Revenge of the Golf Gods

by Howard Jahre

Overview

Ben Hogan, considered to be the greatest striker of the golf ball, would beat balls on the practice range until his hands bled. He once said that in a good round, he hit just three shots exactly the way he wanted. He understood that golf is more a game of misses than a game of perfection. Until a brash young amateur attempts to prove him wrong. When Gordon Howard, trust fund baby and amateur golfer par excellence, comes to the sudden realization that his cushy job working for his father’s mega hedge fund has been a colossal mistake, his world free- falls into a tailspin. Searching for fulfillment and meaning to his life, he throws caution to the wind and embarks on a mission to become a professional golfer on the PGA tour. His goal is to win the coveted US Open. Amidst the pressure of his level headed girlfriend to abandon his pipedream, Gordon is contacted by a man he has never met, who offers him what he has been desperately searching for, an infallible golf swing. But the price Gordon pays for such perfection is much more than he ever bargained for.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781491751817
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	01/23/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	334
File size:	650 KB

Editorial Reviews

2015-06-16
A twisted tale of golf's grip on people, mixed with the equally insidious grips of greed and grand egos.It's not uncommon for mystical powers to rescue a misfired swing. So it is with Gordon Howard. His promising golf career is undone by a bad case of the chokes and his father's disapprobation, which borders on cruelty. Gordon finds himself a wage slave under his father's sore thumb until the young gent discovers the gumption to tell his father off and punch him in the face. He surrenders the money flow and pursues his golfing dreams. Jahre builds a mosaic of a story around this dream: hedge fund shenanigans, industrial spying, insider trading, the love of a good woman, and the torment of golf. He parades a few too many stock characters: the caddie/sachem; the mad, hunchback scientist; more than one testosterone-fueled manly man with a "full head of hair"; and young women with "perky breasts." There's also a weakness for golfing paraphernalia minutiae—"The wide flange of his fifty-six degree regrooved Wilson Staff Gene Sarazen R-90 sand wedge"—that bogs down the narrative just when it's speeding up. But these don't come close to distracting readers from Jahre's fine touch for sleaze and an untainted affection for golf: it's "a game never owned, just borrowed for a brief while, then returned to the Golf Gods," "a simple law of physics, the coefficient of angular momentum, based on Newton's Second Law of gravity and force."Despite landing in a few traps and hazards, the story finds a groove and provides solid reading for most anyone who's ever played a round.

Kirkus Reviews