GITK starts off as a piece of narrative fiction and it's not a half-bad story, either. The problem is that the reader feels not only let down but betrayed when it abandons that form and spins off into the ether. Not to say it comes as much of a surprise, given the mystical underpinnings, but it violates the basic understanding that a story will have a beginning, middle and end. Any text, film, piece of music, that takes on this form (or, perhaps, lack of form) is going to have its detractors.
I happen to appreciate--not like, much less love--GITK. I think it's a very flawed book that was written in the searching spirit of the time. I realize that the '60s hangover curdled into cynical exploitation of people's spiritual fragility, that a lot of snake oil was sold (not that this was unique in American history--look at the revival tent boom of the 1830s and '40s), and that certain remnants of that era have a very distinct, unctuous tone that has not aged well.
While George is probably right that it has compelled a lot of golf stories to slather on the woo-woo, that suggests to me that people really do believe that golf has its spiritual, even mystical, facets, and that maybe someone can take us a little farther than Murphy did. I don't think that's a bad thing.
A related anecdote: Last spring, I arranged to play a fourball at Lahinch with a group of Benedictine monks. These guys were the real deal--chanters, meditators, services five times a day, living in a romantic castle cloister far from the fallen world. I thought for sure I'd get a GITK moment out of this, I'd find out how people who really think about this stuff might connect golf with the human spirit.
Turns out the monks were typical Irish golfers--total trash-talkers and grind-you-down single-digit players. The Benedictines are really into beauty and harmony with nature, but I was not going to get ANY of that. On the Dell hole, I missed about a 5-footer for par to halve the hole. So, we hit our drives on the next hole, and I'm walking down the fairway with the monk I'd arranged the game with, Brother Simon, who was on the opposing side in this match. He stops and sets his bag down and says, in his spaced-out uber-mellow monk-voice, "You've had a long drive today. Are ya hungry, Tom?"
He produces two bananas from his golf bag. One is the platonic IDEAL of a banana, the other looks like it's been in the side pocket since the Reagan Administration. The entire skin is black and nasty. He looks at the two bananas, one in each hand, and offers me the OLD ONE!
I take the banana and peel it, and the inside contents are basically LIQUID, like soft-serve on a 100 degree day. Half of it slops right onto the turf at my feet. Then he gives me this beatific smile, such a perfectly exaggerated piss-take, and heads off toward his ball, miles out there down the centerline, while I look for my crapulous slice in the rough.
I think Golf in the Kingdom helped me appreciate that moment.
