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    On the Tour with Harry Sprague: Letters of a Golf Pro to His Sponsor
    On the Tour with Harry Sprague: Letters of a Golf Pro to His Sponsor
    On the Tour with Harry Sprague: Letters of a Golf Pro to His Sponsor
    Ebook80 pages1 hour

    On the Tour with Harry Sprague: Letters of a Golf Pro to His Sponsor

    By Herbert Warren Wind

    ()

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    About this ebook

    America’s greatest golf writer cracks wise in this humorous peek inside the life and mind of an up-and-coming young pro

    If Hogan had to wait 15 years before winning the Open I guess even a natural athalete like me has to wait a couple of years huh?
     
    Harry Sprague may not be the most eloquent golfer on the winter circuit, but spelling and grammar are the least of his concerns. First, he has to work on his putting, which, due to the aradic nature of the greens at Pebble Beach, Cypress Point, the Arizona Country Club, and other Sun Belt courses, is keeping him out of the money.
     
    And speaking of money, Harry suspects that his current sponsorship deal—he runs a driving range from April to November for no salary in exchange for the cash to go on tour—might not be the fairest of deals.
     
    Finally, there are the fans. In California, Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, and Florida, beautiful women line the fairways hoping for a date with their favorite pro. But as Harry soon learns, if wedding bells don’t ring the following winter, he’ll have hell to pay.
     
    First published in Sports Illustrated, these humorous missives from the bottom rungs of the leader board will delight duffers and low handicappers alike.

     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateJan 26, 2016
    ISBN9781504027540
    On the Tour with Harry Sprague: Letters of a Golf Pro to His Sponsor
    Author

    Herbert Warren Wind

    Herbert Warren Wind (1916–2005) was a longtime staff writer at the New Yorker and a writer and editor for Sports Illustrated. The dean of American golf writers, he coined the term “Amen Corner” to describe the famous stretch of the Augusta National Golf Course and co-authored books with Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, and Jack Nicklaus. A native of Brockton, Massachusetts, Wind graduated from Yale University and earned a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Cambridge. He began playing golf at a young age and competed in the 1950 British Amateur Championship. His elegant, richly detailed prose matched his meticulous golf course attire of a tweed jacket, shirt, tie, and cap—even in the warmest weather. Wind wrote or edited fourteen books during his lifetime, including The Story of American Golf (1948), The Gilded Age of Sport (1961), Herbert Warren Wind’s Golf Book (1971) and Following Through (1985). The United States Golf Association’s annual book award is named in his honor, and in 2008 he was posthumously inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame. According to his friend Ben Crenshaw, “every time you read Herbert Warren Wind, you get a history lesson, a golf lesson, and a life lesson.”  

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      Book preview

      On the Tour with Harry Sprague - Herbert Warren Wind

      1958

      HARRY SPRAGUE JOINS THE WINTER TOUR

      Jan 7nt

      Dear Mr. Parmenter

      I am writing to you from the writing room in the Del Monte Lodge which you can see from the printing on top is in Pebble Beach where we pros are playing the Crosby turnament this week. It is very noisy in here because an awful racket is going on in the bar and if I make any errors in spelling it will be because of the racket and how it effects a persons cordination. Before I left Mass I promised you I would write you a regalar report which is the least I can do since you are my backer and are backing me on the winter tour. So Im going to get this letter off and will treat the racket just like a galery which I did fine in the LA Open or else would I have tied for 14nt place. Thanks for sending your tellergram (spelling?). It was sure good hearing from you Mr Parmenter.

      That was a good daybue finishing tied for 14nt. I could have won the whole shoot and match if I had my touch on the greens. I was paired with Dutch Harrison one round and with Walter Burkemo another round and I am not being conceeded when I tell you I outplayed them every hole from tee to green but they got the putts and I couldent buy one for love of money which is what I hear happens on the tour. Meaning that the real golfers cant putt these aradic greens. I blew a couple of easy birdie putts on 14nt and 15nt that was the differents between tieing for 14nt and a tie for 7nt but as you say a person has got to be a pholossifer (spelling?) if hes going to be a golfer and I did hole 2 40 footers so I feel like a pholossifer about those 2 putts.

      For a sample I got one of those alpacker sweaters which you push up the sleeves on and makes you look extra rugged and proey.

      Some pros had to cancell out of the Crosby so I was invited to play here on the strenght of my showing at LA which I am grateful (spelling?) for and told them so seeing it is my first year on the tour. The pros are very regalar guys both the old fellows like Harrison and Littler and the young fellows you never heard of because I never did. However I am strictly unimpressd by their golf. Harrisons swing is no better than Mrs Proutys but he is almost as old as she is so maybe he was better when he was young. That figures. As I wrote you above the pros are very freindly. Al Besselink for exsample let me use one of his sports jackets on a big date I had in LA and it was sure nice of him even though the jacket was kind of small thru the shoulders. I bougth some new clothes here in a habadashry in Pebble so I exspect to do better with the females from now on.

      Wait till your boy starts putting

      Yours truly

      Harry

      Jan. 21, 1958

      Mr. Walt Parmenter

      Parmenter Enterprises Co.

      148 So. Main Street

      Micawba, Mass.

      Dear Mr. Parmenter,

      Like you asked me to in your telegram last week, I have got in touch with a public stenographer, so all the words in this letter will be clear which apparently they was not in my handwriting due to the racket coming from the bar at the Del Monte Lodge. Also they will be spelled right. I am sitting in a chair in an office here on the main drag in Palm Springs on the second floor of a building above a store where they sell nothing but moccs and loafers but are still in business apparently. They are playing the Thunderbird Invitational here this week, and I am giving this dictation like I was Adolph Menjou to a lady name of Lorna Thomas who is going to stick in the periods and the other dots and dashes when she types the letter up. She is a nice-looking lady with white hair like Mrs. Prouty which is the best description I can give you under the present playing conditions, if you catch.

      Well, Mr. Parmenter, you have probably been wondering how come your boy wasn’t in the money since your last letter. So have I because I have been hitting it a ton. That is one of those slang expressions all the pros use. When you ask a pro how he played, he answers one or two things. I was hitting it a ton, he says or he says, I was playing like a Gangbusters which also means good. They got a lingo of their own out here, like bankers, and that’s all they talk. I’ll give you a sample of what I mean. No pro calls a golf course a golf course. That’s strictly bush. You call a course a track. Another sample. When you get into a sand trap and someone asks you where your ball is, you don’t say, I’m in the trap. You say, I’m on the beach. Another good sample for you is if you see a pro or anyone else whose name you don’t remember just then, you call him Old Buddy. You can pick up this lingo pretty quick like I did in a couple of weeks if you have got any brains at all. I don’t want to lose my own personality which has always been my

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