A fun new golf book offers a wide variety of content

	Courtesy of Workman Publishing

I'll take "Potpourri" for $13.95, Alex.

A potpourri is what you get when you pick up a copy of A Disorderly Compendium of Golf by Lorne Rubenstein and Jeff Neuman. It's the kind of book you can flip open to any page, peruse a couple of items and put back down. The next time you look at it, you can flip it to any other page and start again. It's the ultimate can't-miss Christmas/Father's Day gift for anyone who plays golf.

The book's subtitle describes it as a collection of "Wisdom, Folly, Rules, Truths, Trivia and More." That pretty much covers it. Since this is a satisfying smorgasbord of hackerdom, let us sample freely (and I promise not to give away the ending):

• Golf Scenes in Non-Golf Movies
This may be the best list in the book, with brief descriptions of golf action in surprising places. There's the famed match between James (007) Bond and Auric Goldfinger in Goldfinger, the hacking in wine-lovers' fave Sideways; the unlikely horse-targeting in Animal House; Ray Romano and Gene Hackman dueling in Welcome to Mooseport (I forget -- which one of them won an Academy Award for this?); Katherine Hepburn ditching Cary Grant's belongings in The Philadelphia Story and putting an exclamation point on her displeasure when she gives his golf bag the heave, pulls out a club and snaps it over her knee.

The authors say up front that the list is not exhaustive. I personally like one they ignored -- Jack Nicholson's character in The Two Jakes who, in two different parts of the movie, claims two different handicaps. Just like golfing bandits in real life.

• It's about Time
The news magazine (like SI.com, a Time Inc. property) has featured golf on its covers 10 times since 1923. Bobby Jones was the only golfer to make the cover twice.

While the magazine has featured the usual suspects -- Jack Nicklaus, Ben Hogan, Arnold Palmer, Lee Trevino, Sam Snead and Tiger Woods -- there are two you wouldn't get with a thousand guesses. Johnny Goodman appeared in 1938 as he headed to Scotland to play in the Walker Cup and Edith Cummings made it in 1924. Cummings won the 1923 U.S. Women's Amateur and was part of an elite social circle -- so elite and glamorous that the character Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby was based on her. Those are the kinds of long-lost nuggets that make you want to stand and applaud the authors. And here's one another -- Cummings was the first woman to appear on a Time cover.