Summer is gone, and as the days grow short, the fiery colors of autumn begin to appear. The first chill of a morning reminds us that the cold hand of winter’s icy grip is not that far away.

When the golf course is iced over and covered with kids riding sleds down the steep sloping fairways that in summer we climbed sweat-soaked, in shorts, the golfer in us goes into hibernation. We recall, from years past, that those long quiet nights by the flickering fireplace provide time for reflection. We reminisce over our best rounds of golf, and we try, without much success, to erase the memory of those days on the course we’d just as soon forget.

But golf is about those memories, good and bad, and we live to share them. Those who share them best write about them, tell us about ourselves and our games as they tell us about their games and the games others have played.

The year 2000 was a good year for the telling of golf tales. Best-selling golf books include old classics like The Mystery of Golf by Arnold Haultain and The Gist of Golf by Harry Vardon and more recent works destined to be classics, Golf in the Kingdom by Michael Murphy and John Updike’s Golf Dreams. John Feinstein’s work continues to top the golf charts as well with two offerings, A Good Walk Spoiled and The Majors. David Owens’ The Making of the Masters and Lure of the Links, a short story collection he edited, also continue to sell in big numbers.

The assortment of golf books this year is as vast as a wide-open fairway. A recent online search of Amazon for books on the subject listed 94 new hardcover titles and 106 in paperback. Counting calendars, audio tapes, paperback and hardcovers, the total swells to 214. That should fill quite a few hours when the course is frozen under winter’s icy blanket.

Sleeping Bear Press of Chelsea, Mich., has made a major effort in filling those wintery hours by publishing some of the finest books on golf to be found. One of their offerings, The Greatest Player Who Never Lived by J. Michael Veron, is a legal thriller about a semi-literate 1930s golf phenom named Beau Stedman who disappears under a cloud of suspicion on a charge of murder. A young law student named Charley Hunter, on a summer internship half a century later at an Atlanta law firm, uncovers a cache of correspondence between Stedman and one of the firm’s members, the retired amateur champion golfer Bobby Jones. Hunter uncovers documents to suggest that with Jones’ secret support, Stedman managed to survive and play matches against some of the greatest golfers of that long-gone era. In this tale of mystery and murder, there is plenty of good golf and plenty of good golf writing, too.

If Calvin Sinnette’s Forbidden Fairways (Sleeping Bear, 1998) is the scholarly historian’s view of African Americans’ quest to find a place in American golf, Pete McDaniel’s Uneven Lies: The Heroic Story of African Americans in Golf (The American Golfer, Inc. $50) is its inside story. McDaniel, an Arden, N.C., native, and former Hendersonville (N.C.) Times-News sports editor, tells the story from a deeply personal perspective.

He started in the time-honored tradition as caddie at Asheville’s Biltmore Forest Country Club. There he suffered the indignities of second-class citizenship, but, like many other African Americans, he learned to love---and excel--at the game. Currently a senior editor of Golf Digest, he sports a 9 handicap and collaborates with Tiger Woods on instruction articles.

Through it all, from LPGA, Porter Cup, Ryder Cup and Masters coverage assignments, he remains convinced that Charlotte’s James Black, a childhood hero of his, is "the best player no one ever knew." Other local notables mentioned in Uneven Lies include Harold Dunovant, Murphy Street and George Simkins.

In fact Uneven Lies tells the detailed story of how on December 7, 1955, Simkins and the group that became known as the "Greensboro Six" paid 75¢ green fee and headed for the first tee at Gillespie Park Golf Course. The round of golf they played that day would forever change the local game.

Their case---which would go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court ... took years to resolve. N.C. Governor Luther Hodges eventually commuted their 30 day trespassing sentences. Gillespie’s clubhouse would be burned to the ground, resulting in the temporary closing of the course, but by the time Gillespie golf club reopened in 1962, segregation of North Carolina’s golf courses would be eradicated forever.

Uneven Lies is full of such stories of courage and determination—all for the love of the game of golf. With its colorful layout of historic and current photographs, it is a handsome book, a pleasure to read.

Another sure winner is The Missing Links: America’s Lost Golf Courses and Holes by Daniel Wexler (Sleeping Bear, $35). It is a coffee-table-sized book with a spread of haunting photographs of golf courses around the country. Only these golf courses no longer exist.

It all started with a chance remark made by former PGA pro Dave Marr, who told Wexler, in his famous Texas drawl, that Claude Harmon (Tiger Woods’ golf coach’s father) had once told him that "the Lido was the greatest golf course there ever was." Legendary British golf writer Bernard Darwin agreed, calling it "the finest course in the world."

Trouble was, The Lido no longer exists. So Wexler set out in search of The Lido and other lost gems of Ross, McKenzie, Tillinghast, Thomas and other lesser known designers and builders of America’s great Missing Links.

One of America’s most important—yet least known—amateur golfers is the subject of another great new Sleeping Bear publication. The Old Man: The Biography of Walter J. Travis by Bob Labbance tells the little known story of America’s first great amateur golfer. Before Bobby Jones, there was Walter Travis. Known to his contemporaries as "The Old Man," Travis didn’t take up the game until he was 35 years old. Within two years he had reached the semifinals of the National Amateur, and by the time he was 43 he had won three U.S. Amateurs and had become the first American to capture the British Amateur.

A slight man with a dour temperament and a fierce determination, he drank hard liquor and smoked cigars constantly and putted with his beloved center-shafted Schenectady putter. And he made putts like no one before.

When asked to explain his success, he told sportswriter Grantland Rice, "I never hit a careless shot in my life." The Royal and Ancient thought his success was more attributable to his equipment, and after his victory in the British Amateur at Royal St. George’s at Sandwich in 1904 they banned center-shafted putters from their competition. (Fifty years later, the ban was lifted and one of the first winners of the British Open after the rule change was Ben Hogan, who used a center-shafted putter.)

Golf has probably elicited more quotes than any other game and one new book offers a multitude of great ones. As Hogan Said: The 389 Best Things Ever Said About How to Play Golf compiled by Randy Voorhees (Simon & Schuster, $12.95) offers gems of wit and wisdom from golf luminaries, Tommy Armour to Mickey Wright.

Favorites include: "It’s not your life, it’s not your wife, it’s only a game--" Lloyd Mangrum. And "When your shot has to carry over a water hazard, you can either hit one more club or two more balls--" Henry Beard.

The new book with the widest ranging historical perspective—and some of the most provocative conclusions—on the game of golf is The Golden Era of Golf; How America Rose to Dominate the Old Scots Game Old Scots Game. Its author, Al Barkow, is a veteran golf reporter who was chief writer on the original "Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf" television series and has co-authored numerous books of golf instruction with PGA professionals, including Ken Venturi, Billy Casper and Dave Stockton.

In The Golden Era he offers his clear insights and feisty; well-considered criticisms of the game he has spent a lifetime covering. The Masters, the Ryder Cup, the USGA, televised golf—no institution is sacred to Barkow. No American apple pie and flag-waving here. Just clear, well-written history, an irreverent perspective and an enduring love of the game.

On the lighter side there’s even a little book--for those who believe in such things--called Golf Astrology. Written by Michael Zullo, author of (I’m not making this up) Cat Astrology. It gives astrological signs of the top golfers on the PGA, the LPGA and .the Senior Tour and then uses their comments and tales of their experiences from past performances to illustrate various astrological traits. It’s implausibly offbeat, a little like checking your horoscope before teeing off, but if reading Golf Astrology can give your game a boost, like some cosmic caddie, then why not?

Following the success of his best-selling autobiography Good Bounces & Bad Lies, Ben Wright has compiled a collection of his uniquely poetic golf-speak. Written in collaboration with Michael Shiels, Speak Wright (Sleeping Bear, $18) is a dictionary of golfing terms, flowery phrases such as "the tradesman’s entrance," "aquatic doom" and "shrinking from arrogance" defined in clear, often humorous ways.

Golf is an ancient game with a close kinship to Scots brogues and British put-downs and in Speak Wright connections to the "king’s English" abound. There is a refinement, an implicit expertise in the best of British golf commentators, and in Speak Wright, the tradition goes on.

Best of all, the dust jacket of Speak Wright includes a blurb from the book review page of Triad Golf Today. When this reviewer wrote last year of Wright’s Good Bounces & Bad Lies, I stated, "It is good to hear his voice again—even if it is on the printed page and not the television airwaves." Those words are reprinted on the back of Speak Wright. To be quoted on the dust jacket of Wright’s new book is validation in a form of what we are trying to do here at Triad Golf Today and I, for one, am grateful.

The reader of golf writing has much to be grateful for this holiday season. Take time out to look over some of the golf titles out this year and you’ll see what I mean.

Happy Holidays!