Coffee Talk

There’s perhaps no joke that unites golfers and non-golfers as much as “Golf is a good walk spoiled.” For non-golfers, the refrain is a barb: golf injects monotony and competition into the simple pleasure of walking. For golfers, the phrase carries a healthy amount of irony and self-deprecation. Golf Digest even tweeted the quote from their account, attributing it to Mark Twain. But where does the quote really come from? And what does it really mean? To start, it probably doesn’t come from Mark Twain. The earliest attribution to Twain appears in a 1948 issue of the “Saturday Evening Post.”...

Golf has given many gifts to the world. Dry wick polos. Analogies like par for the course. Doing donuts with a golf cart. But there is perhaps no greater gift than the one that’s found its way into the heart and palettes of people around the world: The Arnold Palmer. In the mid-1950s, the legendary golfer Arnold Palmer made a habit of drinking a mixture of unsweetened iced tea and lemonade at home. He eventually ordered the drink at restaurants and golf courses by describing the recipe aloud. And, the myth has it, during the 1960 U.S. Open at Cherry...

It’s the biggest source of antioxidants in the Western diet. It fights depression and cancer. It helps you burn fat. I’m not talking about Himalayan salt lamps or acai bowls or The Secret. I’m talking about coffee, the liquid evidence that magic exists in the world. Because there’s another thing that coffee can do: it can significantly up your golf game. According to a report by Reuters Health, just a moderate dose of caffeine could shave two strokes off your score. The study was conducted by Auburn University researchers on two groups of collegiate golfers, half of whom received a...