Pro Golfers Quotes

When we watch pro golfers, we expect them to play well, to make the shots we know we can’t, and to be entertaining. Their expectation, however, is very different. They expect to succeed!

Do you know who profits most in a gold rush? Mining suppliers—merchants. Today that includes marketers, because they're selling an idea or lifestyle. It's why golf's richest men aren't the pro players.

Sometimes a strikeout means that the slugger’s girlfriend just ran off with the UPS driver. Sometimes a muffed ground ball means that the shortstop’s baby daughter has a pain in her head that won’t go away. And handicapping is for amateur golfers, not ballplayers. Pitchers don’t ease off on the cleanup hitter because of the lumps just discovered in his wife’s breast. Baseball is not life. It is a fiction, a metaphor. And a ballplayer is a man who agrees to uphold that metaphor as though lives were at stake. Perhaps they are. I cherish a theory I once heard propounded by G.Q. Durham that professional baseball is inherently antiwar. The most overlooked cause of war, his theory runs, is that it’s so damned interesting. It takes hard effort, skill, love and a little luck to make times of peace consistently interesting. About all it takes to make war interesting is a life. The appeal of trying to kill others without being killed yourself, according to Gale, is that it brings suspense, terror, honor, disgrace, rage, tragedy, treachery and occasionally even heroism within range of guys who, in times of peace, might lead lives of unmitigated blandness. But baseball, he says, is one activity that is able to generate suspense and excitement on a national scale, just like war. And baseball can only be played in peace. Hence G.Q.’s thesis that pro ball-players—little as some of them may want to hear it—are basically just a bunch of unusually well-coordinated guys working hard and artfully to prevent wars, by making peace more interesting.

People who don’t play golf pro to envy their golfing neighbors, admiring it as a nifty game you can play to a ripe old age. What they don’t understand is that we don’t keep playing because we can; we play because we don’t know how to stop. It lands in our hands for just a moment before slipping through our fingers, and we grab for it again and again. It’s a shell game, a music man, a three-card monte from which we can’t walk away. Once in a while it glances back at us, and it’s achingly beautiful. A siren? Perhaps. But those sailors at least got the closure of wrecking on the rocks. Golfers find the rocks and just drop another ball.

Habits are as follows: Habit 1: Be Pro-active – I thought of a Bee that is a pro-golfer. That picture should be enough to trigger habit 1. Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind – The brain is running a race, and looking at the end in mind. Habit 3: Put First Things First – the man is in 1st position, putting first things first. Habit 4: Think Win/Win – the two trophies show that everyone wins with win/win. Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to be

Playwright Noel Coward once said, “Work is more fun than fun.” I included that quote in a seminar guidebook for a sales group a year ago and one of the participants in the back of the room raised his hand and said, “Yeah, Steve, who is this Noel Coward guy? I figure with a quote like that he’s either a porn star or a professional golfer.” That line got a great laugh at my expense, but it also revealed a truth (which almost all humor does). People believe that the fun jobs are always somewhere else. “If only I could get a job like that!” “If only I had been a pro golfer!” But the truth is that fulfilling and fun work can be found in anything. The more we consciously introduce game-playing elements (personal bests listed, goals, time limits, competition with self or others, record-keeping, and so on), the more fun the activity becomes.

Later, I learned a golfer was hitting from the ninth tee with his comrades. He had been drinking a few beers and thought he could drive the green. His aim was dangerously off, and he managed to hit the golf ball over the clubhouse, a mere 200 yards away. To my misfortune, it struck me on the head with the force of something much larger. My young, vibrant, and motivated life, as I knew it, changed in an instant.

I played as much golf as I could in North Dakota, but summer up there is pretty short.  It usually falls on a Tuesday.  ~ Mike Morley, pro golfer from North Dakota

The course superintendent and golf pro at the country club then was Milfred (Deacon) Palmer, the father of legendary golfer Arnold Palmer, who was just a year behind Fred Rogers in school.

Legendary golfer Ben Hogan is said to have prepared for majors by playing worst-ball scramble. At the peak of his career, Greg Norman practiced using worst-ball scramble. “I’d play two golf balls, and you always had to hit the worst shot. So if you hit a great drive, you had to hit the next drive great, too,” Norman said. “The best score I remember playing was 72. So, it really makes you concentrate.” According to our simulation, a typical tour pro would average about 80 playing worst-ball scramble on a championship course. A golfer’s best worst-ball score is lower than his average by about eight strokes, so Norman’s best worst-ball score of 72 is perfectly consistent with our simulation results. Hall

It’s extremely confusing to think about trying not to think, but I will say this: if Tolstoy really did pass the entrance exam for the White Polar Bear Club, he was in the wrong profession writing novels. He should have been a golfer.

2011: A boy wearing a San Francisco Giants shirt asked Bill Murray for an autograph. Inspecting the shirt, Bill asked the kid, “Are you willing to at least look at some Chicago Cubs literature?” “I have an uncle who lives near Chicago,” the boy volunteered. “Wouldn’t you rather spend time with him than your mother?” Bill asked. “Sure,” the boy said. Bill signed an autograph for him. “See?” Bill said. “Was that so hard?” Pro golfer D.A. Points, who