National Hole in One Association
“When I play my best golf, I feel as if I'm in a fog, standing back watching the earth in orbit with a golf club in my hands.” Mickey Wright
“These greens are so fast I have to hold my putter over the ball and hit it with the shadow.” Sam Snead
“Here Eddie, hold the flag while I putt out.” Walter Hagen to the Prince of Wales
“Never break your putter and your driver in the same round or you're dead.” Tommy Bolt
“Is my friend in the bunker or is the bastard on the green?” Anon.
“Let's get after it.” Rose Montgomery's signature expression, after spitting on her gloves at the start of a round. On June 2, 1992, at the age of 96, Rose aced the 100-yard 7th hole at Canyon Country Club in Palm Springs for her tenth career hole in one.
“Through years of experience I have found that air offers less resistance than dirt.” Jack Nicklaus on why he tees his ball high.
“A hole in one is amazing when you think of the different universes this white mass of molecules has to pass through on its way to the hole.” Mac O'Grady
Tom Weiskopf's conversation with a couple of unimpressed Scots at the back of number 8 at Carnoustie after he hit a hole in one the week before the 1975 British Open. “Didn't you see my ball go in?” “Aye, laddie.” “And you didn't even clap?” “Boot laddie, it didn't coont now, did it?”
“The swing is never learned. It's remembered.” Bagger Vance, The Legend of Bagger Vance: A Novel of Golf and the Game of Life, by Steven Pressfield
“Don't be in such a hurry. That little white ball isn't going to run away from you.” Patty Berg
“To help your concentration, don't take too much time.” Pam Barnett
“There's an old saying,'It's a poor craftsman who blames his tools.' It's usually the player who misses those three-footers, not the putter.” Kathy Whitworth
“Indecision builds nervous tension and undermines any remaining confidence.” Sharron Moran
“Hit it hard. It will land somewhere.” Mark Calcavecchia
“No matter what happens - never give up a hole….In tossing in your cards after a bad beginning you also undermine your whole game, because to quit between tee and green is more habit-forming than drinking a highball before breakfast.” Sam Snead
“A hungry dog hunts best.” Lee Trevino
“You can talk to a fade but a hook won't listen.” Lee Trevino
