Golf: An Unofficial and Unauthorized History of the World's Most Preposterous Sport »

Henry Beard attended Harvard College and was a member of the Harvard Lampoon during the period when it published nationally noted parodies of Playboy, Life, and Time. He went on to found the National Lampoon with Douglas Kenney (the writer/producer of Animal House and Caddyshack) and served as its editor during the magazine's heyday in the 1970's. He is the author or coauthor of five New York Times bestsellers—Miss Piggy's Guide to Life, Sailing: A Sailor's Dictionary, French for Cats, Leslie Nielsen's Stupid Little Golf Book, and O.J.'s Legal Pad—and more than two dozen other popular humorous works, including Latin for All Occasions, Xtreme Latin, Bill Gates' Super Secret Laptop, The Official Politically Correct Dictionary, Zen for Cats, Mulligan's Laws, and a series of humorous pocket dictionaries, including Golfing, Fishing, Skiing, and Sailing.

As a serious player, a high handicapper, or simply a baffled onlooker to the awesome nonsense that is golf, have you ever wondered why, say, the golf balls have dimples, and the tee is both the thing you stick in the ground and the place you hit from, and the hole is so small, and the courses have all these big pits full of sand where any sane person would put grass?

Well, so did noted humor writer and avid hacker Henry Beard, who brought twenty-first-century computer search-engine technology to bear on this thousand-year-old game, tapping the internet's inherent capacity to confer a thin veneer of authenticity to far-fetched accounts of great moments in the history of golf, warped portraits of its legendary players, and fanciful conjectures about its origins and evolution.

Employing an easy-to-read and simple-to-fudge timeline format, he chronicles the amazing process through which this screwy pastime with wacky equipment and loony rules played for penny wagers by a bunch of bored-silly shepherds was gradually transformed into a screwy sport with wacky equipment and loony rules played for million-dollar purses by superstar athletes.

As he peers through the mists of time to the birthplace of the game, Beard resolves once and for all its many mysteries, like where those weird-looking pants came from, when the fi rst telling of the "Hit, drag Harry" joke was, what a Stimpmeter is, and who dreamed up the idea of those stupid blimps.

Here, then, in one convenient golf-bag-side-pocket-sized volume is a rich, wildly embroidered, ludicrously embellished tapestry of colorful fabrications and highly entertaining but thoroughly dubious speculations that tell the tall tale of golf — the game that deranged the world.