About Doctor Golf

Fans of William Price Fox’s Doctor Golf:

P.G. Wodehouse: “It’s just the golf book that was needed… very funny!”

John Updike: Michael Murphy’s “Golf in the Kingdom” put me in mind of another curious devotional work, William Price Fox’s “Doctor Golf.” Doctor Golf, a fanatic even quainter and keener than Shivas Irons, runs a thirty-nine-member golf sanctuary in Arkansas called Eagle-Ho, refers to “young Hagen,” advocates caddy flogging, sells by mail order a clanking, cumbersome line of golf paraphernalia, and conducts a large correspondence. When one correspondent writes,”I am in my 65th year and I have been seized golf like by a mouse in the claws of a golden eagle,”Doctor Golf congratulates him:

Dear Sir, Only after the fetters of youth have been flung aside can golf enter. Only then can the man know the folly of his adolescent belief of the swing answering to the man and perceive the joy and the truth of the complete man answering to the swing. And, as the years and the eagles cascade by, the even greater joy is realized when he stands in the bright sunlight of complete fulfillment and comes to realize the the swing is the man.

The swing is the man, says Doctor Golf. The Dance of Shiva, Michael Murphy (“Golf in the Kingdom”) concludes, is at the heart of everything. Doctor Golf is more mystical still:

The swing by its very nature transcends the human form. The swing is there when you pass on… The swing, sir…is like the blue in the sky, immutable, eternal, indeed transcendental.

Walt Kelly (creator of Pogo): “True, bittersweet, hilarious, best and, thank God, the worst!”