Menaggio & Cadenabbia Golf Club: The Player’s View

Review

 

I have played golf courses all over the world. Wherever possible, and available, I like to bring a book about them home with me. It’s unusual for me to read about a golf course BEFORE I play it.  Taking us from tee to green on every hole, the new Player’s View series from Beckenham will seduce readers and golf clubs alike - for coffee table rounds of golf, club website images and much more.

 

Menaggio & Cadenabbia Golf Club: the Player’s View, a well-researched coffee table book by William fforde on the history of the design of this historic course above Italy’s Lake Como, has broken my rule, and certainly whetted my desire to go there one day. What a beautiful looking place! The book overflows with landscape photographs that capture a most extraordinary atmosphere and topography - photographs that are alive, not just snapshots in time. 

 

Nor is it at all the kind of place you’d expect to encounter (as the reader does, as a temporary member at the clubhouse in the sky) the ghosts of course designer John D. Harris and the great J H Taylor. The former wisely resisted the entreaties of the latter only to make slight alterations his 1907 original, to meet the challenges of 1960s technology. Amidst biblical misquotes and stories about English cricketer Ted Dexter’s family (once owners of the club), we overhear heavenly conversations between Harris and Taylor, with a few put-downs from ’Saint Bernardo’ (aka Bernard Darwin), that are uncannily familiar to those who have read another, equally entertaining golfing ghost story: The Doonbeg Ghosts...