Golf Among the Redwoods

Book Synopsis: Dr. Alister MacKenzie, the famed Scot golf course architect, laid out the beautiful Northwood Golf Course in 1928. It sits in a grove of redwoods along the Russian River in the little town of Monte Rio, California, and people come from all over the world to enjoy the combination of long shadows, slanting sunlight, river mist, green grass and the almost mysterious serenity that derives from playing golf beneath these majestic trees. Golf Among the Redwoods gives you an account of the course’s unique history, its famous players—Arnold Palmer and Ken Venturi among them—and the lively, unusual, sometimes hilarious collection of characters the author calls The Merry Company of Northwood Golfers. Some really fun golf stories emerge from the Merry Company, including one in which the local priest comes upon a parishioner playing for the Club Championship who finds his ball surrounded by a stand of redwoods a hundred yards from the final green. The priest offers a jocular blessing, his parishioner takes a mighty swing and hits a bouncing, rolling, hippity hop grounder into the hole for an eagle to win the championship. It’s the kind of thing that happens at Northwood from time to time. The author has played the course thousands of times over almost sixty years and has never gotten tired of it, he tells us. He feels a sense of mystery and calm in being surrounded by living things that are so old and climb so high. Your ball may be all but hidden among the new shoots around the base of a redwood tree, but oh what a tree. This sense of things is one of the main blessings of playing golf among the redwoods, he finds. There are others as well.