Golf's Three Noble Truths The Fine Art of Playing Awake

by Ragonnet, James L.; Moore, Thomas

• ISBN13: 9781577315803
• ISBN10: 1577315804
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-03-23
• Publisher: New World Library

Summary

In describing the need for this book, English professor James Ragonnet relates a story very similar to his own, about how people play golf for their entire lives without improving. Ragonnet's friend Chuck has been the handicap chairman of his golf league for 33 years. Over these years, the handicaps of all the league members, more than eighty golfers, remained essentially unchanged. In sum, in 33 years, these golfers did not improve at all. "Can you imagine", Ragonnet writes, "a bunch of people continually and avidly doing an activity....for over three decades and never improving!? It's an outlandish situation. My book says to golfers, Okay, that's it. Wake up and pay attention to what you're doing out there. Otherwise you won't grow." Many books describe golf as a mental game, one that relies on overcoming your psychological blocks to succeed. In this entertaining book of short lessons, Ragonnet takes that argument a step further, demonstrating that to excel at golf, one must recognize that the game follows universal spiritual truths that apply both to golf and to life. To summarize these truths, Ragonnet adapts the Buddha's Four Noble Truths, which serve as the underpinning of Buddhism, into Golf's Three Noble Truths. Ragonnet transforms these lofty goals into eminently practical lessons with stories, examples, and even instruction. As Thomas Moore writes in his afterword to Golf's Three Noble Truths, "Non-golfers sometimes ask: What drives grown men and women to hit a little ball, chase it, and go into tantrums if they don't hit it into a hole in the ground? I suspect that the meaning of life might be hidden in the answer to that question."