Book Review: All-Time Golf Greats Via Michael Arkush's ‘The Golf 100'

Forbes

2 days ago

HOYLAKE, ENGLAND - APRIL 19: A view of the Claret Jug in front of the clubhouse at Royal Liverpool ... More Golf Club on April 19, 2023 in Hoylake, England. (Photo by)
In Men at Work, George Will observed that 'The history of baseball is littered with stories of failures by players who thought that their natural physical endowments would be sufficient.' The previous assertion was what made Will's book such a fascinating read. It never occurred to me that the most interesting aspects of baseball were often the unseen strategies at work, and that were crafted by savants in the dugout and on the field. Baseball was so cerebral, and knowing this made it so much more fun.
Will's classic came to mind quite a lot while reading Michael Arkush's excellent new book, The Golf 100: A Spirited Ranking of the Greatest Players of All Time. Hale Irwin (#54 on the list), whom Arkush describes as more competitive than Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus, Ben Hogan, and even Pete Rose, confirms a la Will with baseball that golf has intensely cerebral qualities. As he put it, 'At this level, it's not about hitting the golf ball. Everyone can do that. It's about the conversation between your mind and your heart.'
Which brings up arguably the most interesting aspect of a book that would still be interesting without it: 'promise unfulfilled.' So many players that could do so many remarkable things with clubs in their hands, but who seemingly lost their magical powers on the grandest of stages. Really, how did Fred Couples (#88), described by Arkush as '007 in spikes,' by University of Houston teammate (and CBS announcer) Jim Nantz as someone who had 'no bad side to him,' win but one golf major, the Masters in 1992?
It couldn't have been for a lack of talent, but maybe it was for a lack of the proper mind necessary to win the biggest tournaments. Think about what Nantz has observed about Couples, while also contemplating Gary McCord's view that 'you have to have a lot of nasty in you to win the majors.' McCord was talking about Davis Love (#76) who 'only' has one major victory on his resume (the 1997 PGA Championship), but one senses McCord would say the same about Couples.
Arkush is plainly apologetic with his routine what-might-have-been comments about golf's greatest players, but realistically they're a feature of the book exactly because they help the reader understand just how mentally challenging golf is, arguably quite a bit more than baseball. The bet is that Will would agree. Baseball is about occasional errors on the field, along with misses and outs at bat, but baseball players have backups, they have relievers, they have other players who can essentially bail them out. Not so in golf. There's no one to fix the seemingly inevitable mental lapses. And rest assured they're inevitable exactly because other than one's caddie (Steve Williams's autobiography was clear that caddies are mathematicians to the players in addition to psychologists), golfers are alone. Every mistake is their own, and this trite truth means few have the consistency of mind to match with their talent.
We know this because so many can't-miss golfers missed. About Sergio Garcia (#86), Arkush writes that 'there will always be a feeling that Garcia should have achieved more.' Garcia, like Couples, like Love, has one golf major to his name, the Masters in 2017, but when he was all of 15-years-old, he was part of an exhibition that included Seve Ballesteros (#17) and Jose Maria-Olazabal (seven majors between the two), and it was apparent even then that he hit the ball better than they did.
Johnny Miller (#47) is to this day thought by those in the know to have played the best round of golf ever (the final round of the 1973 U.S. Open), Lanny Wadkins (#56) describes him as 'the best player I ever saw,' but he finished with two major wins. Still, in Miller we perhaps find clues as to why greatness isn't always sustained, nor does it keep repeating itself in ways that it at times does in team sports. In Miller's words to Arkush, 'I was just content.'
Does success beget relative mediocrity in golf? The question just leads to more questions. It wasn't too long ago that Jordan Spieth (#59) was seemingly unbeatable as the 2nd youngest person (after Jack Nicklaus, no less) to win three different majors before the age of 24. No doubt there have been injuries, but it seems even by Spieth's own admission to come back to the mind. As he explained his fall from the top of the PGA perch to Arkush, 'Once you reach your end goal of something, maybe there's a little bit of a letdown.'
It seems like a reasonable explanation, that reaching the top drives the very satisfaction that knocks you back down, but the explanation is unsatisfactory. That's because the work required to get to the top points to the kind of person who wouldn't suddenly rest on laurels. In other words, the reason you (you being the typical person) will never be Garcia, Spieth, or Rory McIlroy (#25) is because you would never put in the effort to become any of the three. About McIlroy, Arkush writes that 'no twenty-first-century golfer, however much it kills me to admit it, has been a bigger disappointment.'
Once again, so many disappointments among the 100 greatest golfers of all time. How could that be in a sport populated by players who revere the players of the past more than in any other sport, and who for venerating them, understand intimately the constant about golf's greats that is 'promise unfulfilled'? To be clear, this review doesn't presume to answer the question, and Arkush doesn't himself. That's not a knock, it's just a comment that's pregnant with questions. What is it about a sport that, in Arkush's words, 'promises nothing and often delivers a lot less'? Well, what?
To read about how so many of the greats should have won more, but also how some of the greats nearly finished without a major (Couples, 1992, Masters), is to keep searching and wondering. Professional golfers are said to lean Republican. Is that because golf is golf, or is it because golf is golf? As in does golf generally attract a more 'conservative' kind of person comfortable in golf clubs, or precisely because golf promises nothings does it unearth in its professional a conservative mindset that decries handouts from the Commanding Heights exactly because golfers get none?
Dustin Johnson (#44) told Arkush that he hopes to be fishing 'with a gold beer' when he's 64. Too laid back, too unlike the greats? Ok, but he's also got two majors to his name. And as readers no doubt know by virtue of clicking on a review about a golf book, Johnson could have had so many more. Promise unfulfilled? Yet he won two majors. You see the paradox? Johnson seemingly lacked the anger of a Michael Jordan, notably told family members after a U.S. Open loss (Chambers Bay) he plainly should have won that 'it's just a golf tournament,' but could someone seemingly that easygoing ever win two majors as is, and contend for so many more?
If they're all great ball strikers, but not all of them have the mind or the mental fortitude, they still had it enough to win some majors while nearly winning others. The more that's read about the players, and the more that's written about the players in search of better understanding, the more confused it all becomes, albeit in a good way.
Which is a long digression. Writing about the presumed mentally crippling aspects of golf (including satisfaction), it's easy to get away from the purpose of the book. Arkush's ranking is 'spirited,' which is an explicit admission from him that his Top 100 wouldn't resemble that of others. Take Scottie Scheffler alone. He's not listed in the Top 100.
Which requires another digression. Explaining how he ranked the players, Arkush is clear that 'one aspect of a player's career would be valued more than any other: how he or she performed in the game's biggest events.' Arkush explains further that the 'majors feature the strongest fields and, more often than not, are staged on the most demanding courses.' Arkush awarded 2,000 points for each major win, 500 for second, 250 for third, etc.
Back to Scheffler, major #3 happened just last Sunday. From this, the seemingly obvious explanation for the omission was the latter. Except that before the book went to print Scheffler could already lay claim to two majors (the Masters in 2022 and 2024), along with twelve other PGA Tour wins. Many of the ranked had less of a resume (majors and total tournament wins) than Scheffler even before last Sunday, yet as mentioned, they were ranked.
So, while the lack of Scheffler was puzzling (to be clear, Arkush acknowledges the Scheffler omission, and explains it at book's end), the points system was comforting if only because it lent some objectivity to a ranking that surely begs for endless debate. And this presumption about debate comes from a reviewer who hasn't played golf in decades, but who finds the sport and its majors more than interesting. Arkush's book does nothing to dampen interest, while doing a lot to increase it.
The rising interest is rooted in the happy fact that while Arkush's rankings have a numeric quality to them, his discussion of each player in the top 100 is anything but numeric. In roughly three pages per golfer, Arkush brings them to life.
In 1971, and long after John McDermott (#100) had won two U.S. Opens, he was kicked out of the clubhouse at Merion Golf Club (where the U.S. Open was taking place no less!) after no one noticed who the poorly dressed old man was. Arnold Palmer luckily did, and proceeded to right the wrong. Ken Venturi (#93) was increasingly drowning himself in drink until a bartender told him he was 'wasting his life.' Venture told him 'I will not have another drink until I win again.' Venturi won the 1964 U.S. Open.
Larry Nelson (#89) won two PGAs and one U.S. Open despite having never played a round of golf as of age 21. Julius Boros (#53) was an accountant for a Connecticut trucking company before he found his way onto the Tour. On the other hand, Ray Floyd (#29) seemed to enjoy betting on horses more than golf. Luckily his wife Maria let him have it: 'If golf isn't what you want to do for a living, now is the time to get out and think about doing something else. You're not giving it your best.' Sometimes the best people in our lives tell us what we least want to hear…
Paul Runyan (#50) had a father who did not approve of his son playing golf, but his son couldn't not do what won him beatings from his father: 'Dad, you can whip me if you want, but it won't do you any good, because I'm going over to the golf course and I'm going to become a golf professional.' In Bernhard Langer's (#94) case, he went to a job placement center outside of Munich in the 1960s as a teen and told them 'I want to be a golf professional.' They must have looked at him like he had one eyebrow while responding, 'We have no documents on golf professional being a recognized job in Germany.'
It all speaks to the beauty of the here and now. Runyan's father never saw his son play, while nowadays there aren't just golf professionals, there are golf swing coaches, putting coaches, shrinks, nutritionists, and all manner of other professions associated with the sport's prosperity. According to Arkush, swing coach David Leadbetter was paid a six-figure salary to work with LPGA great Se Ri Pak (#90) on her game. I'm sorry, but prosperity loves people yearning to work outside traditional life norms more than anyone else, and it doesn't come close.
Thinking about Runyan some more, it's no reach to say that most readers haven't heard of him, most have heard of Langer, and everyone's heard of players like Crenshaw, Garcia, Couples, etc. This rates mention because readers of the book might be tempted to skip the many ancient names in the book, first half of the twentieth century names, along with the females. It's understandable, but it would be a mistake. There's rewarding, interesting information about each player, male or female. Harold Hilton (#30) smoked as many as 50 cigarettes on days he played golf, Peter Thomson (#55) would supplement his golf income by writing about the tournaments played in for newspapers, and Babe Didrikson Zaharias (#18) was in the estimation of Arkush the greatest athlete of the 20th century.
What of Phil Mickelson? He's in so many ways a riddle wrapped in an enigma, or however Churchill put it. Six majors and over fifty PGA wins, but to Arkush he was, and realistically is, 'another all-time great who underachieved.' The list of professionals who can lay claim to six majors is vanishingly small, not to mention no less than six second place U.S. Open finishes. What a resume?! Yet what's strange and understandable at the same time is that if the oddities that took place at the various U.S. Opens (Winged Foot most notably) can be forgotten, what Arkush most seems to be saying is that even forgetting those, someone with Mickelson's talent still should have won many more.
Except for what keeps coming up in this most interesting of books. Leaving aside #1 and #2, there's realistically no one in this most mysterious of sports that shouldn't have done better. And that of course includes #1 and #2. Mickelson was the definition of 'can't miss,' but at #13 it should be said he was 'can't miss' who didn't miss. This would especially be true with other rankings not compiled by Arkush and that might grade on a curve of sorts. Figure that Mickelson starred, and starred for a long time in a sport that's so globalized, so well-funded, and that has so many flash-in-the-pan stars who, perhaps due to contentedness, can't maintain the greatness. Yet Mickelson did. It's not just six majors, but six majors beginning in 2004, and ending (?) in 2021.
No doubt Arkush understands all of the above, and much better than this reviewer. Which means my one critique of his analysis of both Ernie Els (#27) and Mickelson is that he notes how both unfortunately were at their best when Tiger Woods was at his, hence the fewer majors. This didn't nor does it ring true. For one, we have the can't miss potential of so many other top 100 golfers who somehow didn't reach ten, eight or even three majors, not to mention the arguably more compelling truth that Woods lifted everyone. In other words, absent Woods Mickelson and Els would arguably have won even fewer majors. Arkush at least implicitly acknowledges the possibility of the latter being true when writing about Mickelson, and how he managed to achieve just three top 10 finishes during a ten major stretch when 'Woods retooled his swing and went winless.' The simple truth is that Woods made those he beat so very much better. Mickelson should be so grateful for Woods, so should all who starred at a time when Woods dominated.
Arkush's book is a great read for golf fans, mere followers, sports fans in general, or even people solely interested in the human condition. There's so much learning to be had from reading a book that's about golf, but that is truly about so much more.