The Post That Changed LibraryThing Forever

Just finished reading The Match: The Day the Game of Golf Changed Forever. It recounts an 18-hole match between young amateurs Ken Venturi and Harvie Ward and legends Byron Nelson and Ben Hogan -- played at the suggestion of two millionaires who were betting on the outcome. Mark Frost does a nice job entwining the match with profiles of the golfers and the history of the sport.

But am I the only one to bristle at books that purport to be about "THE DAY/WEEK/MONTH THAT (insert weighty topic here) CHANGED FOREVER"? Maybe authors need to do that sort of thing in pitching an idea to editors, or maybe it's a sign of a marketing department run amok. Whatever, it usually amounts to false advertising, and with The Match, a strong argument can be made that nothing really changed on that day.

Everything changes every day. Therefore, the title basically means, "The Match: Another Day of Golf," as far as I'm concerned.

Jeez, Dave, I thought you were posting about Rupert Murdoch secretly owning LibraryThing or some juicy bit of info like that.

Yeah, it's like when I started hearing that the world had changed forever on 9/11. I knew we were in for it then. When the people who can actually, you know, like do stuff, make things happen, start telling you the world has changed forever, it's time to start worrying. Change is only forever if you let it.

Uh.....Change is forever because static is dead.

The media doesn't determine when my world changes, some publicity/political hack gravely intoning about the "new world order' or that shite.

I'm not a prisoner of the media and its corporate bosses. 9/11 may have changed things for America but a substantial proportion of the rest of the world went on as before, for good or ill. The Palestinians and Chechens still getting fucked, the Russian oligarchs tightening their grip, the Romany in their squalid refugee camps in Kosovo ignored, vilified; civil wars in Sudan, Sri Lanka, Somalia still blazing away, hardly anyone in those dire circumstances sparing a glance or a thought to a couple of towers falling in a faraway land.

The description of that book reminded me of one I came across while researching* Japanese literature. The Master of Go by Nobel winner Yasunari Kawabata, which was the author's favorite, though not one of the books he won the Nobel for. It is a novelization of the account of a single game which, while it didn't change Go forever, is taken as an allegory of Japan's defeat in World War II. A lot of the text is made up of reworked articles Kawabata wrote about the game as it happened. Sounds a little more interesting to me, but then I've never understood the appeal of golf.

* well, "researching." Looking up important names on wikipedia, really. Still, not a bad way to get a feel for the landscape.

>6 CliffBurns: - I'm in America (and always have been), but 9/11 didn't change anything for me personally (except that my dad, at some point, made it one of his 'conspiracies' of interest...). I remember being told about it in school and shrugging, essentially. People die every day. Big whoop.

Of course, it's really only important politically. I hadn't thought of that at the time.

7> Do you play Go? I've been obsessed with the game for the last two years and play whenever I can. I need to check that book out!

I think there are some moments in time that were decisive in guiding or accelerating the course of events -- at least for a while. D-Day, 9/11, etc. But who's to say where we'd be today if Napoleon had won at Waterloo? A lot can change in two centuries.

9> I don't, but I have been told that I must learn.

9/11 just turned America into a shitty Michael Bay movie.

http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/tom_clancy_treated_like_hes

A better approach to such books might be John McPhee's exemplary levels of the game which describes in elegant prose, a semi-final tennis match in the US Open between Clark Graebner and Arthur Ashe. No one claims that "match changed the world" but as a description of sport, of contrasting players and playing styles and the social history of tennis, it's terrific. I'd like to read Wertheim's book on the Federer/Rafa Wimbledon final last year, but the title alone keeps me from wanting to buy it: STROKES OF GENIUS: Inside the greatest match ever played.

Ah, Bob, books on tennis or golf would be, invariably, almost as boring as WATCHING tennis or golf. If there's no threat of violence breaking out, that sport is utterly lost on me.

well, i AM making the assumption that someone who'd pick a book up on a sporting topic has something of an interest to start with! I wouldn't try to force even McPhee's book on someone who wasn't a fan. Talk about boring sports - i grew up w/ competitive swimming and continued w/ intermittent masters swimming. Swimming is defn. a sport that does not lend itself to entrancing writing, even to hard core fans! Tennis, soccer/football and basketball can at least inspire good books that fans, at least, can enjoy.

I'm told baseball and golf lend themselves to good writing. I can't see it myself! I have a particular bias against baseball writing since America's single most pompous columnist, George Worthless Will is such a "articulate" fanboy.

15:

re. baseball writing: See below link for some other possibilities

http://dgmyers.blogspot.com/2009/06/five-books-of-baseball.html

and for boxing: http://dgmyers.blogspot.com/2009/06/five-books-of-boxing.html#0

I don't know why you disparage A Good Walk Spoiled (golf). I enjoy watching golf quite a bit. I once hit 180 on one hole and don't consider myself an expert by any means, but I really enjoy watching people who are good at it do it.

Gene: I'm sure I spotted you last year at Augusta...watering the fairway.

(Hint: there WERE public washrooms nearby...)

well baseball and i have just never gotten along. Part of it, i'm sure, was that my vision has always been sucky. I'm not sure i've ever actually HIT a baseball successfully. And i remember my highschool friends taking me to my one and only Washington Senators bball game - a key problem was i never saw the ball - i heard it hit a few times, but not seeing it took something away from the game. All my friends were playing little league and i was paddling away - swimming doesn't require much in the way of eyesight! I was an adequate (but nothing more) tennis player. The #6 (worst) player on quite a good hs team. The 1-5 players were MUCH better than i. Again vision was a bit of a problem, esp. at net. I played better way back so i'd have time to see the ball. (I kept our team from going from the regionals to the state finals by ignominiously double faulting a match away to end my senior yr in hs).

I'm sure i would have had AT LEAST a 180 on a hole of golf, if i'd ever hit the ball. But though i KNOW any sport at a high level requires skills beyond my imagination, having a clue and enjoying it at some banal level usually helps. Soccer is an exception, i've ended up really enjoying watching games both live and on screen. The field is big enough that even I can see how play unfolds sometimes. the grass of another country was a neat book about the sport.

Johm Feinstein's a notorious dookie so i have to dislike him on principle. Nah, i've read several books hard courts, the last amateurs among them, that i've enjoyed. Though none come close to the wonderfully partisan to hate like this is to be happy forever by Will Blythe who IS a much better writer (and Carolina grad) than Feinstein.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/books/review/02foer.html?_r=1

"Fortunately, Blythe goes far beyond the facile John Feinstein "inside a season" formula. As promised in the title, he uses the rivalry to explicate the nature of hatred — "paddling up the Nile of my Duke hatred, looking for its source." In this quest, he visits the Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman and meditates on the 19th-century English essayist William Hazlitt. But Blythe provides no dazzling insights into the universality of hatred, let alone its presence in sports. And that's hardly a fault. Rather than formulate broad conclusions, he sticks to the peculiarities of the Carolina Piedmont and his own biography. This leads him to digress on Southern Presbyterianism — whose cool Calvinist tendency leads white North Carolinians to seek more effusive spiritual outlets, like basketball — and the suburbanization of his state — which leads North Carolinians to seek authentic emotional experiences, like basketball. He pulls off these generalizations because he writes amusingly, self-deprecatingly and often beautifully."

14: Cliff, the best book about tennis is Infinite Jest

...and I thought the best book about tennis was Lolita.