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Bogie
Golf ... as it was
Charles Hellman
Book
Price: $9.95
ISBN: 978-0-935938-01-2 |
Audio CD
Price: $29.95
ISBN: 978-0-935938-02-9 |
Short of twitting Scotsmen about wearing skirts, the surest way to infuriate them is to suggest that golf started somewhere other than Scotland… and that's precisely what this controversial novel suggests. BOGIE is a picaresque tale of golf at the Old Course of St. Andrews, Scotland in the 1740s, and purports to give creative substance to some of the lore that has studded golf’s history down the centuries, like the names of mulligan, stymie, bogey, dormie, plus customs of buying the drinks after making a hole-in-one. Bogie is a 12-year-old boy plucked out of an Irish orphanage by his returned-from-the-sea father, Mulligan, hitherto unknown to him. The old pirate is uncertain about how to survive as a land-lubber until someone suggests that he can earn a living in Scotland "carrying sticks" in a game called "colf". After arriving in St. Andrews, their first glimpse of the Old Course is marked by the same sense of cynicism expressed by golfers today, but they quickly learn to love the strange landscape that will become their life and death. They meet up with a kindly and generous inn-keeper named "Dormie", a wench nicknamed “Frenchie”, and a ball-maker called "Stymie". Through the years at St. Andrews, Bogie inherits Mulligan’s tastes for drinking and cheating. The hapless Mulligan freakily scores a hole-in-one on the Old Course, the first such, and, despite his reputation for lying, manages to be believed. To underscore his good fortune, he buys double drinks for the crowd at Dormie’s tavern all evening, thus laying the foundation for the hole-in-one drink tradition. Bogie narrates this story which begins and ends with the key golf match that will lead to the nomenclature "bogie" existing as a curse upon golfers, and proceeds in flashbacks of their adventures on and off the golf course.
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