Hit and Hope

David Owen takes a delightfully irreverent look at the game of golf and all the absurd behavior it inspires. He plays a game with which we are all familiar—he takes mulligans off the first tee, practices intermittently at best, marks his ball on the green with his lucky coin, until the luck wears out, and struggles for consistency even though his swing is consistently mediocre. He bets, he wins, he loses, he agonizes, he dreams.

Through the essays in this book, most of which appeared in Golf Digest in a slightly different form, Owen takes the mundane aspects of the game, and how we approach it, and stands them on their head, turns them inside out, and lays our follies bare for all the world to see. He also finds humor and nobility in our essential silliness, as expressed in our pursuit of a little white ball over a vast—but not vast enough to contain our slices—greensward.