The Darwin Sketchbook is divided into ten parts. The first is devoted to Darwin's portraits of golfers whose greatest exploits occurred well before 1900; the second to the great British amateur golfers; the third to the professionals; the fourth to the humor; the fifth is all about Bobby Jones; the sixth describes other great American players; the seventh is about Hoylake, historically the most important of all English golf clubs; the eighth concerns the Great Triumvirate; the ninth describes famous golf matches; and the tenth is a brief autobiography of one of the game's authentic geniuses, Bernard Darwin himself.

There is no question that Bernard Darwin, perhaps the greatest of all writers on sport, came along at a propitious moment in the history of golf. Born in Down, Kent, in 1876, he was fifteen years older than John Hilton, six years older than James Braid, F.G. Tait, and Harry Vardon; and five years older than J.H. Taylor. He knew all six men extremely well and played golf with and against most of them. It can be fairly said that this group of six created the modern game of golf. Over a twenty-three year period beginning in 1890, these six men won nineteen British Opens and fourteen British Amateurs (the three professionals of course were not allowed to play in the amateur championship.) John Ball took advantage of their absence. He won the Amateur eight times. Even more impressive than their individual records was their intelligence, bearing, character, and modesty, and it was these qualities that made the deepest impression on Darwin. These qualities also created the standards by which golfers have always been judged and by which they judge themselves a - standard of character and integrity perceptibly higher than in any other sport. If we feel that Bobby Jones embodied all the finest qualities that these earlier golfers brought to the game, we must remember that it was they who first demonstrated to the world that the great athletes who played golf were also great men.

Darwin began playing golf in 1883, at age seven, when golf was practically unheard of in England. There were only a few courses. One of them was a nine hole course at Felixstowe where Darwin learned the game. He was introduced to it by his father, Francis Darwin, who had taken it up, in part at least, to help him overcome his depression at the death of his young wife who died giving birth to Bernard. Whether taking up golf is a good way to cure depression is a whole other story. There is some evidence that golf increased Francis's melancholy, but for Bernard it was the romance of his life. He had no playmates or cousins his age; he was a solemn child; and he especially attached to his father, who would play nine holes with him in the evenings after work. Golf helped to fill what Bernard called "the irreparable gap" left by the death of his mother. (The part that was never filled may have been responsible for the immense modesty of someone who had no need ­one could almost say no right - to be modest.) He literally fell in love with the game. It provided him with confidence and self-esteem because he was good at it. Golf gave him friends and a home - many homes, in fact; no one enjoyed clubs and club friends more than Bernard did. Golf provided him with a career and it gave him his heroes, and they were heroes. The extraordinary vitality of his portraits - the beautiful way he brings these golfers to life - must have had something to do with the fact that he always looked for the best in people, and in the top golfers he found little that disappointed him. His worshipful eyes beheld men deserving of worship. Add to that the talent of a writer of genius, and the game of golf can count itself infinitely fortunate that it was Darwin who writ in stone for all posterity the record of the heroes of his time.

The question comes up, even when described by a writer as a great as Darwin, why bother to read accounts of great golfers of yesteryear and their deeds? One answer is to ask another question: why, as we grow older, do we like to look through old family scrapbooks and see pictures of us and our relations? We do so because those pictures tell us where we have been and what we were like. They refresh our memory and hence our lives. They tell us where we have come since then and into what we have turned. They define our present position in life and indicate where we might go. In a similar fashion the golfers of old define what kind of golfers we are today. They explain to us why we like the game so much. They describe what it means to be a "golfer". They pioneered the swings we have today, the courses we play on, the clubs we belong to, and the attitudes we have about the game.

Herbert Warren Wind began to know Darwin when Wind, was taking postgraduate studies at Cambridge University in 1937-38 and 1938-39. He learned from Darwin that to understand golf - and, certainly , to write about it - one had to get out on the course and hustle and observe. It was not enough to just see. To quote one of Darwin's favorite characters, Sherlock Holmes: "You see my dear Watson, but do you not observe." No one observed better than Darwin. When because of gout and arthritis, Darwin could no longer roam the course, his "legs" were Wind's and other enthusiastic young students of the game who could hustle and observe and bring reports back to Darwin. Later on, Wind did what he could to keep Darwin in circulation in the United States (Darwin writes so much better than anyone else, that, at first, it's a challenge to read him, and it frequently takes a little time to get used to him.) As the golf editor of Sports Illustrated in the 1950s, Wind asked Darwin, then in his late seventies, to write occasional articles for the magazine. Darwin almost never crossed out a word he wrote, but his handwriting was a tortuous scribble, and Wind recalls how the staff had to decipher his essays and reports in group sessions. Wind kept in touch with Darwin until his death in 1961, wrote a good deal about him, included many of Darwin's essays in his anthology, The Complete Golfer, and persuaded The Classics of Golf to reissue many of Darwin's books. It should be mentioned, another pair of "legs" that reported to Darwin belonged to the great amateur golfer, Bill Campbell, who came to understand Darwin better than almost any other American. His afterward for this book is remarkably insightful.

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