Golf Courses Through Their Veins
To economists, GDP refers to gross domestic product, but to David Owen, GDPs are Golf-Dependent Personalities, a group to which he proudly belongs. GDPs will enjoy these two books.</br></br>I have a colleague at Smith College who is at least a borderline GDP. Once in a while, I play golf with him. When I don't play with him 1 might as well have, because without provocation he meticulously describes the lughlights of his game. 1 took a risk and invited him to dinner with the provision that no golf talk be uttered. He responded that of course he could not possibly sit through a whole dinner without discussing the game, but he thought lie would be able to refrain from putting in my living room.</br></br>Owen, a contributing editor of Golf Digest and a staff writer for the New Yorker, probably would not have been able to make even that commitment. He is a member of several country clubs, owns many sets of irons and woods, plays golf in the snow and indulges in practically every other golf-dependent ritual one might imagine, and still others one would never imagine. After playing the great courses of America, Owen writes that he never before could understand the appeal of a monastic life. But now he thought to himself: "Oh, I get it. Monks feel about God the way I feel about golf. The two words are even almost spelled the same. I suddenly had a vision of a sort of ideal community of golfers: a golfing monastery, or golfastery.Û</br></br>Owen writes well and humorously. He writes trenchantly about the questionable moral leadership of the PGA Tour, and he writes exhaustively about all the shots he has hit on the worldÛªs most famous courses. As a casual golfer, I care little about whether Ben Hogan and Sam Snead walked on the same fairways I am playing, and I care even less about the shots that Owen played on these fairways.</br></br>One recurrent theme in OwenÛªs book is that his addiction to golf has created certain tensions in his marriage. He writes: "If golf is, in part, a game of spouse-avoidance, should one wonder that spouses don't like it?" Despite the appearance that Owen plays golf 80 percent of his waking hours, he repeatedly vents resentment that having a wife and family keeps him from the game, I kept asking myself how he keeps his marriage together. It would have been a true service to