From Fields To Fairways

The first history of Minnesota's celebrated golf clubs and courses, including rarely seen photographs and long-lost details about the game's most famous architects

In golf the playing field is also landscape, where nature and the shaping of it conspire to test athletic prowess. As golf courses move away from the "big business, pristine lawn" approach of recent times, Bradley S. Klein, a leading expert on golf course design and economics, finds much to contemplate, and much to report, in the way these wide-open spaces function as landscapes that inspire us, stimulate our senses, and reveal the special nature of particular places. A meditation on what makes golf courses compelling landscapes, this is also a personal memoir that follows Klein's own unique journey across the golfing terrain, from the Bronx and Long Island suburbia to the American prairie and the Pacific Northwest. Whether discussing Robert Moses and Donald Trump and the making of New York City, or the role of golf in the development of the atomic bomb, or the relevance of Willa Cather to how the game has taken hold in the Nebraska Sandhills, Klein is always looking for the freedom and the meaning of golf's wide-open spaces. And as he searches, he offers a deeply informed and absorbing view of golf courses as cultural markers, linking the game to larger issues of land use, ecology, design, and imagination. Purchase the audio edition.

Photographer David Cannon began his career in sports photography twenty-five years ago and is considered the premier golf photographer in the world. Having played at more than seven hundred golf courses in over fifty countries, Cannon photographs with a true golfer's eye, offering an extraordinary window into some of the world's most celebrated courses—with more than 40 in North America, dozens in Asia and the South Pacific, and several in both Africa and the Middle East. Savor a view from the 11th hole of the incomparable and historic St. Andrews's Old Course bathed in golden afternoon light; glimpse giraffes and elephants from any green at Leopard Creek, South Africa; vicariously experience Pirate's Plank, the harrowing 15th hole at Cape Kidnappers, New Zealand, which is set at the very end of the clifftop fairway surrounded by dramatic 500-foot drops to the ocean; and take in the serene sea view from the signature 18th hole of the very private Seminole Golf Course in Florida. Golf Courses stunningly captures the singular genius and beauty of golf courses. It is a comprehensive collection of the world's best courses by revered designers including Donald Ross, Pete Dye, and Robert Trent Jones, Sr., and such new talent as Steve Smyers and Tom Doak, among many others—all of whom skillfully orchestrate the exceptional union of nature and course design on five continents. This deluxe, limited-edition volume features over two hundred sumptuous color photographs of courses, some of which have never been photographed or published previously, in full spreads and gatefolds—some measuring over five feet in length—and includes a numbered print signed by the photographer. Golf Courses: Fairways of the World will be strictly limited to 5,000 copies.

The histories in Twin Cities Sports are rooted in the class, ethnic, and regional identity of this unique upper midwestern metropolitan area. The compilation includes a wide range of important studies on the hub of interwar speedskating, the success of Gopher football in the Jim Crow era, the integration of municipal golf courses, the building of a world-renowned park system, the Minneapolis Lakers’ basketball dynasty, the Minnesota Twins’ connections to Cuba, and more.

In 'A Course Called America', Tom Coyne plays his way across the United States in search of the great American golf course. Packed with fascinating tales from American golf history, comic road misadventures, illuminating insight into course design, and many a memorable round with local golfers, this book is an epic narrative travelogue brimming with heart and soul.

In this most recent addition to Assouline’s highly covetable and lauded Ultimate Collection, George Peper, former editor in chief of Golf magazine and 2016 PGA Lifetime Achievement Award winner for Journalism, takes readers on an incomparable golf journey as he travels the world detailing the 100 most significant, historically noteworthy, and architecturally paramount courses. Describing intricate holes that have confounded the game’s best, revisiting tournaments that have made and broken champions, and elucidating the unique and truly special characteristics of each course makes Peper the perfect golf partner as he walks readers through the clubhouses, fairways, and bunkers. From greens as old and hallowed as St Andrews to courses celebrating their first anniversary such as Nova Scotia’s Cabot Cliffs, from the island mountain course of China’s Shanqin Bay to the Hamptons’ Maidstone Club, Golf: The Impossible Collection is an unequivocal sensory treat for the golf fanatic, or the perfect feast to feed the wanderlust simmering in all of us.

The hysterical story bestseller about one man's epic Celtic sojourn in search of ancestors, nostalgia, and the world's greatest round of golf By turns hilarious and poetic, A Course Called Ireland is a magnificent tour of a vibrant land and paean to the world's greatest game in the tradition of Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods. In his thirties, married, and staring down impending fatherhood, Tom Coyne was familiar with the last refuge of the adult male: the golfing trip. Intent on designing a golf trip to end all others, Coyne looked to Ireland, the place where his father has taught him to love the game years before. As he studied a map of the island and plotted his itinerary, it dawn on Coyne that Ireland was ringed with golf holes. The country began to look like one giant round of golf, so Coyne packed up his clubs and set off to play all of it-on foot. A Course Called Ireland is the story of a walking-averse golfer who treks his way around an entire country, spending sixteen weeks playing every seaside hole in Ireland. Along the way, he searches out his family's roots, discovers that a once-poor country has been transformed by an economic boom, and finds that the only thing tougher to escape than Irish sand traps are Irish pubs.