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Like so many sports, golf has become such a vast, lush, multi-billion-dollar industry, it's increasingly hard to reflect on its modest and windswept beginnings. Yet golf is so much more than just a game. It can teach you how to win or lose. How to behave towards other people. The necessity of self-control. It can help you understand the past and make you feel truly alive in the present.
At least these are some of the things that poet, novelist and mountaineer Andrew Greig addresses, alongside numerous balls, in Preferred Lies: A Journey to the Heart of Scottish Golf (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.99), his deeply poignant discourse on golf, ghosts, sex, life and death.
Overcoming a near-fatal illness, on a whim Greig retrieves his rusty old irons from the attic - after a 35-year break - and embarks on a tour of |
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henry sutton on a journey of self-discovery down the fairways of Scotland
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Scotland's oldest, wildest and most authentic courses. He begins in North Ronaldsay, outermost of the Orkney Islands, on a nine-hole course tended by an army of sheep, rather than anything resembling a lawnmower - let alone a green-keeper. This, he muses, is how golf must have been when it began some 400 years ago. A game played on common land, open to all. Democratic. Free. Real golf.
Greig was brought up on the east coast of Scotland by a taciturn but golf-mad father. Now he recovers his game, his health, and a sense of what really matters. He plays Bathgate, Aberdour, Gigha, Iona, Lundin Links - 18 courses in all. Throughout, he's haunted by his father, his youth, the history of the game and the wild beauty of his homeland. About golf, about so much more, Greig has written a truly exquisite book. There's not a duff shot in it. 
FIRST
POSTED JUNE 1, 2006
Last week: The Secret of Scent
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