Thursday's Game: Notes from a Golfer with Far to Go

From "In Defense of Thursdays" I name Thursday the last day of the golf week because on that day, you can finally forget the weekend past: the distant Friday where you strung together three birdies for the first time in four years. The rainy Saturday when you sank a sixty-foot snake for bogey on the eighteenth with no one watching. The Sunday scramble where no one could make a six-foot putt for the money. On Thursday, you are done with this. History. Thursday is where the golf week ends.

Even so, I'm saying Thursday is when it all begins. It is the Alpha and Omega of the golf week. It is as much a beginning as it is an end. You start planning the golf ahead. You puzzle a means of slipping out, of setting things straight, of teeing up. On this day more than any other, the weekend beckons.

Tom Chiarella gets to play courses that most duffers can only dream of — leaving divots, lost balls, and the occasional picture-perfect pin shot in his wake. Chiarella is the serious amateur, the humbled hacker, and the appreciative fan all rolled into one. Golfers everywhere will identify with his tales of low-grade frustration centered on a dimpled ball and a fairway filled with traps. But these affectionate, tee-in-cheek reminiscences and respectful rants are balanced by memories of those sublime moments when the shot rises like a rocket, straight and true, carrying over a long stretch of treacherous real estate to settle at last onto the cool comfort of the green. Thursday's Game showcases the freshest voice in golf writing today, perfect for the double-bogey man lurking in the house, that special someone who's only a new set of clubs away from breaking par.