The Club

Introduction

The Club was born while I bobbed around in a swimming pool on an exceedingly hot summer’s day in Canberra. My daughter was, once again, at the golf course for the afternoon while the rest of the city took shelter from the sun’s wrath. I often wonder if I should have introduced my daughter to a  far less addicting pursuit than golf; crack cocaine comes to mind. Her love affair with the sport started at the age of 8 and became a passion at 14, when we moved from Canada and its six month golf season to Australia where it is a year round pursuit.

As my son and I floated atop the water in the pool, we reflected on the quirky cast of characters at my daughter’s golf club. We realised that the course had become much more than a sporting venue for her; it was becoming part of her extended family, indeed a second home.

This novel is not about my daughter or in fact about her golf club; any coincidence to her life is unintentional. Neither is the book true to its original intent as a humorous caricature of the rogues that spend too much time every morning trying to locate eighteen holes drilled into unforgiving pastureland.  Instead, what I discovered in writing this story was the true beauty of sport, something that had eluded me, after years of attempting too many games with too little skill.

I have often lamented that the sports that I have played in my life were specifically designed to break my heart. However as I began to type away at the tale, I realised that the purpose of these artificially created pastimes is not necessarily to break one’s heart but in fact to reveal that we had one in the first place.

So my silly little treatise full of cheap jokes and sophmoric humour became my homage to the many muses in my life that have motivated me to follow my dreams. Inspiration, it turns out, can be found anywhere, maybe even within this story, if we just have the courage not to look away.