Mark Twain? William Gladstone? The Allens? Harry Leon Wilson?

Dear Quote Investigator: I love to play golf, but sometimes when I am playing poorly I am tempted to simply walk the course and get some exercise. When I mentioned this to a friend he told me that Mark Twain said: “Golf is a good walk spoiled.” This sounds like Twain to me, but did he really say it?

Quote Investigator: No, Mark Twain is probably not responsible for this barb. The earliest known attribution of this famous remark to Twain appears in a 1948 issue of the Reader’s Digest as noted in the The Quote Verifier and the Yale Book of Quotations [QVG][YQG]. The Reader’s Digest refers to the Saturday Evening Post, so a slightly earlier cite may exist. But Twain died in 1910, so this is a suspiciously late citation.

The earliest appearance of the quip that QI has discovered is in a 1903 book about lawn tennis.

Tennis players are the traditional adversaries of golfers in the field of recreational sports. The tennis enthusiast author of the second chapter attributes the saying to a couple of fellow players named the Allens [LTH]:

… my good friends the Allens … one of the best of their many excellent dicta is that “to play golf is to spoil an otherwise enjoyable walk.”

A clever expanded version of the quip that uses a rhetorical device called reversibility is attributed to the novelist Harry Leon Wilson in 1904. In 1905 the saying appears directly in one of Wilson’s novels. He later gained fame by writing the serial and bestselling novel Ruggles of Red Gap [HW1] [HW2]:

Harry Leon Wilson, the author of “The Seeker,” is spending the fall days in the woods near Walpole, N.H. Some of his friends have been trying to induce him to play golf, but he refused. He makes the following unique definition of golf: “Golf has too much walking to be a good game, and just enough game to spoil a good walk.”

In 1906 another tennis player disparaged golf with the critical saying, but he adroitly deflected responsibility by placing the words in the mouth of a “well-known jockey” [FWP]:

Although I do not endorse the view of the well-known jockey who said that golf “merely spoilt a good walk,” it appears to me that (excellent game though it be) the attention it receives is just a little in excess of its merits as a game and not merely as an agreeable provider of exercise.

The quotation has been assigned to other famous people in addition to Mark Twain. Indeed, before Reader’s Digest attributed the saying to Mark Twain it was placed in the mouth of the famed statesman William Gladstone by the Earl of Birkenhead in 1924 [GG]:

The late Mr. Gladstone was once, much against his wishes, compelled to play golf. He is reported to have commented upon the experiment that it was a good walk spoiled.

Thanks for the question and enjoy your time on the links whether you are playing or simply walking.

[QVG] 2006, The Quote Verifier by Ralph Keyes, Page 82, St Martin’s Griffin, New York.

[YQG] 2006, The Yale Book of Quotations by Fred R. Shapiro, Page 782, Yale University Press, New Haven.

[LTH] 1903, Lawn Tennis at Home and Abroad edited by Arthur Wallis Myers (second chapter by H. S. Scrivener), Page 47, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York. (Google Books full view) link

[HW1] 1904 December 3, The Pittsburgh Press, Literary Notes, Page 20, Col. 4, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Google News archive full view) link

[HW2] 1905, The Boss of Little Arcady by Harry Leon Wilson, Page 367, Lothrop Pub. Co., Boston. (Google Books full view) link

[FWP] 1906, The Secrets of Lawn Tennis by F. W. Payn, Page 164, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York. (Internet Archive and Google Books full view) link

[GG] 1924, America Revisited by Frederick Edwin Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead, Page 6, Cassell & Company, London. (Google Books snippet view) link