Harvey Penick's Little Red Book: Lessons and Teachings from a Lifetime in Golf

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Take your stance and hold a clubshaft along the front of your thighs,” Penick wrote in his Little Red Book. I found this, as an avid golfer and one who wants to improve his game, a cozy, fun, and educational read. Golfers didn't practice so much in the days when they had to pick up their own balls or else hire a caddie for twenty-five cents an hour to stand down on the range with their shag bags. The two best-selling sports books of all time, at least according to Davis Love III at the time of publication in 2012, are both golf books: Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book and John Feinstein’s A Good Walk Spoiled. The most beloved golf book of all time, Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book has become required reading for all players and fans of the game, from beginners to seasoned pros.

While the father was a good player it was evidant that the 11 year old was more consistant and had a better form. When the club face is pointed perfectly down the target line when you make contact with the ball, you have managed to find yourself with a square club face. For two weeks devote 90 percent of your practice time to chipping and putting, and only 10 percent to the full swing. If your club is traveling perfectly down the target line as you move through impact, you are swinging down on a straight path.

If you are reading this to understand Penick's swing philosophy, there is quite a bit of filler to sift through. Immediately after finishing, I picked up his next book, “And If You Play Golf, You’re My Friend”, to get transported back into his mind. Penick’s text takes a holistic approach to the golf swing and overall game, which seems applicable to a wide and varied audience.

This twentieth-anniversary edition features a treasure trove of rare images from the Penick family archives, commemorates Penick’s lasting achievement with a moving new foreword by 2012 Ryder Cup captain Davis Love III—whose father learned the game under Penick’s tutelage—and reminds golfers everywhere to “take dead aim. At the beginning of this book, the above professional golf champions introduce Harvey to the reader.

There are so many areas of this book to learn from, so I will just list some of my favorite quotes to give you an idea of what he has to say. What separates Penick from a lot of the top teachers around the country today, is that he didn't believe that there is only 1 golf swing that is correct for all his students. Play a round of golf with someone, and you know them more intimately than you might from years of dinner parties. This amount includes seller specified domestic postage charges as well as applicable international postage, dispatch, and other fees. If you try to do too much with your grip, you will find yourself making a corrective motion on your backswing, and then making a correction on the downswing, to correct for the backswing.

We chatted a few minutes about his brother, Bruce, who was one of my boys during the thirty-three years I was the golf coach at the University of Texas. But I’m sure that if I just re-read the book without my teaching pro with whom to discuss my thinking, I easily could end up contorted and flailing at the ball worse than before. Opino que los que insisten con esa comparación lo hacen porque les falta vida o porque les sobra golf.Just as in chipping, the first fundamental to learn about putting is: keep the hands even with or ahead of the head of the putter on the follow-through. After sixty years of keeping notes on the things he's seen and learned and on the golfing greats he's taught, Penick lets the secrets in his Little Red Book be heard by the golf world in this classic work. Attention is given to the power of positive thinking and the rewards of practice and discipline, but this is not a “golf = life” kind of book. As I'm still frustratingly bad at this game, I appreciate his simplification of the techniques and emphasis on positive head space.

Then again, I like playing golf but not really watching it, so that probably explains my ignorance regarding those people.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Harvey Penick, he was a golf instructor from Texas who was the teacher behind many hall of fame careers. The twentieth anniversary edition of this classic work—the bestselling golf instruction book of all time and hailed as “the golfer's equivalent of The Elements of Style” ( The New York Times)—includes a new introduction by a prominent golfer, twenty new illustrations, and never-before-published materials from the Pen