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

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There must be 80+ "chapters" in this book, with most being approximately a page and some being much less. It's a folksy story-based approach to conveying his ideas about golf and, by extension, every day life. Try holding your right shoulder back as long as possible to give your left side a chance to get through. I can see Jackson Bradley out teaching on the practice line, and there are moments when I might want to make a suggestion, but I don't do it. 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 Penick family archives.

I finished this book with great admiration for this man who quietly watched his students swing and offered maybe one or two pieces of advice that were game-changing. I received as much joy from coaxing a first-time pupil, a woman from Paris, into hitting the ball into the air so that she could go back to France and play golf with her husband as I did from watching the development of all the fine players I have been lucky enough to know. Harvey Penick, the legendary swing coach of golf greats like Ben Crenshaw, Tom Kite, and Davis Love III decided to jot down his most useful tips and tools to the game of golf after 8 decades of teaching. 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.Harvey Penick was smart enough not to fill their heads with a lot of instruction about weakening their grips and not turning their right hands over.

Examine how differently Tom Kite and Ben Crenshaw, Penick’s two most famous pupils, approached and played golf as a striking example. Since I am from West Texas, I really enjoyed the story about his college players from West Texas: their grip was different due to holding club steady for shots in those fierce winds. my mission is to make golfers more consistent in just a few hours a week through advanced practice strategies and timeless, first-principle golf instruction. This book includes a span of sixty years worth of notes and markings he made while coaching professionals and amateurs.It pleases me deeply when Ben drops by to sit on the couch or when he phones me from some tournament. Then put your putter blade down behind the ball, keep your head and eyes still, and imitate your last practice stroke.