The Hole Truth – Tommy Bolt with Jimmy Mann, 1971 ★

Who Knew Thunder Could Be Boring?

Tommy Bolt won his first and only major in 1958 at age 42, positioning the golfer as a senior statesman on the PGA Tour just as it exploded in popularity. Bolt seized the spotlight with a predilection for tossing clubs and venting at referees and spectators on the course.

It got him the nickname “Thunder” and a reputation for tantrums in what is still a sedate sport. You may pick up his golf memoir expecting lightning; expect a drizzle instead.

The Hole Truth is more hole than truth. Bolt passes up a chance to open up about himself or offer meaningful insights about the game. Those coming to this book knowing little about Bolt beyond the legend of his temper won’t learn more. Mostly he made a lot of money, not only in tour earnings but wagering.

“Someone once told me, ‘Tommy, the second best thing in the world is betting and losing. The worst thing is not betting at all. The idea is to have the action.’ I never went for that one. But I owned me a bunch of cats that I thought felt that way. And I was forever looking for them.”

Bolt spends a lot of time rhapsodizing about the “mullet,” small-fry amateurs who bet against him in spot matches and came up losers. Little else came easy for Bolt, a poor Louisiana boy and World War II veteran who spent his 20s working as a carpenter. So he enjoyed an opportunity at cleaning up:

“I had me a little dentist and a lawyer who just loved to play during the week. They’d bet their money and we’d go at it almost every afternoon. I guess during those days those two fellows set a world record for getting beat one up. They nearly won every time, but Old Dad would make something happen so he got the casheroo.”

The Hole Truth is organized into three parts. The first section is a 30-page profile, apparently written by co-author Jimmy Mann, in which Bolt is described in the third person as someone not afraid of making a fuss if he believes himself right: “He never tramples toes unless he brings along ten of his own to be trampled.”

Tommy Bolt at the 1956 Los Angeles Open. Throwing a club, or just striking a pose? Image from https://www.thoughtco.com/tommy-bolt-biography-4141731

This section is repetitive, ponderous, and does nothing to establish Bolt either as a colorful character or as a player of note on the Tour. It just dives into the question of his stormy reputation and why he’s misrepresented for same.

This is followed by a second, much longer Q&A section of about 130 pages in which Bolt answers questions about himself and golf. Some of this back-and-forth is pleasant if long-winded. Editing seems to have been minimal.

Much of the time Bolt discusses his on-course personality, “Terrible Tommy,” or as he prefers to recast his nickname, “Terrible-Tempered Tommy.” He admits to playing up that image at times, blowing up on a hapless tournament official early in his round when he felt a need to get his game face on.

It was a style of play he found both authentic and therapeutic:

I can’t say that I never threw a golf club in the heat of the moment. I have. One missed shot and I used to toss the club right now. It was over with. I didn’t take my torment back to the motel with me and beat my wife. I left it all out there where the crime was committed. There have been guys worse than Tommy Bolt, however. 

In 1957, the PGA Tour passed a rule fining a player $100 for throwing a club. The day after they did, Bolt recalls tossing a club after sinking a tough putt. “I did it because it was my rule and I didn’t want anybody else in the world to be the first man fined,” he explains.

This club has only seconds to live: Bolt at the 1960 U. S. Open at Cherry Hills Country Club in Denver, Colorado. Photo by John G. Zimmerman of Sports Illustrated from https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/open-scenic-view-of-tommy-bolt-upset-tossing-club-after-news-photo/81455133

Bolt has less to say about other aspects of his game. He seemed to believe tee shots mattered more than general opinion had it and putting less, and cites a preference for a lighter wood over the heavy drivers other pros used. Most of the time he answers questions about his laid-back lifestyle outside of golf, why he likes Florida as home, his clothes, and his enjoyment of walking a course over riding a cart.

This Q&A section dominates this short book and is followed by a further 25 pages of golf instruction. Bolt claims to have solved the golfer’s malady of hooking shots and repeats a pitch for a product he endorsed, the Tone-O-Matic Hit-Tru Golf Aid. This is the only part of the book where Bolt, the credited author, writes in the first person. It’s a bit ironic given that, earlier on, he whinged about people who annoy him by reading about golf, rather than playing it.

While making otherwise mundane points, Bolt throws up caustic opinions like sparks, sometimes amusing but never enlightening.

Take that august event they play in Georgia every spring. Bolt did better at the Masters than any other major, never winning but finishing high there more consistently than at the U. S. Open or the PGA Championship. [Bolt never played the other major, the British Open.] Still, he was unimpressed by the Masters and the airs of those who ran it. “There is not one golfer in the world who can honestly say that the Masters is a major championship,” Bolt says here.

On the man most credited with popularizing golf as a spectator sport, Arnold Palmer, Bolt recalls his amusement at the sight of Arnie heaving a club in a tournament: “He had to learn to play well, he’d have never made it as a thrower.”

About Jack Nicklaus, golf’s leading man at the time of The Hole Truth’s publication, Bolt is perfunctory if admiring:

Those sand bunkers they put out in those fairways aren’t put there for him. They are there to bedevil the rest of us. Jack just tees his little whitey high and flies it out over those sand traps. It’s good-bye and where’s my eight-iron?

Another golfer, Doug Sanders, known for wearing colorful outfits on the course, draws a sharper bolt: “He is a loud dresser, not a good one. I don’t think Doug has the body that looks good in clothes. He has no shape. His shoulders and hips are the same width.”

Bolt as a younger man. Before club-throwing made him famous, Bolt was known in golf circles for his fine ball-striking abilities and his pure yet simple swing. Image from http://www.golfwrx.com/283633/best-ball-strikers-part-1-tommy-bolt-and-moe-norman/. 

Asked whether he considers a golfer a true athlete, Bolt is typically bracing:

The lowest pro golfer of the top sixty each year is probably as gutsy as the fiercest pro football player. I honestly believe that. I say it because that golfer, to make his way to Number Sixty in the world, had to do it alone.

One of Bolt’s few surprising admissions is that he experimented with taking pills in tournaments. Only tranquilizers to quiet his nerves, he adds (though he claims the use of uppers by others is widespread in golf). He claims it did not take long for him to give that up:

I soon found that Tranquilized Tommy didn’t play the game nearly as well as Terrible-Tempered Tommy. Instead of aiding me to concentrate on my golf, they did nothing but make me concentrate on getting off the golf course and resting. They relaxed me to a point that I just about snored between golf shots.

Bolt’s amiable voice and his knowledge of and enthusiasm for the game should count for more than they do. However many pithy observations and cranky eye-openers he spouts, the result never gels into anything particularly readable. There is no story here, just that brief opening profile that offers glimpses and generalities about Bolt, followed by a long Q&A that bounces around without settling on any topic for more than a couple of pages.

The Q&A has a canned quality about it, too, Bolt offering such pearls as “You’ll find more headshaking around the scoreboard than you will find handshaking around the presentation table.” Or “The clubhead is made to execute the shot. The player’s head must believe it can be done.” I never got the sense he and Mann were ever in the same room, sharing the same wavelength.

The only time Bolt breaks out of autopilot is when discussing the one golfer he clearly admired: Ben Hogan. Perhaps the best-known golfer of the era before Arnold Palmer, Ben Hogan is often remembered as a quiet, sullen character, but Bolt found a warmer side to the guy. Hogan even helped him fix a hitch in his swing that Bolt credits for his win at the U. S. Open the following year at Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Bolt in the clubhouse at Southern Hills after his final round in the 1958 U. S. Open. He led in every round of the tournament and finished four shots ahead of runner-up Gary Player. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/62487513557021211/.

That win gave him one of his milestone moments, a rare major victory by a golfer on the north side of 40. Julius Boros, the oldest-ever major winner, was 48, but like most of the others on the list (Old Tom Morris, Nicklaus, Lee Trevino), Boros had won before. Winning his first-ever major at 42 makes for a rare story to tell. But Bolt doesn’t tell it.

Reading this, I didn’t get a feeling for who Tommy Bolt was, other than a solid golfer who liked to make money on the side. I didn’t even feel a rooting interest for him, which is odd since despite that nickname, he never comes across in this book as unlikable. Just not that interesting.