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7-30-09
BOOKS
A onetime teaching pro and longtime golf writer, Eubanks is also a golf nut, but with an asterisk. On the list of the best courses at home or abroad, he only checks off a conquest “when I have played the course as a complimentary guest, no fees, no discounts, none of the grimy intercourse of commerce.” This, then, is “America’s most shameless golf guest” naming names and cadging games.
Sadly for the rest of us, it is not an instructional. Eubanks is so well plugged into high-end golf connections that landing a free round with Arnold Palmer at his Latrobe CC was, however thrilling, not surprising. He’d helped write two of Palmer’s books, which makes begging a freebie a lot less impossible. Such ties also got him a free tour of the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail in Alabama, a nine-hole round at the Naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba – “the green fees
are cheap but there’s a four-year commitment,” his sponsor told him – and a round with a certain rock star turned golf nut in which he finally thought to say, “Hit the ball, Alice.”
“You know,” sighed Alice Cooper, “I’ve never heard that one before.
But if he doesn’t help the reader get free golf, Eubanks is a good writer and a funny man, never a bad combination. And he can be touching. While playing in China – as a guest, of course – he aced a par-3 on a course in the very city where, two years earlier, he and his wife had adopted a daughter. Now he can’t wait to take her back to show her where she was born, the orphanage where she spent her first months, the culture of her people – and the rock of aces where his name is etched. Now he, too, is tied to that land.
– Dennis McCann
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