Tom Coyne > Quotes

“People who don’t play golf pro to envy their golfing neighbors, admiring it as a nifty game you can play to a ripe old age. What they don’t understand is that we don’t keep playing because we can; we play because we don’t know how to stop. It lands in our hands for just a moment before slipping through our fingers, and we grab for it again and again. It’s a shell game, a music man, a three-card monte from which we can’t walk away. Once in a while it glances back at us, and it’s achingly beautiful. A siren? Perhaps. But those sailors at least got the closure of wrecking on the rocks. Golfers find the rocks and just drop another ball.”
― Tom Coyne, A Course Called America: Fifty States, Five Thousand Fairways, and the Search for the Great American Golf Course

“I want to believe all of that, just as I want to believe that one morning in the ninth century a Scottish king looked up and saw St. Andrew’s diagonal cross in the sky above—white clouds against a blue sky—and took it as a sign to march outnumbered against the Angles. His vision and victory gave birth to the Scottish flag—white × against a blue backdrop—and is too good a story to not be true. And I want to believe that the patron saint of golfers did actually utter St. Andrews’ town motto as his final words, the Latin phrase now stitched into my putter cover and the only tattoo I might ever get: Dum Spiro Spero. While I breathe, I hope.”
― Tom Coyne, A Course Called Scotland: Searching the Home of Golf for the Secret to Its Game

“I too often took golf’s capriciousness as its most maddening vice, but if I adjusted my stance and looked from another angle, its fickleness was the game’s greatest gift.”
― Tom Coyne, A Course Called Scotland: Searching the Home of Golf for the Secret to Its Game

“It’s not so much that I am a cynic, I just might take a bit too much pleasure in demonstrating why things aren’t as rosy as they seem.”
― Tom Coyne, Paper Tiger: An Obsessed Golfer's Quest to Play with the Pros

“The writer overthinks by necessity, collecting and complicating small details, while the tournament golfer needs to be simple, myopic, fixated on one detail at a time.”
― Tom Coyne, Paper Tiger: An Obsessed Golfer's Quest to Play with the Pros

“First tees no longer made me nervous, but somehow rangers still did.”
― Tom Coyne, A Course Called America: Fifty States, Five Thousand Fairways, and the Search for the Great American Golf Course

“There is safety in sitting around and wondering, imagining your successes and blaming cruel circumstance—I always win that game, with nothing put to risk. But the idea that I had committed every penny and minute of my life to one goal—such a clear focus felt slightly unnatural. When you take away all your excuses, funny how lonely your ego can become.”
― Tom Coyne, Paper Tiger: An Obsessed Golfer's Quest to Play with the Pros

“down half the trees, and were restoring some of the holes. That all sounded like good news, but what the place was becoming didn’t really matter. For us, it could only ever be what it had been. It existed for me in a sort of radiant stasis in some immutable part of my memory, where it’s always sunny and I’m forever fifteen years old.”
― Tom Coyne, A Course Called America: Fifty States, Five Thousand Fairways, and the Search for the Great American Golf Course

“The land on which this game is played holds memories for a very long time, and once in a while, it lets us come back and walk around in them.”
― Tom Coyne, A Course Called America: Fifty States, Five Thousand Fairways, and the Search for the Great American Golf Course

“If you had ever leaned sideways into the breeze with a sand wedge in your hands, staring through windblown tears at a golf ball entombed in four feet of fanged thistle, clothes soaked through to the skin, fingers like an overworked fishmonger, and yet you couldn’t bring yourself to stop smiling—then you got it.”
― Tom Coyne, A Course Called Ireland: A Long Walk in Search of a Country, a Pint, and the Next Tee

“This is a great learning experience. It builds character.”
― Tom Coyne, Paper Tiger: An Obsessed Golfer's Quest to Play with the Pros

“Forgan’s”
― Tom Coyne, A Course Called Scotland: Searching the Home of Golf for the Secret to Its Game

“A holed ball was beautiful and final. All it left you were the stories of how it arrived there, powerless I change that plot.”
― Tom Coyne, A Course Called America: Fifty States, Five Thousand Fairways, and the Search for the Great American Golf Course

“Doonbeg was a small town with a few shops and a busy restaurant, small even by Kilkee standards, which I found surprising, seeing how Doonbeg was one of Europe’s hottest golf destinations, home to Greg Norman’s much-blogged-about new links.”
― Tom Coyne, A Course Called Ireland: A Long Walk in Search of a Country, a Pint, and the Next Tee

“That is the dream - that someday we really will know our game, that golf won't always be lurking a few hundred more yards down the fairway.
It isn't just a dream for the helpless golfhead. Everyone who has made contact with a golf ball understands a piece of the game's spirit. It's there as your hands fall towards the ball, just before your club tears the turf, when anything might happen and you can still wonder....what if?
We confess it every time we tee it up, we speak it in our sleep, we feel it as we watch our ball go jumping off the screws - we love this game. What if we could give it everything just for a little while? How much would it love us back?”
― Tom Coyne, Paper Tiger: An Obsessed Golfer's Quest to Play with the Pros

“The Lab hopped up on the picnic table, his coat matted with wet sand. He walked over and sat down next to me, looking out at the ocean as if to say, Pretty nice, huh? I took quick stock of my world as I stood there—thatched pub, clean bed, cool pint of stout, a Labrador—and it was pretty nice, indeed. hole 199”
― Tom Coyne, A Course Called Ireland: A Long Walk in Search of a Country, a Pint, and the Next Tee

“They share the same ballbusting sense of humor, both of them from a generation that seemed to know how to do two things far better than my contemporaries: work and laugh.”
― Tom Coyne, Paper Tiger: An Obsessed Golfer's Quest to Play with the Pros