Quotes on Golf

Sport is a wonderful metaphor for life. Of all the sports that I played - skiing, baseball, fishing - there is no greater example than golf, because you're playing against yourself and nature.

Golf has become so manicured, so perfect. The greens, the fairways. I don't like golf carts. I like walking. Some clubs won't let you in unless you have a caddy and a cart.

If you can't laugh at yourself, then how can you laugh at anybody else? I think people see the human side of you when you do that.

There's no question that O.J. Simpson had been a substitute white man in America. He had gained honorary white status. He was not viewed by many white Americans as black. He was not seen as the African American athlete who was rebellious: Jim Brown, Muhammad Ali, Hank Aaron... He was accepted in golf clubs that were very tony.

The income tax has made liars out of more Americans than golf.

I don't think that golf has a place for two sets of rules. I think one of the reasons that the game has progressed in the way that it has over the years is the fact that the amateurs and the pros all play the same game, and they play under the same set of rules.

Putting is like wisdom - partly a natural gift and partly the accumulation of experience.

I have a tip that can take 5 strokes off anyone's golf game. It's called an eraser.

Everyone I built a course for thinks they have the best golf course in the world and I'm very pleased and proud of that.

Golf challenges you mentally at any age, and when you become my age, it's a challenge physically to try to make your game work as well as it ever did. That's close to impossible, but that doesn't keep you from trying to hit the ball where you used to hit it and make the putts you used to make all the time.

My grandson Sam Saunders has been playing golf since he could hold a club and I spent a lot of time with him over the years. Like my father taught me, I showed him the fundamentals of the game and helped him make adjustments as he and his game matured over the years.

I grew up in poverty on the edge of a golf course. I saw how people lived on the other side of the tracks, the upper crust and the WASPs at the country club. We had chickens and pigs in our yards. We butchered every year. I'll never forget those things.

I don't have any handicap. I am all handicap.

Baseball reveals character; golf exposes it.

Emerald as heavy as a golf course, ruby as dark as an afterbirth, diamond as white as sun on the sea.

I'm the best. I just haven't played yet.

Golf is typical capitalist luncay.

More than anything else, though, to anyone who would write about it, golf offers a four-hour drama in two acts, which becomes memorable even in the tape-recorded reminiscenses of old champs, and which - in the hands of someone like Herb Wind - can become a piece of war correspondence as artfully controlled as Alan Morehead's account of Gallipoli.

To me, life is like the back nine in golf. Sometimes you play better on the back nine. You may not be stronger, but hopefully you're wiser. And if you keep most of your marbles intact, you can add a note of wisdom to the coming generation.

I'm no longer dependent on the movie business to make a living. So if I want to make movies as other old guys would play golf, I can.

Golf was my vehicle to competition and I can't play if I can't compete.