Ancestral Links: A Golf Obsession Spanning Generations
Sports Illustrated writer Garrity offers a twist or two on the familiar golf-travel memoir. Combining some casual genealogy with an extended stay at one of the UK’s great but relatively little-known golf links (Carne, in Ireland’s remote County Mayo, home of his father’s family), he sets out to explore the Garrity “golf obsession,” which began with his garrulous father, who learned the game on a ragtag course in Wisconsin, and extended to his older brother, Tom, who played briefly on the PGA tour in the 1960s. What results is part memoir—the recollections of both his father and brother, recently dead of cancer, are poignant and revealing—part golfer’s travelogue, and part search for roots. Golf is the cartilage that holds this enterprise together, whether it’s Garrity living out his brother’s dream of playing Carne’s seventeenth hole six times consecutively with three balls, 18 holes in all, or following the footsteps of his mother’s ancestors to Musselburgh, Scotland, where golf was played in the 1700s. Garrity’s humility and ingratiating style softens the inevitable envy problem (Why him and not me?) that often makes reading golf travelogues a mixed blessing. --Bill Ott