Sports Illustrated’s new oversized collection of golf photos and stories is a coffee table book in more ways than the obvious one. Attach a leg to each corner of this tome and you could easily use it to serve tea to any foursome.

That is not a criticism – just all the more a recommendation.

Maybe it helped that I opened the book on a cold and  snowy day when golf seemed so distant, more memory than possibility.  Or maybe it was that, as a longtime SI subscriber and (most often)  admirer, I was predisposed to gobble up what the publisher subtitled “A Celebration of the Ancient Game.” Or maybe I analyze too much. The book is simply a delight.

Theoretically, “The Golf Book” tracks the history of the game from the 19th century to current day, though if all history could be taught in such entertaining fashion I would happily go back for a Ph.D. Because it features the photography of SI’s greatest shooters, nearly every photo demands a second, longer look, from Tommy “Thunder” Bolt’s violent driver toss into the drink in the 1960 U.S. Open to the self-defeated Greg Norman with hands on knees after throwing his Masters’ hopes away, from an Army captain’s sand shot in the desert of Iraq to the wedge-shaped swimming pool at Ping heir John Solheim’s Phoenix home.

Some of the game’s most beloved writers – Rick Reilly, Frank Deford, John Garrity, George Plimpton and Dan Jenkins, among  many more – are featured here, though Gary Smith’s profile of Tiger  Woods must be read through a new prism when he asks about SI’s 1996 Sportsman of the Year, “Who will win? The machine – or the youth who just entered its maw?”

The book is about golf so it is about Woods and Nicklaus, Palmer and Hogan, Snead and Jones. But it is also about Bill Murray at Pebble Beach, about Richard Nixon proudly holding the ball he used to make a hole-in-one at Bel-Air, about W.C. Fields using his driver as a fishing rod and Fidel Castro watching Che Guevara line up a putt in Cuba circa 1959. Who said our game isn’t revolutionary?

And if you have ever wondered about Sam Snead’s recipe for fried squirrel, well, wonder no more. Shoot a couple of nice fat squirrels, skin ’em, parboil ’em and fry ’em up with apple slices.

“I tell you,” Sam told SI in 1960, “there’s no better eatin’ in the world.”

“The Golf Book” is enough to make you wish for a rainy day. If you can’t play, a round with “The Golf Book” is the next best  thing. 

— Dennis McCann