Product Description

There’s no question that Dr. Alister MacKenzie was one of the best golf course architects in the history of the game. Augusta National, Royal Melbourne, Cypress Point—among many other famous layouts—are proof of that fact.

In the mid-1990s, MacKenzie’s lost golf manuscript, written a year before his death in 1933, was found and finally published as The Spirit of St. Andrews.

Even all these years later, MacKenzie’s thoughts on such topics as the golf swing, rules, great courses and holes, and golfers are interesting and intuitive.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #339390 in Books
• Published on: 1995-04-15
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .1 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Amazon.com
In 1933 Alister MacKenzie put on paper his considerable golfing knowledge. One of the game's most revered course designers--he conceived Augusta National, site of the Masters, and served the hallowed links of St. Andrews for years as consulting architect--MacKenzie synthesized his thoughts on golf's history, its equipment, its personalities, and his musings on what makes a great course and what makes a great hole, into a manuscript that lay hidden for more than 60 years. Finally available, it stands as one of the most courtly and cultivated treatises ever written on the royal and ancient game. His concepts of the psychology of design are as apt today as when he penned them, and his anecdotal spinnings on his own golfing trials should inspire anyone who's thought of picking up a club.

From the Publisher
"If golf has had a true renaissance man, surely it was Alister MacKenzie....MacKenzie's prose sparkles as much today as it did 60 years ago."
--GOLF Magazine

"The Spirit of St. Andrews may have been written sixty years ago, but much of its content is timeless. MacKenzie never minces words, and his views on golf, golfers, and courses remind us that he was not only a brilliant architect but one of the most provocative characters the game has produced."
--George Peper, Editor-in-Chief, GOLF Magazine

"Alister MacKenzie believed that the chief object of a golf architect should be 'to imitate beauties of nature so closely as to make his work indistinguishable from Nature herself.' He showed us the way in this regard....I am lucky to have the book in my library."
--Michael Murphy, author of Golf in the Kingdom and The Kingdom of Shivas Irons

"In golf-as-religion circles, [the publication of The Spirit of St. Andrews] might be likened to the discovery of another Dead Sea scroll....It's a large dose of common sense about what makes a golf course interesting and fun."
--Wall Street Journal

From the Inside Flap
"The Spirit of St. Andrews may have been written 60 years ago, but much of its content is timeless. MacKenzie never minces words, and his views on golf, golfers, and courses remind us that he was not only a brilliant architect but one of the most provocative characters the game has produced."
—George Peper, Editor-in-Chief, GOLF Magazine

“Having been part of a family closely associated with the game of golf for more than eighty years, I suppose it’s not unreasonable to feel that as far as the game goes there is nothing left to surprise—you’ve seen it, done it, and are on the verge of, dare I say, becoming bored. You look at the world and nothing is the same, life is but a shadow of what it was, sport is seemingly no longer played for enjoyment, commercialism is everywhere, which, according to some, is progress. But when you’re just about to reach for the solace of a large whiskey mac on a dreary winter’s day, along comes a bit of magic to lift the spirits. It arrived in the form of a manuscript written by Dr. Alister MacKenzie entitled simply The Spirit of St. Andrews.

Perhaps the discovery of this manuscript written in the doctor’s own fair hand was not quite as dramatic as Lord Caernarvon discovering the burial ground of Tutankhamen, but for lovers of golf it must run it damn close. Written in early thirties, it provides page after page of interest, common sense and information.

I’ve never read a more interesting book on golf, for it not only covers the art of creating a course, stressing the importance of building it so people of all levels of competence may enjoy playing, it also transports the reader in his mind’s eye to many far flung venues that over the last forty years or so have become so much a part of folklore.

I’m honored to have been allowed to introduce this masterpiece, for that is what it surely is.”
—Peter Alliss, Noted Player, Commentator, Author and Architect