The Marvellous Mania - Alistair Cooke on Golf reviewed in The Irish Times

Cooke's collection has all the right ingredients

Joe Culley savours Alistair Cooke's tome, a little gem full of wit, elegance and passion

At another time and place we will present a treatise on why boxing, baseball and golf, of all the sports, consistently throw up such fine literature.

In the meantime, let us examine the newest addition to the shelf of wonderful golf books.

The Marvellous Mania: Alistair Cooke on Golf is marvellous itself, a surprising little gem full of wit, elegance, insight and passion.

But the most remarkable thing about this collection is that it appeared at all, for Cooke did not take up the game (what he termed the marvellous mania) until 1964 - when he was 55. But he was blessed with hearty genes, and he got a good 40 years out of the pursuit until his death in 2004, just weeks after ending his weekly radio series, Letter from America, aged 95.

Needless to say, he was never any good the game, but that doesn't deter most of us.

His conversion to the game was almost instant.

"My lifelong purity was defiled in a single afternoon in late June 1964 when, at the urging of a superficially decent Englishman, I was taken out with a bag of oddly shaped sticks to fumble around Van Cortlandt Park, the oldest public course in or near New York, in 168 swipes. (I believe my record still stands.)

"Any self-respecting man would have stopped right there. But I was, and am, the product of a Methodist upbringing. And while any normal sinner can take or leave his vices, it is fatal to introduce a Methodist to a whiff of sin. He was trained on many a Sunday afternoon to believe that one puff on a cigarette behind the barn is the certain prescription for life in a sanatorium, that after a single sniff of a beer bottle he will desert his wife, auction his children and expire in the gutters of the Bowery. Show him a lipstick ad and he is ready for every perversion in the Kraft-Ebbing and Andy Warhol catalogues. It takes a practised sinner to practise moderation. The good boy should avoid the first drop."

Those of us of an age to have regularly devoted a slice of Sunday to listening to Cooke's broadcasts can hear him clearly in this work, the easy cadence of his delivery, his understated humour and irony. He is not a man for exclamation marks. (Indeed, many of these pieces were broadcast as part of the radio series, others appeared in the Guardian or golf magazines, and some are published for the first time.)

Given his status for most of his career as a senior foreign correspondent, Cooke spent much time hob-nobbing with the great and the good, whether they be world leaders, Hollywood stars (including two rounds with Rita Hayworth, scorecards on display) or sporting celebrities.

And of course he toured the world. On his travels, he liked to slip in a round or two if possible:

"A lion, you might guess, is not a normal item of wildlife on your course or mine. But in Nairobi once, a tawny monster strolled out of the woods, sniffed at my ball and padded off again, while my partner, a British native of the place, tweaked his moustache and drawled, 'You're away, I think'.

"At about the third hole I pushed my drive into the woods, and when I started after it, the host screamed at me to cease and desist. 'Snakes, man, snakes!' he hissed, 'leave it to the forecaddies.' They plunged into shoulder-high underbrush, and I meekly muttered, 'How about them?' 'Them?' the man said, 'Good God, they're marvellous. Splendid chaps; lost only two this year.'

"That round, I recall, was something of a nightmare, what with my pushed drives and the caddies (the ones who survived) chattering away in Swahili. The whole process was so exotic that I began to wonder if any of the normal rules of golf applied. One time, we come on a sign which read, 'GUR'. I gave it the full Swahili treatment. 'What,' I said, 'does GHOOOR mean?' He gave a slight start, as if some hippo were pounding in from the shade. Then he saw the sign. 'That,' he said firmly, 'means Ground Under Repair.' And he sighed and started to hum a Sousa march. After all, you must expect anything in golf. A stranger comes through; he's keen for a game; he seems affable enough, and on the eighth fairway he turns out to be an idiot. It's the rub of the green, isn't it?"

Because of his position Cooke was able to sample most layers of the game. He became a regular at Augusta for the Masters, usually operating as copy boy/lackey for the Guardian 's man, Pat Ward-Thomas; he played with Bing Crosby; he covered the Curtis Cup, and knew the pleasure of a quick nine holes on your own over your home course in summer twilight. He would cross from his apartment on Fifth Avenue into Central Park to practise his swing - in the snow.

One of the best pieces touches only tangentially on golf: the story of the famed architect Stanford White, who designed Shinnecock Hills (the clubhouse, not the course) and the original Madison Square Garden, in which venue he was shot dead by a psychopathic playboy seeking revenge on White for having, a few years earlier, introduced the man's now wife - then a renowned teenage Broadway chorus girl - to the full pleasures of womanhood. The case was a tabloid sensation to rival OJ.

And all senior duffers will relish the tale of how he played a difficult par five in sublime manner while being watched by two young pups who "carried the dark give-away tan that betokens the 4-handicapper".

Cooke is wonderful company, on and of the course.