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Informationen zum Autor Edited by Charles McGrath Klappentext Golf Stories is a wonderful gathering of short fiction about the famously addictive pastime. Here are literary classics by such golf-loving writers as P. G. Wodehouse! Ring Lardner! and John Updike! mixed with surprises like an appearance by Ian Fleming's James Bond and a little crime on the links from mystery master Ian Rankin. Humorists and sportswriters ranging from E. C. Bentley to Dan Jenkins and Rick Reilly weigh in as well! alongside a tale of romance on the greens from F. Scott Fitzgerald! a little-known gem by famous golf architect A. W. Tillinghast! and a story by Rex Lardner (Ring's nephew) that just may be the single funniest thing ever written about golf. The resulting anthology is as enticing! provocative! and entertaining as the game of golf itself. From the Forward by Charles McGrath George Plimpton used to invoke what he called the small-ball theory of sportswriting — the idea that the quality of the literature about a game is inversely proportional to the size of the ball it employs. This notion was always a little sketchy. Where are the great ping-pong writers, the classic works on marbles? And yet when it comes to fiction about sports there may be some truth here, for the golf ball, whether dimpled, feathery or guttie, has probably inspired more good short stories than any of the larger rounder things. A great majority of these stories are humorous, which seems a little counter-intuitive at first, because golf when you play it — or what I play, anyway — is not particularly funny at all. Tragic is more like it. The other form that golf fiction seems to gravitate towards is mystery, and that seems more appropriate. To most of us the game is a puzzle we will never solve, and it's also not uncommon for a golfer to think a murderous thought or two. What recommends both genres — comedy and mystery — is that they offer resolution and impose a shapeliness and orderliness on a game that often seems so random and arbitrary and in which punishments are often cruelly out of whack with the mistake that incurs them. Golf fiction, in other words, is escape-reading in the best sense. It lifts us from the rigors, uncertainty, and injustice of golf as it is actually played and unfolds for us another, more satisfying and lighthearted world in which everything makes sense in the end. In that respect golf fiction is a lot like the stories we tell ourselves, playing a round over again in our heads on the way home, or each other, lingering in the club house over a cold one. Golf itself is a narrative of sorts. We set off and journey outward, full of hope and purpose; we're tested, we suffer, we experience a few momentary glimpses of bliss; and then we turn and head for home, our progress grimly charted by those numbers inexorably mounting on the card. Then, in the retelling, we make it all sound a little better, a little cheerier. That 90 you shot could easily have been an 80; for all practical purposes it was , in fact. Golf stories are the imaginative equivalent of nudging the ball to improve your lie. They give you a little lift. In putting together this anthology I've tried to give some sense of the range and variety of golf fiction over the years, and the stories are arranged in roughly chronological order to suggest how golf, or writing about it, has evolved. A lot of the selections were self-evident. That there would be a story by P. G. Wodehouse, for example, was a no-brainer. The chore, if you can call it that, was deciding which one, and I spent many happy hours reading and rereading Wodehouse's dozens of golf stories before throwing up my hands and deciding that it almost didn't matter. They are all pretty wonderful, practically interchangeable. That John Updike's story "Farrell's Caddy" would be here was also a foregone conclusion. To my mind it's the best golf story ever...
