If there is anything more disheartening and disgraceful than people who try to cash in on the goodwill and fame of Augusta National and the Masters it’s people who try to do it while simultaneously smearing the good name and reputation of Clifford Roberts or Augusta National members, all while writing themselves into some golf masturbation fantasy where – by some impossible miracle – they win the Masters.
It’s just such a blatant attempt to capitalize on Augusta, coupled with a lethal combination of clumsy, ignorant, and just plain stupid storytelling, characters, and dialogue – as well as bumper-sticker mentality attacks on Augusta National members – that makes John Coyne’s The Caddie who Won the Masters not just the worst golf book of the year, but maybe the worst golf book in the history of golf or books.
For decades Coyne was a fringe horror writer with, at best, a niche audience and readership. Educated as an undergraduate at St. Louis University and as a Masters student in English at Western Michigan, Coyne has attempted to shift from horror to golf, with results that, sadly, are as frightening as a Stephen King novel.
His convoluted plot is as hackneyed as any daydream concocted by Caddyshack’s Carl Spackler. Tim Alexander, a former caddie and high school golf star quit golf after failing to make a splash in college golf, let alone the pro ranks. Late in life, on a whim, he takes up the game again, and wins the U.S.G.A. Mid-Amateur Championship at Midlothian which, surprise, is an allusion to Coyne’s own life. He caddied there in his youth.
Winning the Mid-Am gets Alexander a spot in the Masters, where the ghost of Clifford Roberts appears to him, telling him that he will win the Masters and miraculously cure his wife’s cancer by winning. As you might guess, Alexander comes from behind on Sunday to win the Masters by beating Tiger Woods (head to head in the final group and from four shots back) and Phil Mickelson. His wife’s cancer is immediately cured when the ball tumbles into the cup, Roberts’s soul is saved from haunting the course, everyone pukes, the end. In doing so he happens to be the oldest major champion in history, the first amateur to win the Masters, and the first amateur to win a major championship in his first and only professional tournament.
Yeah, right. Pull my other leg and it plays “Jingle Bells.”
One wonders if in the sequel he walks on water, turns water to wine, creates loaves and fish from rocks, achieves world peace, rides a spaceship to Neptune, finds everyone’s lost car keys, and beds the entire field of the Miss America pageant.
It’s bad enough that his is just another ham-fisted attempt by a writer to wet-dream himself into a Green Jacket. (Come on, guys. This again? Really?) But in the process, Coyne becomes what Master and Commander author Patrick O’Brian called a preachy-floggy tyrant. His one-dimensional protagonist, an ill-tempered snob, proudly boasts to Roberts’s ghost, “I’m more intelligent that you realize. I’m a professor of literature, Mr. Roberts. I was schooled in the seven types of ambiguity.”
Well I guess that shows Roberts!
His character then spends many chapters haranguing Roberts by rehashing all the tired, ignorant refrains the looney, academic iconoclasts parrot about Augusta National in Martha Burk’s talking point manifesto: racist, sexist, secretive, ultra-rich, clubby, blah, blah, blah.
Coyne alleges such lunacies as:
1) Since Roberts never went to college, he would not have heard of Dr. Faustus;
2) Roberts was not aware that Gene Sarazen was really Italian and insinuates that Roberts would have been racist against Italians, “Why would they change their names if they had nothing to hide?” Coyne writes in Roberts’s voice;
3) When it comes to Augusta National members, he knows “how prickly they were when it came to their own importance at their private club….It was in surroundings like this that they felt most at home, men alone and safely away from women;”
4) Roberts ordered Frank Stranahan out of the Masters one year for coveting a woman Coyne claims Roberts was interested in as well.
He then puts racist words in Roberts’s mouth alleging he would have publicly said, “the whole Godamn World, it’s a crumbling place, going to Hell in a handbasket. We have our country being run by a democrat and a President of mixed blood.”
This is as ghastly and grotesque a piece of unfounded conjecture and gossip as I have ever seen uttered against Roberts. Even if any of these old rumors were true, who cares? There is no purpose in reheating old garbage except to promote a despicably yellow journalistic agenda. But the offenses don’t stop there – Coyne’s protagonist then gets in Roberts’s face and shouts, “Well, then, you may as well kick me out of the Masters. I voted for Obama!”
I’m checking back with you now. How did that turn out?
He then decries Augusta as “the most discriminatory and secretive club in America.” Thanks for the public service announcement.
Anyone who has spent time at Augusta and with its members comes away with one indelible impression – “I never imagined how kind, open-hearted, generous, welcoming, warm, inviting, and dedicated to one thing – golf – they are.” Augusta is about one thing, and it isn’t money or power or exclusivity. It’s about being a steward of golf traditions. That’s all that’s being discussed, celebrated, and promoted. All those allegations of clubby business and racism/sexism/whateverism are the jealous rants of uninformed imbeciles with a political axe to grind who don’t know the first thing about Augusta, its members or even golf.
Now let’s closely examine the writing of John Coyne, who so pompously rides into Augusta on his high horse with machismo and braggadocio about his academic credentials and track record as a “best-selling author.”
Obviously he needs an editor. who would have caught the following:
1) “Sergio and Vijay were position closest to me;” (Mixes past and present tense.)
2) “Vijay was working with his alignment with his swing coach and his body was wrapped in a rubber sleeve to keep from over swing;” (It should be “overswinging.”)
3) “I was a candidate for a pilot TV Reality show.” (The “r” shouldn’t be capitalized.)
4) “Life gets real complicated at times;” (Awkward sentence structure, but sooooooooooo profound…)
5) About the 7th hole – “the easiest hole at Augusta until it was lengthened by forty yard;” (It should be plural – “yards.”)
6) “Charlie pulled out his King Corba and teed up a long tee;” (It’s spelled C-o-b-r-a and you don’t tee up a tee…)
I guess these must be some of those seven forms of ambiguity.
I could go on and on about these mistakes alone, there’s many more pages of errors, but let’s switch gears for a minute. Get these howlers:
1) His character has to ask for directions to Amen Corner! What golfer playing in the Masters would need to ask directions to Amen Corner? You walk down 10 and you’re at the start once you get to 11 tee! (Shows you what use a Masters degree in Literature is. What idiot on any golf course would have to ask directions to any hole.)
2) He claims the song “Shouting on Amen Corner” was a spiritual. Wrong – it’s a jazz song about spiritualists.
3) “The ball was a few inches below my feet. That wouldn’t help my fade.” Uh…a ball below your feet will promote a fade. If the ball is above your feet, it promotes a draw. It seems he must play as poorly as he writes.
4) Augusta National gets his bio wrong in the official tournament program. He claims to have shot a 60, but of course, Augusta would get it wrong and make it a 61; and
5) “At best, Clifford Roberts was no more than a handmaiden to the greatest golfer of his time….his suicide was the one mistake he couldn’t fix.”
I am shocked and alarmed that a man who advertises himself as a “best-selling author,” who has a Masters in English, and who taught English to schoolchildren could release a book so replete with errors in spelling, punctuation, and grammar. I am deeply offended to my Victorian soul – which is a central virtue of all true golf lovers – that someone, anyone could presume to tell a man as great as Clifford Roberts “what’s what” about anything, let alone how to run Augusta National and the Masters Tournament. And I find it nothing short of scandalous that someone who purports to love golf could attribute such hideously callous insensitivities to Clifford Roberts who was, in life, a paragon of virtue and who gave golf the Masters, a gift of unquestionable grace and purity.
Since Coyne is so misguided as to defecate upon so much of what true golfers hold sacred, I’ll presume to do my own rewrite of his story and give it the ending it richly deserves. Let’s try this instead: The ghosts of Roberts and Jones are conspiring to help an amateur win the Masters, but the Scooby-Doo gang show up in the Mystery Machine and decide to investigate. After about 50 minutes of knee-bent running around and getting scared by the so-called ghosts, complete with Scooby going “Ruh-roh Raggy!” and Shaggy yelling “Zoinks!” Velma finds a clue which makes the gang think the ghosts are more fake than Kim Kardashian’s breasts. Freddy creates a Rube Goldberg to trap the ghosts of Roberts and Jones using Scooby for the bait. Scooby is reluctant at first, but half a box of Scooby snacks cures that, and he and Shaggy lie in plain sight waiting for the ghosts.
As usual, Danger-prone Daphne trips over her own feet and triggers the trap early, which nets Shaggy and Scooby instead of the ghosts. But by a stroke of luck as miraculous as a 49 year-old amateur winning the Masters in his first and only professional tournament, the rope holding the net breaks just as the ghosts are about to get Freddy, Daphne, and Velma. Shaggy and Scooby fall on top of the ghosts, which are really Coyne and Alexander in rubber suits covered in fluorescent paint. They were plotting to scare off the competition so Alexander could win the Masters unimpeded and make off with the Green Jacket. As they’re dragged away by the authorities, Coyne and Alexander are overheard snarling, “And we would have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for those meddling kids!” The credits then roll to the tune of the Scooby-Doo theme….Stay tuned for Superfriends, which is next, followed by the Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner Hour and then Land of the Lost.
The Caddie who Won the Masters is nothing more than a brutal, bilious insult to not just Augusta and the Masters, but golf and all the virtues it promotes. To call this book amateurish would be an insult to amateurs. A lethal combination of loud and stupid, it should be a big hit among grungepunks, Martha Burk wannabees, and the “I play golf in my wifebeater and jeans-shorts” crowd. Thankfully, between its potato-chip flimsy characters, sleep-inducing dialogue, hackneyed ham-fisted preaching, and mistakes, it becomes a good comedy piece. But then again, if Coyne ever decides to get back into teaching what he purports to be English, he has a ready-made use for the book – he can show all the kiddies exactly what not to do. As Mark Twain wrote, “Go back to your circus.”
***UPDATE*** Special thanks to John Coyne for taking the argument we had over email and publicly sending it to all his email addresses under the headline “another fan of the book.” Thanks also for passing them all my phone number and email! That was just as classy as your book. Don’t you go changing buddy. But hey! Send me your next book, if there is one…I’ll do a review you can forward to a friend…if you have one.
