A Course Called Ireland

Zusatztext "Equal parts touching! wry! and hilarious." - New York Times "There is no golf trip like an Irish golf trip! and Tom Coyne has risen to meet that road. I look forward to reading this again. Pack it with your sticks." -Bill Murray "Witty and winning...A joy from start to finish." - Wall Street Journal "Like the country itself! Coyne's book is an affable ramble through a charmed land." - Chicago Tribune " A Course Called Ireland explores the history of the land being traveled and pauses for tales both tall and short! as well as! in this case! for pub songs. Coyne finds plenty of all of the above from Kilkee to Kerry! the long way. Golfers reading this book may wish they'd been walking by Coyne's side." - Boston Globe "A delightful and fun book." - Minneapolis Star-Tribune "A really good read." - The Modesto Bee Informationen zum Autor Tom Coyne is the author of the novel A Gentleman's Game and cowriter of the screenplay for the novel's film version! which starred Dylan Baker and Gary Sinise. He is a contributor to Golf Magazine and teaches creative writing at St. Joseph's University. Klappentext This hilarious and epic tale follows a walking-averse golfer who treks his way around an entire country! spending 16 weeks playing every seaside hole in Ireland! and often battling through all four seasons in one Irish afternoon. Disclaimer: This excerpt contains adult language and may not be suitable for all readers. I took my first golf trip to Ireland when I was nineteen years old. Growing up outside Philadelphia as the youngest of five, I had a vague sense of my Irish roots. I knew that my great-grandparents hailed from towns in County Mayo, that they settled in Scranton, Pennsylvania, before the turn of the century, and that none of them ever went back. I wore a green kiss me, i'm irish pin on my Catholic school uniform on March 17, and I suffered through corned beef and cabbage once a year, but that was the extent to which Ireland was celebrated in our house. The only other time I remember hearing about our heritage was when my mother would accuse my father or one of my brothers (and even myself from time to time) of being a damn Irishman. I took it as a compliment, though it never quite sounded like one. We were Americans, Catholics, golfers, Phillies fans, shoregoers, Wiffle-ballerseven as a redhead, Irish ranked low on my list of labels. The potential of my heritage never occurred to me until I graduated high school and my father took me on a golf tour of Ireland, where we spent a week discovering the Irish countryside through a bus window and I first began to wonder what were my great-grandparents thinking? How was Lackawanna County an upgrade from County Mayo? My family came from a postcard where everyone laughed and danced and the air smelled of turf and sea. How could they have pulled up their roots out of so much soft green and gold? My father and I spent ten days bouncing around Ireland in that bus, from golf course to hotel and hotel to golf course, and I don't think I've ever enjoyed golf, or my father, or a bouncing bus, for that matter, quite so much. It was the golf trip against which all others would be measured, a few days from that time when a father first starts to look and act like a buddy. Teeing up that first ball in Ballybunion, as we looked out over an ebb and flow of dunes giving way to green strips of fairway, beach grasses spinning in the breeze, a white-tipped ocean just a three-wood away, I felt an understanding for how this strange game came to be, how a contest of knocking pebbles around a field survived through the centuries. Because those first golfers were knocking pebbles around fields like these. My first round in Ballybunion left me red-cheeked...

"Equal parts touching, wry, and hilarious."
-New York Times

"There is no golf trip like an Irish golf trip, and Tom Coyne has risen to meet that road. I look forward to reading this again. Pack it with your sticks."
-Bill Murray

"Witty and winning...A joy from start to finish."
-Wall Street Journal

"Like the country itself, Coyne's book is an affable ramble through a charmed land."
-Chicago Tribune

"A Course Called Ireland explores the history of the land being traveled and pauses for tales both tall and short, as well as, in this case, for pub songs. Coyne finds plenty of all of the above from Kilkee to Kerry, the long way. Golfers reading this book may wish they'd been walking by Coyne's side."
-Boston Globe

"A delightful and fun book."
-Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"A really good read."
-The Modesto Bee

Autorentext
Tom Coyne is the author of the novel A Gentleman’s Game and cowriter of the screenplay for the novel’s film version, which starred Dylan Baker and Gary Sinise. He is a contributor to Golf Magazine and teaches creative writing at St. Joseph’s University.

Klappentext

This hilarious and epic tale is the story of a walking-averse golfer who treks his way around an entire country, spending 16 weeks playing every seaside hole in Ireland and often battling through all four seasons in one Irish afternoon.

Zusammenfassung
An epic Celtic sojourn in search of ancestors, nostalgia, and the world?s greatest round of golf

In his thirties, married, and staring down impending fatherhood, Tom Coyne was well familiar with the last refuge of the adult male: the golfing trip. Intent on designing a golf trip to end all others, Coyne looked to Ireland, the place where his father had taught him to love the game years before. As he studied a map of the island and plotted his itinerary, it dawned on Coyne that Ireland was ringed with golf holes. The country began to look like one giant round of golf, so Coyne packed up his clubs and set off to play all of it. And since Irish golfers didn?t take golf carts, neither would he. He would walk the entire way.

A Course Called Ireland is the story of a walking- averse golfer who treks his way around an entire country, spending sixteen weeks playing every seaside hole in Ireland and often battling through all four seasons in one Irish afternoon. Coyne plays everything from the top-ranked links in the world to nine-hole courses crowded with livestock. Along the way, he searches out his family?s roots, discovers that a once-poor country has been transformed by an economic boom, and finds that the only thing tougher to escape than Irish sand traps are Irish pubs. By turns hilarious and poetic, A Course Called Ireland is a magnificent tour of a vibrant land and a paean to the world?s greatest game.

Leseprobe
Disclaimer: This excerpt contains adult language and may not be suitable for all readers.I took my first golf trip to Ireland when I was nineteen years old.

Growing up outside Philadelphia as the youngest of five, I had a vague sense of my Irish roots. I knew that my great-grandparents hailed from towns in County Mayo, that they settled in Scranton, Pennsylvania, before the turn of the century, and that none of them ever went back. I wore a green kiss me, i’m irish pin on my Catholic school uniform on March 17, and I suffered through corned beef and cabbage once a year, but that was the extent to which Ireland was celebrated in our house. The only other time I remember hearing about our heritage was when my mother would accuse my father or one of my brothers (and even myself from time to time) of being a damn Irishman. I took it as a compliment, though it never quite sounded like one.

We were Americans, Catholics, golfers, Phillies fans, shoregoers, Wiffle-ballers—even as a redhead, Irish ranked low on my list of labels. The potential of my heritage never occurred to me until I graduated high school and my father took me on a golf tour of Ireland, where we spent a week discovering the Irish countryside through a bus wind…