Dave,
Ask and ye shall receive...
The name of Rick's book is "Missing Links".
PS I had the pleasure of playing a round with Rick at this year's club championship. First time I'd met him. He's a great guy as well as a terrific and very funny writer.
All The Best,
From the Publisher:
Raymond Lee Hart - better known to his unshaven buddies as Stick - has a pretty good life, most of it spent at Ponkaquogue Municipal Golf Course and Deli, the single worst golf course in America. For Stick, Dannie, Two Down, Thud and the rest of the "Chops," Ponky is a little slice of paradise - if you picture paradise with a rusted-out '57 Chevy on the 8th hole and ninety-five-cent egg sandwiches waiting after the round. Mostly, the Chops like to bet, a habit that's about to get them into serious trouble. Just adjacent to Ponky, over a twelve-foot-high hedge, lies the Mayflower Country Club, the most exclusive private club in all of Boston. For the Chops, it is both an irritant and a lure. Tortured by the Mayflower's immaculately manicured fairways and intrigued by its fanatical exclusivity, the Chops propose a bet. Stick, the devious Two Down, and the slyly beautiful Dannie, Stick's sometime bedmate, plunk down a thousand dollars each, a small fortune for people who sometimes take the bus to the course. The first to play all 18 holes at the Mayflower wins the pot. Lying, cheating and fraud are encouraged. But as each of these three pursue their quest - and one another's money - the charm of their odd friendships, and their strange loyalty to Ponky, begin to unravel. One of the three will win The Bet, but it seems a hollow victory. Missing Links is a tremendously funny novel, but it is also a book wise in the ways of friendship and family, broken dreams and unexpected gifts. Above all, Missing Links is a long overdue tribute to those unsung heroes of the game of golf, the dog-meat public course and the incurables who play it.
From the Critics
From Publisher's Weekly - Publishers Weekly
Some time ago, Reilly, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, contributed a humorous article about the Ponkapoag Golf Club, aka Ponky, a blue-collar golf course in Canton, Mass. The author's first novel returns to Ponkychanged here to the Ponkaquogue Municipal Course and Deli in Boston's working-class neighborhood of Dorchesterfor a rollicking tale about a grungy group of "Ponkys" who aspire to play at the Mayflower, a nearby elite, invitation-only course. Narrator and Ponky leader Raymond Lee Hart initiates a group bet to see which member of his regular foursome can become the first Ponky to play at the snooty club. The Ponkys' schemes include a night raid on the Mayflower, a forgery scam and a pair of romances that offer potential access to a Mayflower foursome. Reilly resolves the bet halfway through the novel but saves his funniest moments for a final play in which Hart and another Ponky square off against Hart's stuffy, domineering father and a second Mayflower member. The humor occasionally flags, particularly when the author takes the father/son conflict a bit too seriously, and a working knowledge of golf is required to appreciate much of the funny stuff. But from scratch players to duffers, all who spend their leisure time chasing the little white ball will relish this wry tribute to the game. (June)
From Kirkus Reviews
From Sports Illustrated writer Reilly, easily the wittiest golf novel yet—the Bull Durham of the genre, and the closest thing to Caddyshack on paper we're likely to get.
The golf-book genre usually falls into two categories: bios of the game's great players, first, and quasi-spiritual agons, second, such as Steven Pressfield's The Legend of Bagger Vance (1995), in which sulking has-been linksters return to the fairways to redeem themselves. The former are written for golfers who like to read, the latter for readers who like to golf. Reilly's debut, however, stands on its own, with a gaggle of loopy characters plucked off the country's municipal courses. They have nicknames like Two Down, Thud, Crowbar, and Stick, and their course is a dogpatch strip called Ponky, where the hazards aren't sand and water but abandoned cars and shopping carts. Stick, a.k.a. Raymond Hart, is a fine golfer who's allowed his talent to decline into lethargy, whiling away his days trying to fleece his golf buddies (the "Chops"). But his life is irrevocably altered when unexpected damage to a hedge reveals an enticing view of the Mayflower, the original snooty WASP haven. The men become consumed by the private Mayflower's perfectly manicured expanse and create a sizable betting pool to reward the first of their brethren managing to play a full 18 holes. Ray should win in a stroll; his father, unbeknownst to the other Chops, is a Mayflower member. But Ray has Oedipal problems, so he vacillates over asking his Old Man for a round. Meanwhile, his buddies devise increasingly elaborate schemes to snare the dough. The first half of the book ends with the winning of the bet. The second involves Ray's love life and a grudge match with his father.
A loving, knowledgeable, laugh-out-loud portrait of the Hardest Sport There Is, as practiced by the blue-collar rakes who compose golf's most devoted fans.