Shanks for Nothing

Commuting to work has cut down a lot on my leisure reading, a fact made slightly humorous by the fact that I now work for an online media exchange that predominately sells books. I used to read books on the way to and from work, which provided about 90 minutes of reading every work day.

These days, my mornings are pretty much given over to Adam Carolla, but on the ride home, which inevitably takes a lot longer, I have started listening to a book. It started with Hour Game, a David Baldacci mystery. My thoughts were that a mindless thriller type would be the best type of book because it wouldn’t matter if the story was somewhat weak. That is, I could pay attention to the road and the story without losing focus on either.

While I realized quickly that Hour Game was barely an adequate story, it was also clear that my commute seemed a lot quicker when someone was, in essence, telling me a story during the ride.

So I went back to our in-office library and found a few other titles I could grab, deciding to take something I’d enjoy for its own sake. I was thrilled to see Rick Reilly’s Shanks For Nothing.

The book is a sequel to his seminal hysterical golf novel Missing Links. I first ‘discovered’ that book by sitting next to someone on an airplane who couldn’t stop laughing out loud at the book while he read. After devouring it myself, I gave it as a gift to many of my friends, at least those who golfed. While I don’t always love Rick Reilly’s Sports Illustrated columns, Missing Links was a truly funny tale of a bunch of hacks on Ponky, “the world’s worst golf course.”

Shanks for Nothing meets up with them years later, and the audio CD (narrated by Nick Stevens) tells us that Ray “Stick” Hart has gotten married and had a kid. The premise of the book, primarily, is that Ponky is going to be sold. The group – including characters like Cementhead, Two-Down and Hoover from the first novel – scheme in their own pathetic ways on how to raise the money they’d need to buy the course.

The story itself isn’t overly complicated, and a casual reader (or, actually, listener) can see a few things coming from a solid par-4 away. (See what I did there? Oh, so clever.) And perhaps it’s Stevens narration, but the jokes seem forced at times as do some of the pop culture references. There’s also a secondary story about Resource Jones, an inmate and former Ponky hack, scheming a breakout from his prison (which also has a golf course.) Both those elements deter from the overall story, but for fans of Missing Links, it’s still well worth the quick read. It certainly made the commute home amusing over the last week or so.

Rating: 7.0/10.0