Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf

The building blocks of winning golf -- from one of the masters of the game.

Ben Hogan, one of the greatest golfers in the history of the sport, believed that any golfer with average coordination can learn to break 80 -- if one applies oneself patiently and intelligently. With the techniques revealed in this classic book, you can learn how to make your game work from tee to green, step-by-step and stroke by stroke.

In each chapter, a different tested fundamental is explained and demonstrated with clear illustrations -- as though Hogan were giving you a personal lesson with the same skill and precision that made him a legend. Whether you're a novice player or an experienced pro, Ben Hogan's Five Lessons is a must-have reference for anyone who knows that fundamentals are where champions begin.

Afternoons With Mr. Hogan: A Boy, a Golf Legend, and the Lessons of a Lifetime

Ben Hogan’s pro-golf record is legendary. A four-time PGA Player of the Year, he celebrated sixty-three tournament wins and became known as a man of few words and fewer close friends. Most of what we know about Hogan has been based on myth and speculation. Until now.

In the 1960’s, though Hogan’s competitive career was over, he kept the practice habits that had made him famous and remade modern competitive golf. He hired fifteen-year-old Jody Vasquez to help. Each day, after driving to a remote part of the course at the Shady Oaks Country Club, Hogan would spend hours hitting balls, and Vasquez would retrieve them. There, and over the course of their twenty-year friendship, Hogan taught Jody the mechanics of his famous swing and shared his thoughts on playing, practicing, and course management—unknowingly revealing much about his character, values, and beliefs, and the events that shaped them.

In Afternoons with Mr. Hogan, Jody Vasquez shares dozens of stories about Hogan, from the way he practiced, selected his clubs, and interacted with other star players to his little-known humor and generosity. Combining the gentle insight of Tom Kite’s A Fairway to Heaven (which recalls Kite’s golf education under Harvey Penick) with the sage perspective of Penick’s own Little Red Book, Vasquez’s tribute is funny, poignant, and full of advice for golfers of all levels.

HARVEY PENICK'S LITTLE RED BOOK: LESSONS AND TEACHINGS FROM A LIFETIME OF GOLF

THE CLASSIC BOOK OF GOLF WISDOM FROM THE GAME'S GREATEST TEACHER

The Little Red Book has become required reading for all players and fans of the game of golf, from beginners to seasoned pros. The legendary Harvey Penick, who began his golfing career as a caddie in Austria, Texas, at the age of eight, worked with an amazing array of champions over the course of nearly a century, dispensing invaluable wisdom to golfers of every level. Penick simplifies the technical jargon of other instructional books and communicates the very essence of the game, and his Little Red Book is full of inspiration and homespun wisdom that reflects at once his great love of golf as well as his great talent for teaching.

Golf for Enlightenment: The Seven Lessons for the Game of Life

The Keys to the Effortless Golf Swing: Curing Your Hit Impulse in Seven Simple Lessons

The biggest paradox in golf is that the harder you try to "hit" the ball, the worse you do so. In The Keys to the Effortless Golf Swing, Michael McTeigue offers you a simple system of sequential body movements that produces a true swinging motion with every club in the bag. The result is increased distance and greater accuracy for all sizes, shapes, and ages of golfers for a minimum investment in learning time.

The clarity and simplicity of McTeigue's frell-free approach to the golf swing leads the reader to a new experience of power and effortlessness. He truly shows how to "build a swing you can trust and keep for life."

If you love golf but have never played to your potential, here is a book that you will quickly come to treasure.

Every Shot I Take: Lessons Learned About Golf, Life, and a Father's Love

As Davis Love III walked the fairways of the Oakland Hills Country Club, in contention during the final round of the 1996 U.S. Open Championship, he had a powerful ally on his side. For the rest of the nation the day may have been Father's Day, but for Love every day on a golf course is father's day.

It was Davis Love, Jr., master professional and legendary teacher, who taught his son the game in all its beautiful complexity. As a child, Davis III was encouraged just to play, to enjoy the game as he grew and developed his athletic skills, to find the pleasure in the game that can lead to the desire for improvement. But when, early in his teens, Davis III declared himself ready to take golf seriously, to put in the time to learn and understand the physical and mental components of the game that turn a golfer into a champion, his father was delighted, determined, and ready.

With every shot he takes, Davis Love III provides a tribute to the strength and the value of his father's teachings. And in Every Shot I Take, he shares with us the lessons he learned about how to play golf with power, with skill, and with joy. Those lessons range widely, from the psychological ("Let your attitude determine your golf game; don't let your golf game determine your attitude") to the physical ("To hit the ball far, hit the ball straight; I try to hit the ball at 80 percent of my overall power, because at 80 percent I have a much better chance of hitting the ball with the center of the clubface") to the technical ("When you begin your downswing, and your left foot returns to the ground, put your cleats in the same holes they were in originally"). They include drills like the Hitchhike Drill, where you place your right hand behind your back and your left thumb on your right shoulder, then in a spinning motion move your thumb to your left shoulder -- that's the golf swing in miniature! There are the Ten Commandments of Putting, six steps to successful long bunker shots, and tips for playing in the wind and rain, on fast greens, or out of long rough. Yet all are ultimately about something more than golf.

Golf was, for Davis, Jr., a way of being a father, of teaching his sons how to learn, how to approach whatever they might choose to do with knowledge and with care, how to overcome obstacles through dedication and understanding. It was the vehicle through which he taught the most important lesson of all: "Follow your dream, and enjoy the trip."

BUTCH HARMON'S PLAYING LESSONS

Tiger Woods turns to him for advice. Shouldn't you?

Whether you're an aspiring pro or just a weekend hacker, you too can benefit from the hottest teacher in golf today -- the man who helped Tiger hone his skills. Presenting strategies for golfers of all levels, Butch Harmon shows you:

HOW TO APPROACH EACH HOLE
HOW TO PLAY TO YOUR STRENGTHS
WHEN TO TAKE RISKS, AND WHEN TO AVOID THEM
AND MUCH MORE!

To make his lessons more fun and more challenging, Harmon has selected eighteen holes from America's greatest courses to illustrate his techniques. Packed with full-color photos and diagrams, Butch Harmon's Playing Lessons fulfills every golfer's dream -- the chance to play legendary holes in the company of a world-renowned pro.

My Golden Lessons: 100-Plus Ways to Improve Your Shots, Lower Your Scores and Enjoy Golf Much, Much More

He made his first cut in a professional major championship in the 1958 U.S. Open, at age eighteen. Forty years later, he had his most recent top-10 finish in a major at the Masters. In between, he won eighteen professional majors, a hundred tournaments worldwide, and provided countless thrills along the road to being named "Golfer of the Century" by his peers and by publications from America to Antarctica.

In his unprecedented run at the top of the game, Jack Nicklaus has seen the importance of constant learning and constant refinement. Your game at age sixty cannot be the same as your game at age twenty; where you were once able to overpower the golf course, with time and wisdom you discover new ways to approach the challenges of the game that depend less on physical ability and more on mental agility. Along the way, you learn which fundamentals will always put you in good stead, and you see what advice has stood the test of time.

In My Golden Lessons, the greatest golfer of them all takes the best from his many years of playing, practicing, and studying the game, and distills it into over 120 pieces of priceless instruction. Drawn from his immensely popular columns in Golf Digest and Golf Magazine, the topics cover the full spectrum of the game, from choosing the right equipment, on through the fundamentals of stance, grip, and setup, to the pursuit of power and the subtleties of the short game and putting. These techniques helped Nicklaus set the marks that future generations will strive to match, but it was his mastery of the mental side of golf that truly set him apart from his peers and his predecessors -- and he shares his advice on the mind game as well. In addition, the book presents a beautifully drawn sequence of the Nicklaus swing at its peak, alongside advice tailored to the needs of the better players who want to be better still.

My Golden Lessons is a book that took a lifetime to prepare, but one that will improve your game from the first few minutes it spends in your hands. These are the techniques that made Jack Nicklaus the golfer he is, and his clear, bite-sized pointers will show you the path to hitting better shots, shooting lower scores, and enjoying the game more every time you play.

On Golf : Lessons from America's Master Teacher