James Reston Quotes

Jim Murray's greatest writings were golf writings.

The determining bulk of Scotch people had heard of golf ever since they had heard of God and often considered the two as of equal importance.

I don't remember too many rounds where you get shots given to you. Usually, ones are taken away.

Historians tell us that a gentleman named John Ball once captured eight British Amateur titles.

I would say my first golf memory was asking who Arnold Palmer was when he was always on the Pennzoil commercials. When I was a little kid I watched a lot of sports, but I didn't watch a lot of golf, and this guy was always on a tractor.

Golf should be taken down and must not be played.

I'm an athlete. I'm not a big golf nerd in that aspect. I'm not big on the history.

Golf is an exercise in Scottish pointlessness for people who are no longer able to throw telephone poles at each other.

It's easy to see golf not as a game at all but as some whey-faced, nineteenth-century Presbyterian minister's fever dream of exorcism achieved through ritual and self-mortification.

Arnold's place in history will be as the man who took golf from being a game for the few to a sport for the masses. He was the catalyst who made that happen.

I wonder what Tommy Morris would have had to say to all this number 6-iron, number 12-iron, number 28-iron stuff. He probably wouldn't have said anything, just made one of those strange Scottish noises at the back of his throat like someone gargling.

I've studied golf for almost 50 years now and know a hell of a lot about nothing.

I've been playing golf a long time, although it's not really true that on my first round they strapped my bag on the back of a dinosaur.

There are very few sports where you can find that tranquility. Some people find that in golf, but when you're in the water it's such a difference from the golf course or the basketball court. That's what makes surfing unique over any other sport.

I've thrown or broken a few clubs in my day. In fact, I guess at one time or another I probably held distance records for every club in the bag.

Many of us who grew up playing golf know that our kids aren't doing it. A great way to enhance the game, make it cool again and bring back some of the interest among younger people is to make golf the greenest sport in an environmental sense. Every course's greenkeeper should think of himself or herself as the greenkeeper: responsible for preserving the green, not just the greens.

I've heard people say my swing's not perfect, and I know that. But golf's a natural sport, very sensitive. It's played a lot by feel. I don't care if my swing is too flat. If it works, I don't have to change it.

I admire the way golfers handle themselves. But tennis players are a lot younger, as a rule. There aren't many teenagers on the golf tour.

I reread "Ball Four" by Jim Bouton, the father of all sports books. Aside from that, and books like "Out of Their League" by Dave Meggyesy, sports books generally pull their punches.

Golf is a bloodless sport-if you don't count ulcers.

Go play golf. Go to the golf course. Hit the ball. Find the ball. Repeat until the ball is in the hole. Have fun. The end.

Having so many gold courses so close together was ideal for me. With my slice I could enjoy three or four golf courses at the same time.

What other sport holds out hope of improvement to a man or a woman over fifty? True, the pros begin to falter at around forty, but it is their putting nerves that go, not their swings. For a duffer like [me], the room for improvement is so vast that three lifetimes could be spent roaming the fiarways carving away at it, convinced that perfection lies just over the next rise. And that hope, perhaps, is the kindest bliss of all that golf bestows upon its devotees.

Few golfers are born with the natural talent for hitting the ball, but every player is blessed with the God-given ability to throw a club.

...as all souls are equal before their Maker, a two inch putt counts the same as a 250 yard drive. There is a comedy in this and a certain unfairness even, which makes golf an even apter mirror of reality.