Golfing with God (Review)
GOLFING WITH GOD
A Novel of Heaven and Earth
By Roland Merullo
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 277 pp. $23.95
By COLMAN McCARTHY,
Author of “The Pleasures of the Game: a Theory-free Guide to Golf” and who scored a 65 in collegiate competition.
After a near-death moment when struck by lightning during a golf tournament, Lee Trevino said he’d never again let it happen. Next time he heard thunder, he would run up a high hill and hold a one iron over his head because “even God can’t hit a one iron.”
Turns out He can. Herman “Hank” Fins-Winston, who played four seasons on the PGA tour, with middling results but then took refuge as a country club teaching pro specializing in “rehabilitating golf swings that were once quite good but had been poisoned by some mysterious demon,” (p. 7) has seen the Almighty in action. With 8,187 courses in heaven, including Eden Hills and Nirvana Meadows, and when He needs a break from lording it over the universe, God golfs.
The tale of Hank the earthly pro and God the eternal swinger is engagingly and wittily told by novelist Roland Merullo. Theologians might wince at the mildly blasphemous notion that God, presumably the Perfect One, doesn’t shoot 18 holes-in-one per round. Biblical literalists may be troubled by the trick question: if God can do anything, can He make a golf course so hard that he can’t break 100 on it? For the rest of us whose veins aren’t clotted with overly deep thoughts, especially when it comes to something as primitive as whacking golf balls, Merullo offers ample amounts of flowing prose and a story line that holds together like a string of birdies on the back nine. Amid the laughs and playful banter, “Golfing With God” is a serious story of self-examination and growth, the hardest games of all and which only a few play well.
In the promise land, word has spread that one of the recent arrivals—Hank—is a master teacher. God, who has had His share of otherworldly rounds, summons Hank for a lesson. “I’m in slump like nothing anyone has seen in a million years and you’re going to make my game right again,’ He commands Hank, “or I’m going to quit the damn sport forever and take up needlepoint.” (p. 19)
The problem? The yips, the chronic disease of missing near gimmee putts caused by a semi-palsied shaking of the hand muscles, a meltdown of the mind and the paralyzing fear of pending humiliation when a two foot putt slides four feet past. Plenty of the greats have had the yips—Sam Snead, Bernhard Langer—so why not God? Other parts of His game are, what else, divine. His drives soar 400 yards into Tigerland, He slashes irons stiff to the pin. And then come the bedeviling yips.
In humanizing God, Merullo stretches a bit. God carries his own clubs. You’d think He’d get St. Peter or Job to caddie. He dresses in chinos and a jersey and wears no socks. No Izod alligator golf shirts in paradise? Midway into the novel, as if it’s now the back nine, Hank is dispatched back to earth, there to work on his flaws and failures. This time God is a Her, not a Him, which will get the theologians and the literalists steaming again.
Hank and God the Mother play at Augusta National, a course “as fine as the perfected soul.” (p. 193). Merullo misses a chance here for a sentimental moment, to have Hank and God be joined by the immortal Bobby Jones, who had a deathbed conversion to Catholicism.
Golf hasn’t attracted that many quality fiction writers. F. Scott Fitzgerald approached true literature in the short story “Winter Dreams.” John Updike and J. F. Powers have had golf scenes but not full novels. John O’Hara gave it a try with “Appointment in Sumatra,” as did J. P. Marquard in “Life at Happy Knoll.” There is Stephen Pressfield’s “Legend of Bagger Vance” and J. Michael Veron’s “The Greatest Player Who Never Lived” and “The Greatest Course That Never Was.” Michael Murphy’s “Golf in the Kingdom” is more an exercise in self-help than literature. Dan Jenkins’ golf novels are designed for 19th hole guffaws. That domain rightly belongs to master of manic golf fiction, P.G. Wodehouse, who would have made a stellar fourth at Augusta with God, Hank and Bobby.
With “Golfing With God” Roland Merullo, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Micronesia in 1979-80, ranks a place in current golf literature. He knows the game. He’s up, also, on the Hanks of this world as they slice, hook, shank and yip their way through life’s fairways and roughs seeking a lucent moment or two, and lucking out occasionally when a prescient novelist like Merullo is on hand to explain it all in prose that’s right around par.