Elegy for a Golf Pro: Memories of a Might-Have-Been

Westrum, who teaches English at Ottaway University in Kansas, began his work life as an assistant golf pro in Minnesota. Although essentially an autobiography, this brief account is as much about his father, a good golfer but not good enough to get on the pro tour, an excellent teacher but a contentious individual who was forever moving on to new courses that were not top-rank, even as his love for the game prevented him from taking jobs other than stints at clubhouses and giving lessons. Two things are troublesome about this memoir: first, the old man was neither a success nor a failure, nor particularly interesting (so why the book?); second, for all his adulation of his father, the author has failed to see, or has overlooked, that the old man--``emerging from the bedroom, his great belly protruding over his shorts''--was a megalomaniac, uprooting his long-suffering family at the slightest provocation or perceived slight on the course and dragging them off for another start in another little town. It is amazing the author isn't completely teed off. (Mar.)