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By John Coyne
GOLF-INSPIRED WRITINGS HAVE NOT BEEN LIKE one of Tiger Woods' drives: long, high and very deep. The sport sorely misses language that transforms golf from a game to a wellspring of literature.
George Plimpton, who wrote about baseball and golf in his bestselling 1968 book The Bogey Man, said that while baseball has produced some interesting books, golf books were better written, because of the sport's "popularity among the educated classes."
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| John Coyne |
If so, where's golf's The Natural? Who is our Bernard Malamud?
Golf, I will say, has longevity. While its beginnings as a game are lost in Scottish antiquity, we do have a reference to the sport as early as 1457 in a Scottish Acts of Parliament [the authorities wanted to ban golf as it was taking time away from archery practice, a much more needed skill to defend the Highlands].
While golf has produced countless books on rules, manners and how-to play, starting with the 1857 The Golfer's Manual, authored by "A Keen Hand," where was the great Scot writer Sir Walter Scott? In his million words on Scotland there are no words about his national game.
Daniel Wexler, author of The Golfer's Library: A Reader's Guide to Three Centuries of Golf Literature, and one of America's leading golf historians, cites three writers who have raised the bar for writers. They are Bernard Darwin, Charles' grandson, and longtime correspondent for The Times of London; Henry Longhurst, a Sunday Times columnist who wrote about the sport before, during and after the Second World War; and in America the masterful New Yorker magazine writer Herbert Warren Wind. But these three journalists were doing reportage, not writing literature.
Other fine writers have written about the game they love and played.
To name a few: Michael Bamberger, James Dodson, John Feinstein, Geoff Shackelford, John Paul Newport, David Owen, Bud Shrake, Rick Reilly, Bo Links, Don Wade and Curt Sampson, who played on the PGA Tour before becoming a full-time golf writer. And our own Neil Sagebiel, who has written two great golf histories, The Longest Shot and Draw in the Dunes. These player/writers write books about how they play the games, biographies of great golfers, histories of famous championships, and narratives on legendary golf courses.
Other writers, famous in other genres, have also been drawn to golf in search of peace, mystery, humor and self-awareness. These include A.A. Milne, Arthur Conan Doyle, P.G. Wodehouse, Ring Lardner and his son, John Lardner, Ward Just, Ethan Canin, Ian Fleming, Michael Murphy and Dan Jenkins.
That said, what is missing in these long lists of writers, are literary novelists.
While F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O’Hara, John P. Marquand, J. D. Powers, Richard Ford and John Updike all used golf in their novels to comment on their contemporary society, golf was never the core of their plots. O'Hara wrote From the Terrace not From the Thirteenth Green. Michael Murphy's Golf in the Kingdom, ostensible a novel, is really an exercise in self-help, not in golf literature. And Dan Jenkins' very funny books are easily shelved with collection of tall tales told at the 19th hole bars of any club.
Golf Literature Through the Caddie Yard
The truth is that to find the pathos, the great characters, imposing themes and compelling narratives, readers might be wise to look in the caddie yard, not the clubhouse, and seek out Sancho Panza, not Don Quixote.
Anyone who plays the game knows why caddies keep popping up: In real life, as in these novels, they function as coaches, psychologists, cheerleaders and, increasingly, as the protagonist of the novels themselves. This shift of focus and point-of-view is a fairly recent fiction phenomenon, and makes caddies the Nick Carraways of golf fiction.
The first of these "caddie novels" was 1995's hugely successful The Legend of Bagger Vance by Steven Pressfield. While the novel draws on golf history, its real focus is the mysterious African-American caddie who guides a troubled, rich, white war hero through a match against Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen.
In 2002, A Gentleman's Game by Tom Coyne [no relation] pitted a poor caddie against rich members at a club near Philadelphia. The class theme returns in Peter Dexter's Train (2003), where a gifted black caddie/player loops at an exclusive Los Angeles golf course.
And novelist/lawyer J. Michael Veron concluded his popular Bobby Jones trilogy (including The Greatest Player Who Never Lived and The Greatest Course That Never Was) with 2004's The Caddie. Its hero: a caddie named Steward "Jones" who guides a young pro to victory and wisdom.
In my first "caddie" novel, The Caddie Who Knew Ben Hogan, victory and wisdom are acquired by both Hogan and Jack Handley, the caddie/narrator. The young teenager helps Hogan navigate a golf course and is given advice for his life from the masterful golf professional and iconoclastic Hogan.
National Book Award winner Norman Rush says the novel is "a lens through which aspects of Midwestern daily life in the 1940s, of thwarted love, of social class, are revealed with stark and unsettling clarity."
Like Nick Carraway, young Jack has a story to tell. So, the next time you tee up remember the kid carrying your bag may just be writing a novel about you in his head.
John Coyne is the author of three "caddie novels" and has edited three books on golf instruction. He also has written and edited a dozen other fiction and nonfiction books.
