Gary Moran says forget the film, Steven Pressfield's novel stands as an engaging journey into a mystical match
"The chauffeur tugged the rear door open. There was a pregnant beat, a wafting curl of tobacco smoke, then a $500 black-and-white golf shoe arced forth into the sunlight, followed by an athletic calf wrapped in pale yellow argyle and a knife-creased plus four. Sir Walter stepped forth in his plumage."
Author Steven Pressfield describes the arrival of Walter Hagen for the 36-hole exhibition match at Krewe Island that forms the centrepiece of his 1995 novel The Legend of Bagger Vance. If you have seen the execrable film of the same name and your instinct is to stop reading right now, then suspend your judgment.
It may not be everybody's cup of tea, but CBS golf commentator Ben Wright called Bagger Vance "the best golf novel I have ever read. I was utterly riveted by this work of art and literally covered with goose bumps for many hours until I had read it in a single sitting".
Bud Shrake, who co-wrote Harvey Penick's Little Red Book, termed it "the rarest of gems, a truly good novel with golf at its core".
It is set in Savannah, Georgia, in 1931, with the southern states still in the post-Crash depression. Wealthy businesswoman Adele Invergordon sees the chance to lift local spirits, kick-start the area's economy and raise the profile of her Krewe Island resort with an exhibition match for the unprecedented sum of $20,000. The contestants will be Hagen, Bobby Jones and, on the insistence of the city fathers, the former state champion, first World War veteran and eccentric Rannulph Junah.
The golf descriptions are colourful and emotive: "Junah's iron play was fearless. He hit the kind of low, screaming bullets that started out jackrabbit-high and rose like eagles to peak, tower, float till they were nearly motionless, and then drop feather-soft to the green where they would alight, as Sam Snead later used to say, like a butterfly with sore feet."
Jones and Hagen are portrayed as themselves, and where the book moves from something that could almost be factual to the fanciful is with the introduction of Junah's mystical caddy, Bagger Vance.
Vance, Junah and their story are based on the Hindu epic and scriptural poem the Gita, in which Bhagavan is the "Supreme Personality" who teaches his follower, Arjuna, about life. Most reviewers missed the parallel, and Pressfield admits that whenever he explained it, "you never saw eyes glaze over so fast".
It requires a truly giant leap of faith for the average reader to buy into all of Vance's theories. With echoes of Bob Rotella and Tim Gallwey, he tells Junah "the golfer comes to realise that the game is not against the foe, but against himself. His little self. That yammering, fearful, ever-resistant self that freezes, chokes, tops, nobbles, shanks, skulls, duffs, flubs. This is the self we must defeat."
We enter another realm with: "Hagen wanted to play the best possible shot and the best possible shot wanted him to play it. Wanted to be brought into physical existence by him. It needed a person. An embodied soul. A human being."
It probably needs an interest in the Gita and related philosophy to get the most out of Pressfield's work, but it is so cleverly woven around the tale of the match that it does stand alone. The biggest mystery is how a book that appeals to many could have been turned into such a woeful film.
