The Downhill Lie: A Hacker’s Return to a Ruinous Sport by Carl Hiaasen is about the author’s return to golf after a thirty-year break. I enjoyed the first Hiaasen novel I had read enough to give him another chance, yet this time it was with a work of nonfiction. Under the impression that golf was one of the rare activities that one can get better at while older versus younger, Hiaasen’s goal was to improve upon the score he had attained when he was in his early twenties. Could he finish eighteen holes under 88?
The author was not afraid to be brutally honest about his own mediocrity and the hopelessness of his game. He was often funny in his self-assessment and I couldn’t help laughing at some of his remarks about his performance and the game in general, like this one he made after undergoing a videotaped review of his swing:
“Speaking of Mom, she’s always been a stickler for good posture. I wish I’d listened to her. On the tape my stance looked round-shouldered and tilted oddly to the left; the swing was loopy and hurried. The effect was that of a vertigo patient, threshing wheat.”
In addition to enrolling in golf lessons, Hiaasen also tried, in the name of “research”, the various contraptions and snake-oil products advertised in golfing magazines and on television. None of them helped improve his game, whether he tried specific pills, jewelry or designer golf clubs.
Hiaasen often scored between ninety and one hundred, and didn’t try to impress the reader by fudging his score card or asking his playing partners to look the other way:
“As is true in sportfishing, golf for some men is basically a dick-measuring contest. Lying inevitably occurs, some of it clever and some of it clumsy. Among true devotees of the sport, honor is prized because there are no referees or judges on the course; each player is relied upon to be truthful. Consequently, it’s easy for a common shitweasel to nudge his ball out of the rough, cheat on his scorecard and churn those bogus pars into a lower, more impressive handicap.”
Hiaasen explained some golfing terms, as I am sure some of his readers found this book solely based on the reputation of the author and not because they were in search of a lighthearted golfing testimonial. I still had to look up some terms such as “ham-and-egging”. He did explain in detail how handicaps were assessed, the ethereal magic number that he could never tame:
“Admittedly, much of what Rotella says makes sense; most golf books do. I now own a shelfful of them, and a handicap that flutters up and down like a runaway kite.”
His wife and son took up the sport as well, both of whom seemed to enjoy the fun of the activity more than he did. Hiaasen did manage to reduce his score to an 85, but could not maintain it.