Dream On - Book Review

Dream On: One Hack Golfer’s Challenge to Break Par in a Year

by John Richardson

Grade: a qualified “B”
Teacher’s Comments: A tale of obsession

I’ve heard it said by more than one teaching pro that the average golfer will never get any better as a player than he is three to five years into his playing “career.” That’s pretty depressing news, and not something that I think the PGA of America wants to get out there. Speaking quite frankly, a pro friend once told me that lessons will make a temporary difference, but that unless a golfer is willing to make a significant commitment of time and effort, he’s wasting his money. For the average golfer (and remember that the average golfer shoots 100, and has since the 1950s) to drop his scores into the 80s would require at least bimonthly lessons and untold hours of range time.

So given that, it was an outrageous challenge that hacker John Richardson set before himself: to play a round of golf at par within a year’s time. Even more unlikely was that he planned to do it while holding down a job and trying to avoid divorce. The title of the book reflects the supposed impossibility of that task. When the possibility of succeeding at such a challenge was suggested to the great Scottish golfer Sam Torrence, his reply was “Dream On.”

I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to reveal that Richardson did, indeed meet his goal. There was absolutely no suspense about that from page one. A failure would not have rated a book.

It’s also not particularly “inspiring,” in spite of what many reviewers have said. In his quest to make par, Richardson put what I would deem to be an enormous burden on his family and work partners. Although his wife is by all appearances a Saint, I wonder how the marriage survived. Some of his work relationships did not; Richardson says that had nothing to do with his quest, but I am skeptical. Truly, I found his dream to be more than a little bit disturbing.

Richardson also was certainly not a hacker by standard definitions, so the rags to riches story was somewhat incomplete. As a youth, he had aspirations of becoming a golfing professional, and throughout his year-long odyssey could regularly uncork 300 yard drives. Anyone who can hit 300 yarders is not an ordinary golfer. Richardson also readily admits that his game was ultimately designed to beat one particular course, and that he might not be able to achieve the same thing on another.

Finally, there’s little or no practical golfing advice here. Richardson details lessons taken, practice hours, training devices, videos, swing theories, injuries and mental gurus. But aside from a few names to check out, I didn’t learn anything new.

All of that is not to say, however, that the book isn’t worth reading. It’s an engrossing take of obsession, like something written by Melville, Poe, or King—but without the dark ending. I feared at several points that I was serving as the literary witness to a descent into golfing madness. Fortunately, Richardson’s search for par turned out better than Ahab’s search for Moby Dick, Livingstone’s search for the source of the Nile or Scott’s for the South Pole.

I enjoyed it, but it might not be the golf book you’re looking for.