our father who art in heaven, help me eagle hole eleven

In the wake of the thrilling climax to The Open Championship, here's a short list of reasons why we should cherish 2015 champion Zach Johnson a bit more than we are perhaps naturally inclined to:

• he's a rare case of a small-ish guy (by modern standards anyway, a slim 5ft 11in makes him not exactly a midget) holding his own among a host of great muscle-bound hulks who bomb it 300 yards through the air by virtue of being very accurate and having a stellar short game;
• he's sneakily successful - of properly active PGA Tour players only Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Ernie Els, Jim Furyk and David Toms have more tournament wins than Johnson's twelve;
• he had enough self-awareness to tailor his victory speech to the audience and tone down the reflexive Goddiness - he got through thanking Peter Dawson, the greenkeeping staff, the fans, his caddy and his wife before he got onto thanking the Lord;
• he is far from being the only tedious God-botherer on the PGA Tour - of recent major winners both Bubba Watson and Webb Simpson are also pretty serious about the whole Jesus thing, and generally speaking the fairways are awash with simpletons who imagine that offering incantations to an imaginary Jewish zombie will help steady their nerves over critical shots coming down the stretch at major championships.

Other Open news: it was nice to see David Duval having a decent week; he eventually finished in a tie for 49th at four under par, but he had been as high as eight under at one point during the last round. A pretty decent performance for a man whose involvement in golf tournaments is increasingly as a broadcaster rather than as a player, and for whom making the cut is a major achievement these days.

Here's another short list for you: you may recall me singling out Paul Auster's Invisible as a book whose title was a sub-string of another one in the book list: well, the most recent entry provides another example, the pair of Solar and Solaris.