LYLE SLOVICK HISTORICAL RESEARCH
"History - (Especially Golf) - Preserved and Shared"
MY BOOKS
Trials and Triumphs of Golf's Greatest Champions: A Legacy of Hope (2016)
Golf can be a vexing and cruel game, and teaches us much about ourselves. It has been described as “a contest calling for courage, skill, strategy and self-control. It is a test of temper, a trial of honor, a revealer of character.” In the end, as with most of life, success hinges on the character and spirit we possess.
Trials and Triumphs of Golf’s Greatest Champions brings us inside the world of seven champion golfers whose strength of character sustained them against the physical and emotional trials that threatened both their careers and lives.
Shadows on the Green: Golf's Scandals, Trials, Triumphs and Offbeat Tales (2020)
Walk in the shoes of people from golf's untold and "hidden" past, as Shadows on the Greens brings us into their lives and reveals both the destructive and inspiring sides of human nature. The frailties and strengths of men and women are represented equally, allowing us to empathize with their experiences - which were not so different from our own - and consider our own power to do good or bad in this world.
Among the subjects in the book:
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Nathaniel Moore, the self-indulgent son of a rich industrialist was an Olympic golf champion in 1904, but also a morphine addict who died in a Chicago brothel, the victim of an opioid crisis as great as what we face today.
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Eben Byers won the 1906 U.S. Amateur but died a gruesome and painful death, one of the many victims of a supposed patent medicine elixir in the 1920s that poisoned him with radium and ate away the bones in his jaw and head.
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John Shippen, the first African America to play in the U.S. Open in 1896. Beyond societal pressures he also carried the burden of numerous family crises, beginning with his father’s suicide, and estrangements from his wife and children, who valued education and thought his lowly profession meritless.
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Lucy Barnes Brown, the winner of the 1895 U.S. Women’s Amateur, who has connections to Pebble Beach, one of the most famous courses in the world. Her son was Franklin Roosevelt’s friend and roommate at Harvard, and her granddaughter owned the land on which the remodeled fifth hole (designed by Jack Nicklaus) now occupies.
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Marion Miley was one of the best amateur golfers in the country when she was brutally murdered in 1941 at the age of 27.
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Cyril Walker won the 1924 U.S. Open, beating the great Bobby Jones, but was a hopeless alcoholic who died in a jail cell.
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The "Rabbit Wars" of St Andrews from 1801 to 1821 that threatened the existence of the oldest course in the world.
Three Days in Elysian FIelds (2011)
Alex Wyrobnik is a forty-six year old archivist lamenting a past he cannot change, and obsessed with a riddle that carries him to Elysium, the abode of the blessed. In this benevolent netherworld, it is the year 1851, and here Alex meets Thomas Hodge, the man his father told him holds the key to truths which will set Alex’s troubled soul free.
As Hodge guides an obstinate Alex through this place where time present and time past are fluid, secrets seep out between the cracks, including one that haunts Alex’s family history and will transform his life. Motivated by memory, guilt, and hope, the characters in this novel mine the history of golf and the heartaches of its iconic champions – Old and Young Tom Morris, Harry Vardon, Bobby Jones, and Ben Hogan, among others – to expose the human frailties that affect relationships between fathers and sons, and testify to the redemptive power of imperfect love, in this life and the next.