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Before there were titanium woods and graphite
shafts, golf clubs were made from the wood of hickory trees
and had intriguing names like cleek, mashie and jigger. Golf
was a game played not with high-tech equipment but with skill,
finesse, and creativity. And the greatest hickory player of
all time was Walter Hagen---until the day he met a teenage
caddie at a country club outside Chicago.
America's first touring golf professional, Hagen made (and
spent) more prize money than his friends Babe Ruth and Jack
Dempsey earned from baseball and boxing during the Golden
Age of Sports. In this novel, set in the halcyon post-war
Midwest of 1946, Hagen comes to historic Midlothian Country
Club as the champion he is---but also as a man handicapped
by a secret.
Waiting for him are two caddies. Harrison Cornell--a onetime
rich playboy from the Bahamas--has a past; the other---Tommy
O'Shea, a farm boy who caddies at the country club---may have
a future . . . but only if he can somehow beat Hagen on the
links, in one last game played with hickory...
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