The Greatest Game
The Ancyent & Healthfulle Exercyse of the Golff
The Greatest Game - The Ancyent & Healthfulle Exercyse of the Golff is a new book by Hugh Dodd & David Purdie with foreword by Colin Montgomerie. Published 24 June 2010, it explores the real and fictional history of the game from its foundations in ancient times to the present in humorous prose and brilliant illustrations.
The Greatest Game is available from all quality booksellers in two editions:- The hardback popular edition ( ISBN 9780951447079) at £25 and an edition limited to 150 copies (ISBN 9780951447086) which has a higher quality paper and casing, a loose-leaf limited edition print of the cover image, and is signed by both authors and Colin Montgomerie at £150.
Pictures from The Greatest Game are available at www.hughdodd.com
Foreword from The Greatest Game
There are many books on the subject of golf, but I suspect there have been none quite like this one. The game is governed by strict Rules and also by Laws inexplicable to science, Books, however need no such regulation and it is refreshing to find the authors prepared to base historical statements on firm facts where available, and on equally firm powers of inventions when not. They have attempted nothing less than to fill the many gaps in our knowledge of the game, and they have done so with scholarship, much humour and glorious illustration.
Playing golf can be a serious business, as I know, but the game has a healthy habit of standing back from time to time and taking a wry, sideways look at itself, at the incongruities of its institutions and eccentricities of its devotees. This book does just that. No area of golf escapes the surgical probing of David Purdie’s pen, or the equally deft touch of Hugh Dodd’s paintbrush. The book takes us from the invention of the warning Fore!, apparently by the army of Imperial Rome, to the European Union’s help with the banana slice, GPS-linked tagging of club members to combat slow play, and finally to the extraordinary assertion that Wm. Shakespeare Esq. was probably a strolling player in more senses than one…
But overall, what emerges is the authors’ love of the game. It is a game which they both play and whose traditions we all cherish as the bedrock of one of the finest outdoor pursuits to have been conceived by the mind of Man; the indeed ancient and healthful exercise of the golf.
However, to describe it any further here would be, to misquote Mark Twain, a good read spoiled. Enjoy.
Colin Montgomerie
Copies are available from www.birlinn.co.uk
