“I think that (Alister) MacKenzie and I managed to work as a completely sympathetic team. Of course there was never any question that he was the architect and I was the advisor and consultant.”

I have never felt so lonely as on a golf course in the midst of a championship with thousands of people around, especially when things began to go wrong and the crowds started wandering away.

Golf is the one game I know which becomes more and more difficult the longer one plays it.

The difference between a sand trap and water hazard is the difference between a car crash and an airplane crash. You have a chance of recovering from a car crash.

Nobody ever wins the National Open. Somebody loses it.

One reason golf is such an exasperating game is that a thing we learned is so easily forgotten, and we find ourselves struggling year after year with faults we had discovered and corrected time and again.

Rhythm and timing are the two things which we all must have, yet no one knows how to teach either.

Doesn’t it show us all that we are silly little boys or fatuous asses to think that we can play golf without making a lot of bad shots?

Jack Nicklaus is playing an entirely different game, and one which I’m not even familiar with.

Competitive golf is played mainly on a five-and-a-half-inch course… the space between your ears.

Too much ambition is a bad thing to have in a bunker.

Addressing a golf ball would seem to be a simple matter; that is, to the uninitiated who cannot appreciate that a golf ball can hold more terrors than a spacious auditorium packed with people.

As I see it, the thing that hurt my putting most when it was bad, was thinking too much about how I was making the stroke and not enough about getting the ball in the hole.

It is nevertheless a game of considerable passion, either of the explosive type, or that which burns inwardly and sears the soul.

Golf is assuredly a mystifying game. It would seem that if a person has hit a golf ball correctly a thousand times, he should be able to duplicate the performance at will. But such is certainly not the case.

Nobody ever swung a club too slowly.

They say Yogi Berra is funny. Well, he has a lovely wife and family, a beautiful home, money in the bank, and he plays golf with millionaires. What’s funny about that?

I have to admit, I sometimes wonder how much more successful I would have been as a coach had it not been for my spending summers on the golf course.

Golf is a great example to me. Golf is a metaphor of life. I mean, every shot.

I agreed to coach the golf team. I didn’t even know how to keep score, and really, my main job was not to wreck the van on the way to tournaments.

I feel like I’m the Babe Ruth of golf.

There’s nothing better than competitive golf.

One of the easiest shots in golf is chipping. It should be the easiest. It’s like throwing a ball or pitching pennies. It’s easy. And I struggle with that, and the struggle is all mental.

This whole golf thing was so left field for us, as Polynesians, but he had a lot of knowledge about sports in general. My dad was a genius, really. He was an absolute genius.