Sports - General & Miscellaneous, Golf, Fiction Subjects

Golf's Best Short Stories

Name: Golf's Best Short Stories
Author: Paul Staudohar
ISBN: 9781556523250

by Paul Staudohar

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Overview

Every decade of the 20th century and many great writers, including P. G. Wodehouse, Paul Gallico, Don Marquis, and John Updike, are represented in these great tales of golf. British duffers, amateur sleuths, pros, hustlers, plodders, cheaters, starry-eyed lovers, and crass finaglers people these stories, which range from comedy to tragedy, mystery, action, introspection, and romance. Each reveals a true love of the game and a wry understanding of golf’s frustrations, perplexities, embarrassments, and moments of pure delight.

About the Author, Paul Staudohar

Paul D. Staudohar is the editor of Baseball’s Best Short Stories and Football’s Best Short Stories and the author of Playing for Dollars: Labor Relations and the Sports Business and other business books. He is a professor of business administration at California State University in Hayward.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

John Updike, Paul Gallico, P.G. Wodehouse, Ethan Canin and Ring Lardner all contribute to this strong collection of 24 golfing yarns. Although Wodehouse, "the bard of the links," sets the light tone (and the standard) for most of the collection with three stories, Canin's "The Year of Getting to Know Us," is perhaps its jewel: a brilliant study of a son's relationship with his dying father. Updike is ironic in "The Pro," while cheeky humor carries the day in his other contribution, "Farrell's Caddy," which focuses on the off-the-links advice of a Scottish caddy. Among the several stories that score well: Kevin Cook's hysterical cheating fantasy, "Me and Lee at the Open," Charles Dickenson's "My Livelihood," a lively yet wry take on a lazy man who falls into golf as a profession, and William Pettit's world-weary but incisive "Decision on the Fairway." A few pieces lean too heavily on hackneyed victory-defeat plots, but these flaws will hardly scare away devotees of what Mark Twain called "a good walk spoiled." (Sept.)