The Masters Tournament is a golf tournament at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia that ends Sunday and many of you couldn’t care less.
Let’s get something straight up front: Golf is a stupid game, and I say this having played for more than half a century and as one who will be watching this Masters.
This year’s edition of what is often called, in pompous overkill, “a tradition unlike any other,” will not feature Tiger Woods, the greatest golfer ever to play.
Neither will this year’s Masters feature Joe Riley, an out-of-work former golf journalist with an ancient set of clubs that gives him the ability to hit a golf ball further than anyone ever has, ever.
While Woods is real, a tragically flawed human being, Riley is not. He is the creation of the colorful imagination of Gene Wojciechowski, a lifelong golfer, longtime sports journalist and the author of a wildly entertaining new book titled “All Carry.”
Yes, it is about golf but there is more to it, much more. Formally published on March 31, it has already been attracting acclaim.
Steven Pressfield, author of the widely admired golf novel, “The Legend of Bagger Vance,” calls it: “Beyond a gem. It’s a true sporting masterpiece. (Wojciechowski) can make the implausible seem truer-than-true. … His on-tour, inside-the-ropes experience, particularly at the Masters, makes this long-ball tale come to vivid, magical life. If you love the game, you will savor every page.”
And this, from an unusual source, the bestselling author John Grisham, who says, “This wonderful tale is for all lovers of golf, especially the weekend hackers with embarrassing handicaps (like me). Now we have hope. If we can just find the magic clubs.”
Wojciechowski knows the sports world. It has been his career and his life. He covered sports for the Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News and, for a couple of years in the ’90s, the Chicago Tribune. Moving to ESPN, he covered many sports over the decades, with an emphasis on major golf tournaments. He also found time to write a dozen or so sports books, often teaming with such collaborators as basketball’s Bill Walton and Reggie Miller, football’s Jerome Bettis and Kirk Herbstreit.
“All Carry,” by sportswriter and broadcaster Gene Wojciechowski. (Mark Black/for the Chicago Tribune)
He has won a bunch of awards and is currently a full-time professor at his alma mater, the University of Tennessee. He lives in Wheaton. He and his wife Cheryl, a native South Sider, have two grown daughters who are not golfers and two grandsons “who love to play.”
He brings considerable knowledge and details to every page of “All Carry.” The story unfolds with Riley’s oldest son, Buddy, buying at a garage sale a set of old but never used golf clubs for his father, a golf journalist and a modestly capable player. The clubs, the dad soon discovers, are able to hit golf balls farther than anyone ever has. An out-of-work caddy, Max “Hard Way” Mitchell (one among plenty of lively caddie nicknames), discovers this secret and soon he and Riley team up to form an unlikely but likable pair with an insane dream, to play in the Masters.
“In golf, there is the concept of taking a mulligan, you know, a do-over, though you’re not supposed to do that,” says Wojciechowski. “That’s what is happening here. These characters are getting a mulligan in life thanks to these magic clubs.”
The impossible dream road taken by this pair (a fairway trotting Don Quixote and Sancho Panza) is peopled with lively, amusing and loathsome characters, most vile being the pro who got “Hard Way” banished from the tour. There is romance, a lot of golf lore and history, familial woes and joys, and a world fashioned with wit and written with style.
“This story had to be reality-based for it to make sense,” says Wojciechowski. “That is the way for readers to take a leap, to wrap the magic in a blanket of authenticity.”
You can, if you’ve read them or maybe just seen the movies, think “The Natural” or “Field of Dreams” for other examples of this theory.
And so there the reader will happily arrive at the tournament, more than 300 pages into the novel, on a Thursday morning, the Masters beginning with Riley standing “at the back of the first tee box, waiting nervously to be introduced. … At exactly 8:12 a.m., Riley was called forward. … When he hit the ball, it took the patrons moments to process its flight … there were gaping mouths and gasps. … From white tee to green fairway, the ball traveled 402 yards.”
For those unfamiliar with the game, that’s an astonishing distance.
That day and the next three unfold with drama and surprises and a lot of birdies, an increasingly frenzied media — and that’s all I’ll tell you except that late on the tournament’s final day we have father and son standing on the 18th green, “the shadows lengthening as the sun dipped toward the horizon.”
There is more, as events and people wind up back in Wheaton.
That was where Wojciechowski was on a recent Sunday, packing to spend a few days in Augusta at the Masters. He told me, “This novel was actually inspired by a set of clubs that my father gave me long ago, and combined with my desire to find a place where I could put all of the knowledge and observations I have had over the decades of my relationship with the game, that’s how this novel came to be.”
You will find in the novel some of his feelings about the Masters, of which he writes, “Everything at Augusta National is done in extremes. It is what makes the place singular, but also so exasperating at times.” He writes of its “complicated and distressing history,” but when he tells me that this novel is “ultimately a bit of a love letter to the place,” it’s impossible to argue.
It would also be impossible to argue that this novel is not a love letter to golf, to second chances and to the power of a mulligan, if you are ever lucky enough to get one.
Author event with Gene Wojciechowski at 7 p.m. April 10 at Anderson’s Bookshop Naperville, 123 W. Jefferson Ave., Naperville; $35.00, more at eventcombo.com
rkogan@chicagotribune.com