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Carl Hiaasen and I have something in common
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
We both have a passionate love-hate relationship with golf. But while I just flail away, week after week, trying to either get better or get calmer, Hiaasen does the same, and then wrote a very funny book about it: “The Downhill Lie: A Hacker’s Return to a Ruinous Sport.”
Hiaasen is known for his Florida-based comic thrillers like “Nature Girl” and “Strip Tease,” so the lacerating first-person account in “Downhill” will be new to his fans. But not the humor, as he sets out on “the cart path to perdition” to improve his game and/or be at peace with it. What he finds, instead, is that “golf is as calming as a digital prostate exam.”
Hiaasen will talk and sign “Downhill” at 7 tonight at Georgia Perimeter College in Clarkston. In a phone interview last week, he was in a venting mood.
Q: Are you still playing?
A: I played yesterday and it was a bloodbath. It was like I never played the game before.
Q: Have you made any progress in how you view the game?
A: No. Yesterday was such a massacre I have nothing good to say about it. It was one of those days you want to throw your clubs off a bridge. I set out at the beginning of this experience to be able to say OK, I’m having a rotten day, but I’m still outside walking around in Florida. Theres only 3 billion people who would trade places with me in a heartbeat. If nothing else maybe I can teach myself to enjoy the game in a therapeutic way. And I’m not there yet, obviously. I have nothing to offer but bile and bitterness.
Q: Books like this are supposed to end with enlightenment.
A: This isn’t a self-help book. This is a self-abasement book. I don’t think writers are cut out to be golfers. We train ourselves to be our own toughest editors. Then you take that way of thinking on the golf course and you’re just brutally hard on yourself on every hole.
Q: What’s harder, golf or writing?
A: Both are very difficult and painful, and they’re supposed to be. If you’re gonna be good and excel at them, it’s not gonna be easy. Anything that’s easy, the outcome shows it. Day to day, the writing comes more naturally to me.
Q: I loved your writing about the ads on the Golf Channel.
A: That’s the most depressing commercials in the world, on the Golf Channel. Prostate problems, erectile dysfunction, joint pain, high cholesterol. They know their demographic. And their demographic is me.
Q: Near the end of the book you realize that the worse you play, the funnier the book is going to be, and that your editor is actually hoping your game goes as far south as possible.
A: I thought it would still be a good story if I got to a level where I was breaking 80, so there’s sort of a heroic ending. Of course it didn’t work out that way. The worse I played, the funnier it got, not just for my editor but for all my friends. I would trade the whole book for an 8 handicap any day.
Since today’s book is about golf, do we have any golfers out there who would like to try to one-up either Hiaasen or me on how insane golf makes you?
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