Fore

GOLF IS MADNESSBy Lawrence T. Barnett Jr. ’49Golf Digest, 1977. 128 pp. $5.95

Golf is the appendix of sport. We all know it’s there but deep in our hearts we know there is no reason for it. It is a game thoroughly at odds with our time: it is slow, it is individualistic, it is non-violent. It is a game for middle-aged men, mostly fat, who like to dress in colors that should appear only on airline hostesses and who like to work at having fun.

There is probably no reason for books like Ted Barnett’s Golf is Madness, either. Besides the inescapable fact that it is written about a game with no social or athletic value what- soever, it holds no compelling moral lessons, no gripping plots, not even a reference to the natural gas deregulation debate or even an in- sight, however thin, on the balance of payments deficit in Zaire.

No, I don’t play golf and probably never will. But 1 do read books and occasionally like to laugh. And if the very thought of grown men in double-knits walking around green meadows that would ennoble any English landscape isn’t enough to make me kick and squirm with laughter, then Ted Barnett is.

This is a funny man, and he has written a fun- ny collection of contes about a sport that on its surface is as dull as most of the books usually reviewed in this space. Ted Barnett actually makes it funny no little accomplishment with tales about golfers named (no kidding): Ronny Grits, Stash O’Neill, Cap Cruller, A 1 Macaroon, Bobo Pastiche, Herbert Huppman, and Harold Ribbon.

And then there is the classic of a story called “The Marmaduke Massacre,” a tale about golfers and their souped-up futuristic recreational vehicles. These monsters, as much an affront to the human race as the game of golf itself, are Titanics on wheels, air-conditioned mobile dachas that probably would require two zip codes. Virtue wins out in the end, however.

Ted Barnett actually makes us curmudgeons forget that golf means little more than bursitis, dull conversations, early mornings in drizzle and fog, and birdies and eagles and other things best left to ornithology textbooks. This is a major achievement, one that should by all rights be rewarded by a year’s membership in a squash club.

Mr. Shribman, a Buffalo Evening News staffreporter who rooms with a golf writer, wasstruck on the head with a fairway wood at agefour.