Book description
Although Alistair Cooke called golf 'a method of self-torture,
disguised as a game', from the first time he swung a club at the age
of fifty-five, he was hooked for the rest of his life. This book
brings together the best of Cooke's writings about his greatest
sporting passion, which display the incomparable wit, the unexpected
insights, the mischievous charm, the elegance and enchantment which
made him famous for over sixty years as a broadcaster.
Whether he is writing about the pleasures of a bout in the snow, how
the 'senior golfer' secretly disguises their ageing swing, Arnold
Palmer playing in 102-degree heat in San Antonio, dapper Gary Player
winning the U. S. Open at Creve Coeur, Missouri, or Jack Nicklaus
playing - and winning - almost anywhere, (not to mention a surprising
and persistent tendresse for Raquel Welch), Alistair Cooke on his
favourite sport is a rare and constant pleasure.
Alistair Cooke enjoyed an extraordinary life in print, radio and
television. Born in Manchester in 1908 and educated at the universities
of Cambridge, Yale and Harvard, he was the
Guardian
s Senior Correspondent in New York for twenty-five years and the host
of groundbreaking cultural programmes on American television and of the
BBC series
America
.
He was, however, best known both at home and abroad for his weekly BBC
broadcast
Letter from America
, which reported on fifty-eight years of US life, was heard over five
continents and totalled 2,869 broadcasts before his retirement in
February 2004, far and away the longest-running radio series in
broadcasting history.
