Stick of the Litter

by Vic Williams

Trash Talk and Links Hijinks Put Reilly's Rowdies in the Golf Lit Pantheon

Anyone who braved a round with Sports Illustrated columnist Rick Reilly’s band of lovable, loud-mouthed gamblers, goons, grifters and purported golfers in his first novel, Missing Links, will love a second go with them even more — if, that is, they don’t mind busting a gut with irreverent laughter on every hole, or should we say, page.

In Shanks For Nothing, the wisecracking Reilly puts his cheesy and ever-scheming crew of “Chops” from Boston’s Ponkaquogue Municipal Golf Club — the worst track in America, built on an old toxic waste dump and adorned with rusted-out car hulls, billboards and the fragrant cuisine of Asian cook Blu Chou — through the kind of rapid-fire comic paces few writers can sustain for 250 pages. This guy is part Dan Jenkins, part Damon Runyon and all hacker-lovin’ heart.

Make that Hart, as in scratch golfer, greeting card bard and underachieving neer-do-well Ray Hart (aka “Stick”), the novel’s narrator, central character and some would say the Colorado-born Reilly’s alter ego. Last time out Ray and his crew — well-sketched characters with nicknames like Two Down (“the world’s greatest gambler”), Hoover (a brainiac who can’t break a C-Note) and Cementhead (an anti-brainiac malaprop who never met a good deed he wouldn’t take on), spent the better part of Missing Links figuring out a way to play Ponky’s neighboring Mayflower Club, where the blueblood membership, including Ray’s old man, bear a suspiciously close resemblance to some of the real-world golf hierarchy Reilly skewers from time to time in his back-page SI column. The novel was a solid comic effort, revealing Reilly as much more than a one-dimensional writer.

This time out, though, he really shows his Chops (pardon the pun). Ray and company’s beloved garbage heap of a course is on the block — owner Froghair is dumping it to move to a Florida nudist colony — and Mayflower is fixing to buy it, pave it and send Ponky packing forever. That just won’t do for a bunch of degenerates for whom the course represents all that’s pure about Everyday Schmoe golf; says Ray, “Ponky was my happy place — five bets riding on every shot, cold ninety-five-cent beer anytime you wanted, and hilarious guys who didn’t want to tell you how their Google stock is doing every f---ing day.”

Only one solution presents itself: Find a way to scare up $250,000 to buy Ponky and go on their merry, drunken way. First they cajole a big-stakes game out of a group of local bent-noses, which leads to several chapters of some of the funniest gambling schemes ever committed to print; Reilly puts to good use his notes from his previous book, Who’s Your Caddy, in which he tees it up with some of Vegas’ most notorious golf hustlers. That leads to a series of ever-more-preposterous and pretty damn funny vignettes as the boys try everything from extortion to auto theft to find the cash. Oh, and there’s one other option: If Ray somehow can qualify for a major within a calendar year from the date of his dad’s death (which occurs by Chapter 2), the old man’s estate will award him — you guessed it — $250K. Problem is, Ray hates organized tournament golf, and he’s got a wife and little boy to consider. Which means getting a real job.

Of course, Ray ends up heading for England anyway, in the company of Blind Bob, a Ponky regular who has a sixth sense for BS, and turns out to be Ray’s confidant, savior and perhaps best friend. Reilly saves his best writing for Ray’s stint in England and Scotland, introducing perhaps the smarmiest, most insufferable father-son pair in all of golf literature — who get their comeuppance in classic Ponky-ized fashion — and a homeless, red-headed Scottish caddy named Sponge, a guy who can assume any movie or celebrity voice and is as flatout funny as any of Ray’s buds back home. Check out this passage, for instance, when Ray asks Sponge to teach him everything he knows:

We were over about a ten-foot putt when Sponge said, “Ay, this one here is a Lance Armstrong — one ball ou’.”
I learned that a “Calista Flockhart” was a shot that was thin but still pretty. Not to be confused with a “Kate Winslet — fa’ bu’ otherwise pairfec’!” A Joan Rivers: “Thin and scary.” A wicked slice was a Lorena Bobbitt. A shot fat and left was Michael Moore. Fat and right, Rush Limbaugh. A putt that lipped out was Steven Tyler. One time I hit a twenty-footer that stopped an inch short of going in and Sponge hit me with his perfect Walter Cronkite impression. “And, sadly, that’s a Nelson Rockefeller! Laift dead in the hole!”

Does Sponge lead him to the promised land of a British Open berth and the Ponky-saving stash? That’s for you to find out next time you’re under a beach umbrella. But maybe the best reason to put Shanks For Nothing at the top of the summer reading heap is its killer side-stories, especially the ongoing saga of Ponkyite-turned-inmate Resource Jones, who carefully plots his escape while manicuring the bunkers of Prison View Golf Club. Once a scratch player himself, he nearly pulls off the caper by drugging a Prison View regular, assuming his identity and playing out the poor guy’s weekly round. Only problem is, after the front nine he’s on track to break 70 for the first time in his life. Hence the brutal choice: Golf immortality or freedom?

It’s that unexpected heft in theme that makes this tome such a gas to navigate, and Reilly’s irreverent, lively prose such welcome relief in a genre overloaded with Dewsweepers and Flatbellies and magic shillelaghs. Perhaps Shanks For Nothing will never earn a place among golf’s greatest literary works, but its goofball inhabitants end up being people we want to know, and wouldn’t mind teeing it up with now and again, with plenty of brew in the cooler and a little something on the line. FG

Short Round with Reilly

It seems Rick Reilly is everywhere these days. If he’s not doing a few minutes of radio with ESPN’s Dan Patrick or showing up in some form on new mobile phone technology (“Riffs of Reilly” on Verizon V-Cast), he’s waging verbal warfare with Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” or commenting on the life of John Daly for “60 Minutes.” In between, we landed a few minutes with him for three burning questions:

1) If you decided to conjure a Ponky in the West, where would you put it and what kind of players would we find there?

“Well, there is kind of a Ponky in the West — the course I grew up on in Boulder, Colo. It was called Lake Valley, but we called it “Snake Valley” for all the reptiles there. And by reptiles, I mean the vermin who played there and tried to cheat you. The course only had water rights to the lake once a week, so that’s all they’d water, inevitably on your backswing. The greens were harder than Telly Savalas’ skull. If you ate a hot dog at the turn, you could usually count on cramping up until 15. Everybody there was fun, crazy and a little mean. There was one guy nobody liked, and whenever he’d get up from his bar stool to take a leak, somebody would stir his drink with their d@#&.”

2) If you found yourself teamed with Barry Bonds in a pro-am, what would your first thought be? And would you demand to keep his score?
“My first thought would be, ‘Damn, I’ve somehow been entered in the Hell Invitational.’”

3) More fun to cover — today’s pro game, with Tiger, Phil, MIchelle and Annika, or back in the day when Jack and Arnie were becoming golf gods?
“Much more fun in the old days because Jack and Arnie — especially Arnie — used to sit around with the four or five writers covering the thing and drink whiskey and smoke Kents and shoot the fat until your notepad was full and your brain dizzy. Now, we’re lucky to get a stiff-arm from Tiger’s bodyguards.”