BIOGRAPHY/SPORTS

Kevin Robbins

Harvey Penick: The Life and Wisdom of the Man Who Wrote the Book on Golf

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Hardcover, 978-0-544-14849-9 (ebook also available), 348 pgs., $28.00

April 5, 2016

Reviewed by Si Dunn

No matter where on Earth you play golf, Harvey Penick likely has had influence on how you pursue the game.

Nearly twenty-five years after its first publication, Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book remains the top-selling golf instruction book of all time. The New York Times once hailed it as “the golfer’s equivalent of The Elements of Style.”

Harvey Morrison Penick (1904–1995) spent most of his life close to home in Austin, at the Austin Country Club’s golf course. He started out there in 1912 as a young caddy and worked his way up to being named the country club’s head professional golfer in 1923, a position he would hold until he “retired” in 1971. Retirement meant staying on as “professional emeritus” and helping new and experienced golfers improve their play.

Throughout his career, Austin author Kevin Robbins explains, Penick had kept careful notes, recording his thoughts and observations on good and bad golf in a worn red Scribbletex notebook. “Harvey knew what he knew,” Robbins emphasizes, “because he had seen it work.”

Indeed, for decades Penick used his experience and insights to help a wide array of golfers, from youngsters to top professionals and celebrity golfers. And this included women golfers at a time when many country club pros still refused to teach them. For a number of years, Penick also coached the University of Texas at Austin’s golf team part-time, while remaining with the Austin Country Club. He played significant teaching roles in the careers of top American golfers such as Tom Kite, Ben Crenshaw, Betsy Rawls, Kathy Whitworth, and numerous others.

Friends and family began telling him his accumulated notes should be put into a golf instruction book. Once he warmed to the notion, a series of events led him to a book contract and a fortuitous but unusual pairing. In 1991, Penick, a quiet, retiring, golf-focused gentleman, chose Edwin “Bud” Shrake, an Austin-based Sports Illustrated writer and novelist, to co-author the Little Red Book. Robbins writes that Shrake had an “uncanny aptitude for balancing competent journalistic production with great personal excess,” which had included alcohol and drugs. Shrake also was dating Texas governor Ann Richards.

The 1992 first edition quickly became a best-seller. Indeed, Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book even influenced Penick’s future biographer. Young Kevin Robbins’ grandmother knew he loved golf and gave him a copy as a Christmas gift. Robbins later became a sportswriter who focused on golf and had a twenty-two-year career that included writing for the Austin American-Statesman, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and other publications. He is now a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

“Harvey’s message of simplicity, honor and integrity,” Robbins has stated elsewhere, “appealed to me in a deep place; [his book] changed me, in ways that go well beyond golf.”

Even if you have little interest in golf, this well-written Texas sports biography tracking Harvey Penick’s life and career can entertain and inspire.

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