Customer Reviews

Fairway to Hell: Around the World in 18 Holes

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is surely one of the great golf books. Every page is bursting with gentle witticisms and laugh-out-loud humor. If you haven't read the memoir Unstrung Heroes or Lidz's other book, Ghosty Men, the chances are that for some rogue reason, you have been unaccountably denied. The chapter on the tournament at a Florida nudist colony is worth the cover price alone. Add to that the adventures with Bill Murray, the blotto heavy metal band Judas Priest, the New England farmer who raises llamas as caddies, the Zambia course at which 15 holes are guarded by live crocodiles, and the Fattie Open - where you're penalized if you weigh under 250 pounds - and you've more than made your money back.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Franz Lidz has taken such mundane material and made of it a picaresque adventure so warm, so likable, and so disarmingly funny.

Take the most difficult, annoying and addictive game ever invented and one of our wittiest writers at the peak of his powers and you have the funniest golf stories it will ever be your good fortune to read. My personal favorites are the author's encounter with a burrowing botfly on a golf course in Panama and his e-mail exchange with a Nigerian scam artist about bank accounts and rocket golf carts. All I can say is that like for many of the very best things in life, I almost envy those who have never experienced Mr. Lidz for the pleasure they have ahead. I am a relatively old hand, so for me his writing is like womb music - no matter how bad things get I can always take pleasure and relaxation from the style, the charm and the great good humor. This book penetrates the human condition in a way that simply makes me feel better.

The thing about this golf memoir is that you don't even have to like the game to enjoy it. You certainly don't have to understand it. Lidz' golfing descriptions of duffers on the tee fussing about like a hen scratching gravel, or teasing the ball like a cat investigating a tortoise speak eloquently enough of character to enchant anybody. I can't state with confidence the function of a spoon or a brassie, but the point is that the vocabulary of the links fits the author's style like the paper on the wall, particularly in the chapter on a tournament in a nudist colony:
"Nudists mostly avoid risque repartee. But pack 30 of them on a tight course, and the ricocheting double entendres are inescapable.
"It's long, real long."
"It's not that long, is it?"
"Believe me, it's long."
"Did you stay up, Sam? Please tell me you stayed up."
"Yeah, I'm up."
"Pam, can you loosen up on your grip?"
"Stroke it a little more gently, Al."
"He jumps on Len's misses every chance he gets."
"By golly, what I wouldn't give for another three inches."
"If you'd been straight, Sam, that puppy would have gone in."

There's a moment in every golfer's life that we remember forever. It belongs to that period after a perfect swing, when the sweet spot of the driver has met the ball with a thick, solid click. The ball screams off the tee on a low, rising climb, and just in the last quarter of its flight when you think it might start falling, the spin you've put on it bites into the air and the ball lifts, climbing more steeply and slowly in a last flare of energy. And then you get the moment, when the flight of the ball connects with the feeling of the strike and the two have travelled up the club, through your arms and shoulders and into your heart. I got much the same feeling after finishing this funny, funny book.

Lidz is a true satirist with an eye for the ridiculous, the bogus and the vain. He is deeply skeptical about many things and his humor can be savagely cutting, but I do not think it is ever cruel. He is hard but fair. It is encouraging to find that he has lost none of the wickedly sharp powers of observation that have distinguished his work in the New York Times.

I agree with what others have written here regarding the author and must add this: the more of him in one place, the better, thus my unguarded praise for this volume. As someone who closely observes another human writer at work, I must also say that he should be enjoyed (and studied) for two reasons: 1) the fine clarity and elegance of prose; 2) sheer inventiveness.

There seems to be a run lately on golf books in which the objective, it seems, is to show how many wild, wacky and - yes - wonderfully diverse ways the sport is played and enjoyed. But for my greens fee, few do it better than Lidz, a former Sports Illustrated writer who now dazzles for Conde Nast Portfolio and the New York Times. All that experience no doubt came in handy as the author offers up such gems as golf with shock rockers Judas Priest; coverage of the Fatty Open, where contestants are penalized for every pound under 250; outings with the American Singles Golf Association and golfing nudists (not the same story); and profiles of CBS funny man David Feherty, Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz and "Caddyshack" star Carl Spackler, aka comedian Bill Murray. I reveled in Lidz's attempts (with buddies, and later with his preteen daughter) to play all 33 mini-golf courses in Myrtle Beach, and in Zambia, where the "hazards" are crocodiles and rogue hippos. All the stories (30; the original plan for 18 went awry) come via Lidz's hilarious, if slightly warped, perspective - though a few, notably the Murray and Schulz stories and one about aspiring tour pro David Ping (no relation to the golf equipment of the same name) are poignant and touching. If you have ever enjoyed the golf humor of P.G. Wodehouse (and even if you haven't), Lidz is a worthy successor. He keeps you reading and chuckling until you wonder where the time went - and when he might be writing more.

Mr. Lidz is as superbly nonsensical as ever. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more annoying than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.

There is really nothing I can say about Fairway To Hell that hasn't already been said. The constant stream of startlingly original and side-splittingly funny similes and metaphors and sarcasms, the dizzying complexity of the chapters, the characters that you'd swear have been stolen from your own circle of acquaintances... three perfectly formed pearls of masterful comic writing. Aaaaaahhhhh.....