Golf Takes a Back Seat

Since the release of his impressive maiden novel of fiction and fun, Hunting the Red Fox, W. Kenneth (Kenny) Tyler, Jr. was asked by several interviewers about the significant role golf takes in the book. When asked point blank about the level of golf in the story he replied matter-of-factly that “there isn’t really that much playing of golf in the book as much as the goings on around golf events. It’s not a novel about golf per se in the least.”

As much as Tyler loves playing golf and the general camaraderie that goes along with a good foursome, the golf in Hunting the Red Fox was all about one word, “plausibility.” Golf, and mostly professional golf in the 1950’s, became a vehicle to move the main character, Perry Barnes, a journeyman professional during the time of Ben Hogan, Jimmy Demaret, Tommy Bolt and many more storied personalities from that bygone time through a series of seemingly unconnected events, places and times.

Through golf, Perry very early in life had a chance meeting with the great Jackie Gleason in a wholly plausible circumstance that cemented a lifelong friendship with the entertainment legend. Through that friendship Perry was very plausibly befriend by other people of varying levels of fame and importance while bouncing from one degree of minor success to bouts of absolute deflating failure.

Tournament golf also forced Perry to necessarily float from town to town with the tour, meeting the most influential folks at each stop and creating opportunities for the story to branch out. It also created a level of boredom after several years of unmitigated mediocrity resulting in Perry plausibly drawing upon his past Army training as a WWII commando to become a Robin Hood type highwire jewel thief to scratch his latent itch for adventure.

Golf was the moving background sideshow behind which every other happening or change of scenery would have seemed impossibly forced. Golf was the canvas. Everything else was the layered and in some cases a slathered on color scheme of details which could not survive without the canvas.

There was one additional point Tyler wanted to stress because of its significance from his perspective while fingerpainting the framework of his story. “I was conscience of and extremely careful with the amount of golf I allowed to roam around the manuscript for one reason,” Tyler said. “I didn’t want to bore the typically voracious reading, bright and influential mature woman segment of potential victims, uh, I mean book buyers, with too much golf minutiae.”

Tyler continued, “If I could keep them engaged and encouraged to plow through the necessary foreground laying of storylines to capture the rest of the narrative, I thought I would have a book with a better chance of success. In the end, the barely perceptible tableau of golf gave way to relationships of varying degrees of intensity, romances, intrigue, suspense, lots of clever humor and ultimately true love.”

“In the end not one of the dozens of folks I know who have read Hunting the Red Fox and eagerly reported their impressions about the book back to me mentioned anything about golf. This piqued my curiosity which led me to consult the third-party independent and Amazon reader reviews that have been steadily filtering in recently. There is scarcely a hint from these sources that any golf took place whatsoever. As much of a lover of the game as I am, I’m vastly proud of that perception, or lack thereof.”

Tyler sat silent for a brief time staring out the window as if lost in thought, as in fact he was. Then a smile crossed his expressive face followed but a chuckle. “You know,” he said. “It just occurred to me. I could be totally wrong and the reason so few people thought the golf was nothing more than a literary storytelling device was because they got bored and didn’t finish the book!”