Hacked Off

* A hilarious golfing memoir in the tradition of Aurum's acclaimed and successful My Baby Got the Yips * By an accomplished sports journalist * Ideal Father's Day gift * Impulse-buy format and price * Colourful and arresting jacket

---

Golf had never made sense to Tony Lawrence. It didn't make sense to his wife or their six-year-old daughter either - not that they'd ever been foolish enough to try and play it. Then, fast approaching his 50th birthday, he found himself laid low with Post-Viral Fatigue, made redundant, newly cast as a house husband and - the final straw -humiliated over 18 holes by his 13-year-old nephew. So he set himself an ultimatum: 12 months to discover the secret of golf or give up for good. This is the story of the year that followed; of how one of life's Mr Averages, a stone or two overweight, committed to crisps, chocolate biscuits and the odd glass of wine as part of a balanced diet and, like most bad golfers, believing in fairies and the power of miracles, pursues his chosen Holy Grail - to play a couple of rounds in single figures and, in glorious culmination, to beat his three brothers for the very first time, not to mention that diabolic nephew with the glinting teeth braces. If only finishing the ironing, baking an edible broccoli souffle for dinner and understanding the workings of his daughter's mind were as easy.
His quest takes him further afield than he could ever have anticipated. How can it possibly be so difficult to fix a golf swing? (Soon he is two-timing his swing teacher). Do club manufacturers sell us sets of clubs to improve our game or just to bolster their profits? How on earth did that session of hypnotherapy in a deep squishy armchair lead immediately to the best round of his life? And why is it that his young daughter confuses 'Brazil' with 'Walnut' in her geography homework? He learns booming drives from one of England's long-driving champions, receives a trenchant talking-to from ex-British Open champion Vivien Saunders and stands on thermographic 'force plates' to have all 28 parameters of his putting stroke dissected by computer. His marriage survives, despite the holes he gouges in the lounge carpet. The result is a funny, frank and touching testimony of one man's attempts to master an art, and as near as any sane person has come to the secret of the elusive, maddening, impossible game of golf.
But, as we leave him at the moment of truth, standing over a five-foot putt for that final climactic match, muttering, 'Hole this and I'll carry on playing, miss it and I give up...,' you don't have to be interested in golf to find Hacked Off an intriguing exploration of the place of sport in life, and of how our drives sometime land in areas quite different from where we'd been aiming. His daughter, incidentally, came up with the rather good subtitle.