When was the last time that you felt your score accurately reflected your true ability as a golfer? Do you remember a time when you felt truly comfortable on the golf course, treating it as a playground to explore? Can you imagine what it feels like to create unique golf shots in your mind and then execute these intentions? The lost art of playing golf suggests answers to these profound questions. It will help you to re-connect with the soul of the game. Learn how to approach the game you love in a profoundly different way -- and liberate yourself to derive more pleasure from your precious time playing golf.

The Buddha’s seven years of wandering in search of enlightenment ended in frustration. So did the author’s thirty years of traversing golf courses. Neither found what they were looking for until they stopped searching outside and started looking within. The result for James Ragonnet was the kind of “second birthday” Eastern thinkers describe when “you wake up to everything happening around you.” Through delightful anecdotes and practical lessons, Ragonnet reveals the power of awareness, balance, and unity to banish the dissatisfaction and stagnation so many golfers experience. He shows how “all golf Buddhas — Bobby Jones, Jack Nicklaus, Annika Sorenstam, Tiger Woods — play with their outer and inner eyes wide open,” describes his twelfth-green OOGE (“out-of-golf-experience”), and offers readers simple truths that prompt flashes of understanding. These insights invite birdies, drop handicaps, and transform experience both on and off the course.

The perfect golfing gift: A book that is a complete, working 9-hole miniature golf course, with miniature golf balls and putter included. The first book you can play through. The book that's a true original. Featuring nine themed courses, from pirates to dinosaurs to the classic windmill, The Miniature Book of Miniature Golf celebrates the silliness and the golf-for-everyone! attitude of Putt-Putt. Each page in the book is a cleverly designed hole, modeled on real mini golf courses. Tap the ball through the grooves and make sure to avoid the obstacles. Then see if you can get it in the clown's mouth on the last hole. Every hole is par fun.

Deepak Chopra has discovered the delights—and frustrations—of golf, and he is passionate about the game. Confronted by the wild ups and downs of his own play, he consulted with golf professionals and developed a new approach to the game that any golfer can follow—from the novice to the expert. The results can be measured not only in increased enjoyment and skill, but also in greater wisdom about life beyond the 18th hole. Chopra’s own game has improved dramatically since incorporating the elements of his program. Instead of focusing on the mechanics of a “perfect” swing, Chopra reveals how golf can be mastered through mindfulness, a form of awareness that combines sharp focus and relaxation at the same time. Expanded awareness, he tells us, can accomplish much more than external mechanics to improve one’s game. But Golf for Enlightenment is also an engrossing story about Adam, an Everyman who is playing a terrible round of golf when he meets a mysterious young teaching pro named Leela. In seven short but profound lessons detailing spiritual strategies, she teaches Adam the essence of a game that has much to explain about life itself. Chopra has spent the last year taking the unique message in Golf for Enlightenment nationwide, teaching the essential tenets of his program at lectures and seminars to golfers everywhere. His message continues to help players turn an obsession into a positive life path.

How we walk, where we walk, why we walk tells the world who and what we are. Whether it's once a day to the car, or for long weekend hikes, or as competition, or as art, walking is a profoundly universal aspect of what makes us humans, social creatures, and engaged with the world. Cultural commentator, Whitbread Prize winner, and author of Sex Collectors Geoff Nicholson offers his fascinating, definitive, and personal ruminations on the literature, science, philosophy, art, and history of walking. Nicholson finds people who walk only at night, or naked, or in the shape of a cross or a circle, or for thousands of miles at a time, in costume, for causes, or for no reason whatsoever. He examines the history and traditions of walking and its role as inspiration to artists, musicians, and writers like Bob Dylan, Charles Dickens, and Buster Keaton. In The Lost Art of Walking, he brings curiosity, imagination, and genuine insight to a subject that often strides, shuffles, struts, or lopes right by us.

Charles Blair Macdonald may very well be one of the most influential persons in American golf history. In this visually stunning book, author George Bahto presents a compelling look into Macdonald’s, Seth Raynor’s, and Charles Banks’ work and includes an impressive array of rare vintage photographs, detailed course layouts, and sketches of many of their most highly regarded hole designs. In the tradition of recent architectural classics, The Evangelist of Golf joins Discovering Donald Ross: The Architect and His Golf Courses and The Life and Work of Dr. Alister MacKenzie to form a rare and beautiful triumvirate.

A beloved New York Times bestselling author and golf aficionado shares his insatiable curiosity, trademark sense of humor, and vast knowledge of the game in this cavalcade of original pieces about why we love the sport, now featuring three additional new pieces. This is the book Rick Reilly has been writing in the back of his head since he fell in love with the game of golf at eleven years old. He unpacks and explores all of the wonderful, maddening, heart-melting, heart-breaking, cool, and captivating things about golf that make the game so utterly addictive. We meet the PGA Tour player who robbed banks by night to pay his motel bills, the golf club maker who takes weekly psychedelic trips, and the caddy who kept his loop even after an 11-year prison stint. We learn how a man on his third heart nearly won the U.S. Open, how a Vietnam POW saved his life playing 18 holes a day in his tiny cell, and about the course that's absolutely free. Reilly mines all of the game’s quirky traditions—from the shot of bourbon you take before you tee off at Peyton Manning’s course, to the way the starter at St. Andrews announces to your group (and the hundreds of tourists watching), “You’re on the first tee, gentlemen.” He means that quite literally: St. Andrews has the first tee ever invented. We’ll visit the eighteen most unforgettable holes around the world (Reilly has played them all), including the hole in Indonesia where the biggest hazard is monkeys, the one in the Caribbean that's underwater, and the one in South Africa that requires a shot over a pit of alligators; not to mention Reilly’s attempt to play the most mini-golf holes in one day. Reilly expounds on all the great figures in the game, from Phil Mickelson to Bobby Jones to the simple reason Jack Nicklaus is better than Tiger Woods. He explains why we should stop hating Bryson DeChambeau unless we hate genius, the greatest upset in women’s golf history, and why Ernie Els throws away every ball that makes a birdie. Plus all the Greg Norman stories Reilly has never been able to tell before, and the great fun of being Jim Nantz. Connecting it all will be the story of Reilly’s own personal journey through the game, especially as it connects to his tumultuous relationship with his father, and how the two eventually reconciled through golf. This is Reilly’s valentine to golf, a cornucopia of stories that no golfer will want to be without. **The Sports Librarian’s Best of 2022 – Sports Books**