Carl Hiaasen confesses to his madness right up front in The Downhill Lie: A Hacker's Return to a Ruinous Sport (Knopf, $22): He returned to golf because he is ``one sick bastard.''
Hiaasen, longtime Miami Herald columnist, knows about crazy people; he has written about them in detail in 12 novels (he has also written two young adult novels and a boatload of nonfiction). But golf is a particular sort of madness that afflicts millions, one undeterred by complete ineptitude. Hiaasen quit the game for 32 years, and then, apparently, lost his mind all over again.
``On the day I gave up golfing, I stood six-feet even, weighed a stringy 145 pounds and was in relatively sound physical shape. When I returned to the game, I was half an inch taller, twenty-one pounds heavier and nagged by the following age-related ailments:
• elevated cholesterol;
• a bone spur deep in the right rotator cuff;
• an aching right hip;
• a permanently weakened right knee, due to a badly torn medial meniscus that was scraped and repaired in February 2003 by the same orthopedic surgeon who'd once worked on a young professional quarterback named Dan Marino. (The doctor had assured me that my injury was no worse than Marino's, then he'd added with a hearty chuckle, `But you're also not twenty-two years old.')''
Hiaasen writes of irons and Woods (Tiger, that is); frustration and elation; Golf Digest and the PGA, and all sorts of handicaps that plague aging golfers. 'Before I started playing golf again, I'd never even heard of Flomax; I thought `weak stream' was a trout creek in autumn.''
He winds up with some good memories: ''[T]hat singular shining round of 85.'' Take that, bad knee.
Snippets is an occasional series highlighting a new book.
