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Slim and None: A Novel - Softcover

Jenkins, Dan

 
9780767914338: Slim and None: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0767914333 ISBN 13: 9780767914338
Verlag: Anchor, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

Introduced in Dan Jenkins’s previous uproarious novel of the pro golf tour, The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist, Bobby Joe Grooves is now forty-four and still without a win in a major championship. A student of golf lore, Bobby Joe is well aware that only a small group of stars have ever won a major at his age or older, and among them are such immortals as Nicklaus, Boros, Irwin, and Trevino. It’s now or never for Bobby Joe, and excuse him for thinking that his chances are slim and none.

So it’s off to the Masters, U.S. Open, British Open, and the rest of the PGA Tour for Bobby Joe, who’s leaving behind the prospect of a third ex-wife. On the golf courses he’ll face familiar competitors such as Knut Thorssun and Cheetah Farmer, but the rival who may loom the largest is the game’s newest child star, nineteen-year-old Scott Pritchard. His talents are the talk of the Tour—so is his arrogance—and so, by the way, is his stunning mom, Gwendolyn, a shapely adorable woman who captures Bobby Joe’s full attention and threatens not to let go.

Long revered by his peers as one of the world’s best sportswriters, and beloved by readers for such classics as Semi-Tough and Dead Solid Perfect, Dan Jenkins is at the top of his form in Slim and None. It’s packed with authentic insider gems about each of the majors and hilarious sketches of many of the characters—touring pros, officials, media, agents, caddies, and ladies—who inhabit this outrageous and endearing world of sports.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

DAN JENKINS is the author of nine previous novels, including Semi-Tough, Dead Solid Perfect, Baja Oklahoma, Rude Behavior, and, most recently, The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist. He has also published seven books of nonfiction, most notably Fairways and Greens and The Dogged Victims of Inexorable Fate and writes an enduringly popular monthly column for Golf Digest. Jenkins is the recipient of the William D. Richardson Award from the Golf Writers Association of America, which recognizes those who have consistently made outstanding contributions to golf. He divides his time between his native Fort Worth, Texas, and New York City.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Introduced in Dan Jenkins's previous uproarious novel of the pro golf tour, "The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist, Bobby Joe Grooves is now forty-four and still without a win in a major championship. A student of golf lore, Bobby Joe is well aware that only a small group of stars have ever won a major at his age or older, and among them are such immortals as Nicklaus, Boros, Irwin, and Trevino. It's now or never for Bobby Joe, and excuse him for thinking that his chances are slim and none.
So it's off to the Masters, U.S. Open, British Open, and the rest of the PGA Tour for Bobby Joe, who's leaving behind the prospect of a third ex-wife. On the golf courses he'll face familiar competitors such as Knut Thorssun and Cheetah Farmer, but the rival who may loom the largest is the game's newest child star, nineteen-year-old Scott Pritchard. His talents are the talk of the Tour--so is his arrogance--and so, by the way, is his stunning mom, Gwendolyn, a shapely adorable woman who captures Bobby Joe's full attention and threatens not to let go.
Long revered by his peers as one of the world's best sportswriters, and beloved by readers for such classics as "Semi-Tough and "Dead Solid Perfect, Dan Jenkins is at the top of his form in "Slim and None. It's packed with authentic insider gems about each of the majors and hilarious sketches of many of the characters--touring pros, officials, media, agents, caddies, and ladies--who inhabit this outrageous and endearing world of sports.

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1


It had to be the first bare navel on the Masters veranda. Luckily it came with a shapely adorable. Could have been a bulker. All in all, she was your basic tri-state crime-spree gorgeous. Make you try to eat corn through a chain-link fence, as Cary Grant or Fred Astaire used to say, or maybe it was Grady Don Maples.

Picture this: a long-haired brunette babe poured into a pair of low-hanging stretch jeans looking like the same thing as one of those halftime college showgirls. She stood between the two big trees on the veranda. Her tummy was flat as a West Texas fairway, and she was wearing the minimum legal requirement of a white knit top. This helped her display two tickets that would easily gain her admittance to the hospitality tent at any golf tournament she'd wish to attend.
I should add that she also wore a clubhouse badge for the Masters.

"Screen-saver," Jerry Grimes said alertly.

"Fire in both engines," Grady Don said.

"Riders up," I said.

I don't know that there'd been too many sights at Augusta to equal that one. Usually the veranda was a gathering of geezers in their green jackets, scads of privileged folks sitting at tables under bright umbrellas, scattered groups of serious business execs looking worried about something, and assorted media intellectuals shopping around for scoops and scandals.

As a rule, the serious business execs would be talking to each other, their hands clasped behind their backs while they rocked back and forth in their FootJoys. They could be equipment salesmen, they could be the dapper officials of various golf organizations, or they could be powerful sports agents, but if they were powerful sports agents their eyes would be darting this way and that, and they'd have a tendency to bite their nails.

Assorted wives of Tour pros frequently emerged from indoors--two lookers, say, and one bulker. They would have dined upstairs on the balcony, where they'd discussed maladies, child-rearing, exercise classes, difficult mothers-in-law, catalog orders.

Players' wives have changed over the years. I wasn't around when they were all needlepoint ladies, but I'd been around long enough to see the lookers go from stately former yearbook favorites to Barbie dolls that could actually make noises like human beings talking.

We'd walked up on the roped-off veranda after our Tuesday practice round. I'd smiled at the two security guards who were stationed there to keep out the K mart shoppers. That's when we spotted the shapely screen-saver displaying her finest features.

She was obviously at the magnolia joint for the first time. If she was trying to arouse any of the gentlemen on the veranda, she was making a mistake. Most of the veranda gentlemen were on the high side of sixty and were more likely to be aroused by the report of a new oversized driver that would give them fifteen more yards.

Jerry Grimes said, "It's too bad that lovely thing happens to be the asshole's mother, Bobby Joe."

"That's no mother," I said. "I know what mothers look like. Mothers look like Betty Crocker."

"They do?"

"Cheerios."

"Mothers look like Cheerios?"

"Detergent . . . type of thing."

Grady Don Maples said, "I guess she don't crochet a lot, but she's still the asshole's mother."

"Which asshole?" I said. "I have choices."

"Scott Pritchard," Grady Don said. "That's old Gwendolyn Pritchard, it sure is. Scott's mom. Right there with her steel belly and her lung problem. Kill me first, Gwen."

"That's the child star's mother?"

I must have blurted it out. The dapper official of a golf organization glared at me. Guy in a dark blue blazer, white shirt, striped tie, red face. Looked like he knew for a fact that I ate with my hands.

Some hasty arithmetic was called for. Scott Pritchard was nineteen, our newest phenom on the Tour--there seemed to be one every year. He was six-three, muscled up, too handsome for his own good. He came out loaded with amateur titles, an average driving distance of 324 yards, a satchel of contracts too heavy to lift, and you could add the blank stare of a young Beverly Hills valet parker. His age meant the mom must have been a tap-in under forty, but she could play younger, as evidenced by this penetrating veranda moment.

"Scott Pritchard's a big kid," I said. "He must get his size from the lumberjack who knocked her up."

"It could have been a tight end," Jerry said.

"Naw, tight ends don't get laid by adorables," Grady Don said. "I was a tight end in college. Might as well be a defensive tackle. Scrap around with the meece."

We were interrupted by a media celeb. It was Irv Klar, a sports columnist for the Washington Post, as in D.C. I'd first known Irv as an aggressive young guy working for a small paper in California. He'd wanted to do a book with me. Me being the first golfer he'd ever met. I'd dusted him off. But since then, while my back was turned, he'd become a big-shot columnist and a best-selling author.

Irv's first bestseller was Speed Freaks: The Story of How the Nazis Invented Amphetamines to Win the '36 Olympics.

When it came out I'd seen Irv at a tournament and said, "Irv, I thought Jesse Owens won the Berlin Olympics, and the Nazis invented speed to keep their troops awake."

"That too," he said.

I'd read almost all the way through the first chapter.

Irv Klar had written two other bestsellers since. With time, I could remember the titles. He was always working on a new book.

Irv was wearing baggy shorts, frayed sneakers, faded knit shirt, and an old Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap, to prove he was a man with a sense of history.

"Hey, guys," he said. "Who's your pick this week? I'm taking a poll for the column."

"Ben Hogan," I said.

"Ben Hogan?" Irv frowned. "Ben Hogan's dead."

"You're shitting me."

"You don't want to pick somebody serious?"

I said, "I'll stick with Hogan. Dead, he's already got me four back."

Irv said, "What about you two? Grady Don . . . Jerry?"

Grady Don said, "I'll go with old dead Sam Snead."

Jerry said, "I'll take Jimmy Demaret. He's dead, too, isn't he?"

Irv had spunk. He said, "I thought y'all had to win something big before you got to be assholes?"

He walked away, shaking his head.

"It's on our list of things to do," I called after him.

We turned our attention back to the shapely, or I should say the chick-babe-mom, who was dolling up the veranda. She was now smoking a cigarette and accepting a drink from a waiter in a white jacket. The waiter had carried the drink on a tray from the outdoor bar that's under an overhang near the main clubhouse door.

"How come I haven't seen her before?" I asked.

"Because she didn't come out till Bay Hill," Jerry said. "You skipped Bay Hill and Doral, remember?"

"True," I said. "I stayed home to do something. Oh, I know what it was. Get divorced."

Gazing at the chick-babe-mom on the veranda I was reminded of the time I was taken prisoner by another showstopper in a pair of low-riding jeans and skimpy top. Only she'd been a blonde. But Alleene Simmons, my first wife, hadn't dressed like that on purpose. It had been required of her by the low-rent owner of the cafe-bar-singles-derelict joint where she'd been employed as the hostess when I met her. The bucktoothed owner, Bodobber Roberts, had long...

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Verlag
Anchor
Erscheinungsdatum
2006
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0767914333
ISBN 13 
9780767914338
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

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