A quick, breezy look at slumps

How Great Players Survived
Their Darkest Moments in Golf
and What You Can Learn From Them

By Jimmy Roberts

Collins. 256 pp. $24.95

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Reviewed by Joe Logan

When you plow into a book subtitled

How the Great Players Survived Their Darkest Moments in Golf and What You Can Learn From Them

, you sort of expect to come away having, you know, learned something.

Ha! The joke's on me.

Not that Roberts' book isn't a pleasant, breezy read, ideal for the beach or - let's be honest here - a last-minute gift for that golfer in your life. Just understand that while this gift might get you off the hook, it won't get rid of his or her hook.

It's the first book for Roberts, a solid, likable golf correspondent for NBC Sports. (In the acknowledgments, Roberts writes that when he called his older sister to tell her he was writing a book, there was silence on the line until she said, "I think Mom and Dad would have been happy if you just read a book.")

Breaking the Slump is literary cotton candy. It's chock-full of fun stories and anecdotes about some of the biggest names in, and out, of golf, such as Greg Norman, Phil Mickelson, Paul Azinger, Johnny Miller, Ben Crenshaw, Arnold Palmer, the first President Bush, and Jack Nicklaus.

Jack Nicklaus? Who knew that Nicklaus, who remains the greatest player in the history of golf so long as Tiger Woods continues to chase his record of 18 major championship titles, ever had a slump?

I write about golf for a living, and I'm old enough to remember Nicklaus in his heyday, and I didn't recall a slump.

But, hey, there was one year. It was 1979, 17 years into his career, when Nicklaus was pushing 40. He'd already famously dethroned the beloved Arnold Palmer, and he had won the PGA Tour money title six times. But in '79, inexplicably, Nicklaus stunk the joint up. He didn't win once. He didn't even finish second. He only had one third-place finish all year, and he fell to 71st on the money list.

"I mean, you wouldn't believe how pathetic I was," Nicklaus told Roberts.

So, what did Nicklaus do? Nothing. He took four months off.

Come January 1980, when he was rested and ready, Nicklaus went back to his old coach, Jack Grout, like he was a fresh-eyed kid.

"I started from scratch," said Nicklaus. "OK, Jack Grout, my name is Jack Nicklaus and I want to learn how to play golf."

Returning to fundamentals is what did it for Nicklaus. The next year, he was more like his old self, winning twice.

It's a revealing story for Nicklaus-ophiles, and it's too bad Breaking the Slump doesn't have more of them.

Unfortunately, in profiling 18 famous golfers, Roberts too often only skims the surface of what brought on the slump and what, ultimately, got them back on track. Too often Roberts seems to read the old clips to frame the problem, then glean what he can in a half-hour interview over lunch or in a car ride. We don't get a lot of introspection or baring of souls that might help us learn from some of the game's most famous back-from-the-dead slumpsters, like David Duval, Davis Love III, Hal Sutton, or Steve Stricker.

Breaking the Slump is at its best when Roberts' subjects seem to share his enthusiasm for his project, or at least share their time and insight, prompting him to dig a little deeper. Case in point is Dottie Pepper, a 17-time winner on the LPGA Tour, now working as a commentator for the Golf Channel.

Breaking the Slump is at its worst when Roberts is writing about someone he seems intimidated to be interviewing at all, like Arnold Palmer or the first President George Bush, which in turn got him an audience with Bush 43 when he was still president. It's in those chapters that Roberts fawns and gushes and gets so syrupy you're almost embarrassed for him.

"It's January 2007, and I'm sitting in the White House library, a small room on the ground floor of the residence, chatting with the most powerful man on earth about the least important thing he'll have to think about this day," writes Roberts.

Puh-leeze.

Curiously, the best advice I found about how to break out of a slump didn't come from one of the golfing subjects in the book at all. It came from former tennis great Chris Evert in the chapter about her new husband, famous slumper Greg Norman, as Evert talks about her battles against her old rival Martina Navratilova, who once beat her in 13 straight matches.

Suffice it to say, it's all about confidence - or at least projecting an air of confidence.

Bottom line: This is a fun book but don't expect a peek into the dark recesses of the human psyche where demons live.