In A Course Called Ireland, released this month by Penguin Books, the intrepid Tom Coyne takes the reader on a memorable journey. Coyne challenges himself to play every links course in the country with one stipulation: He must walk to every course. That’s right: no driving and no public transportation.
Traveling more than 1,000 miles, Coyne captivates the reader with his vivid imagery and colorful storytelling. One would think 300 pages about a golf trip would become monotonous, but Coyne’s candidness, transparency and humor shine.
The reader learns that it’s not just about the golf. The relationships, the pubs, the food, and most importantly the people in Ireland make the story so revealing.
In Paper Tiger, Coyne dedicated two years of his life to trying to make it to the PGA Tour. Once again, in A Course Called Ireland, he has the uncanny ability to involve us as he pursues the average golfer’s wildest dreams.
Tom was kind enough to take some time and answer some questions I had about the book. Enjoy!
RS: Tom, a wonderful job with the book. You continue to seek out stories that so many golfers could only dream of while executing compelling storytelling techniques. Immediately after I finished the book, I was curious about what you did your first week home—did any of your activities involve walking?
Tom: My first week home, I did as little as physically possible. I planted myself on my couch with my dog, remote at my fingertips, and caught up on American television. I went to a few welcome back dinners with family and friends, where I took no small joy out of showing off my new road-hardened physique. I was probably twenty pounds lighter at the end, which was something of a miracle considering the fact that I drank five million pints and ate enough fried food to kill a Clydesdale. I actually came home with a terrible cold -- four months in the rain, hardly a sniffle, but airplane air nearly killed me -- so my return was slightly more subdued than I had imagined it. Alas, no trumpets, no parades.
RS: You wrote that in addition to carrying your sticks, a change of clothes and toiletries, you also carried a laptop. As a newspaper reporter, I find that I am typically at my best late morning to early afternoon. After walking 20 miles some days, was it difficult to open up your laptop at night and file your accounts?
Tom: Writing on the road was certainly a challenge, and some days it just didn't happen. I always had a journal in my book pocket -- I filled a half dozen of them. When I arrived in a town, I'd search out a sandwich and a pub and a newspaper, and I'd do my writing at that point, in a dark corner of a bar in the late afternoon. But that was mostly collecting ideas or making rough sketches of stories or the people I'd met, scribbling down scraps of dialogue, bits and pieces that I might revisit later and turn into something of substance. As for filing stories (via that damned laptop I had to haul around Ireland with everything else), that typically happened on a Sunday morning or afternoon, or early on a Monday -- it really depended on when I had access to the internet which, in some of the more rural areas, was a rare event. There were a few cheats during the trip where I had to take a bus off my route to find a hotel with wi-fi so that I could get my stories to my editors -- and for authenticity's sake, I'd take a bus back to where I left my route, and continue on foot from there.
RS: On a similar note, can you talk about the process of writing down your observations after playing each course?
Tom: I would make notes in my journal about a particular course, and I kept some detailed scorecards, but as you read the book, you'll notice that I don't do a lot of hole by hole accounts of golf courses. I talk about the truly stunning holes or the most memorable shots, but the book isn't just about golf courses or golf holes or course design -- frankly, that stuff bores me. It was much more important to capture the characters, the stories, the events that added to this adventure, moreso than compare this back nine versus that back nine -- there's some of that in the book, but I didn't spend too much time making sure I knew where every bunker in Ireland was so that I could relay that information to my readers. The best reviews I've gotten so far have been those that say, Hey, you write about sixty golf courses, and somehow it wasn't boring. That's the experience I was after, so I hope that's what readers are finding.
RS: I am sure that it was extremely difficult to embark on a four month journey and condense your accounts into 300 pages—what was the most challenging part of writing the book?
Tom: Spending four months in Ireland, you collect stories by the bushel. Writing the book really was a matter of chipping away at what I had and finding that balance between entertaining and informing, and somehow getting the whole trip in without losing the reader. There were stretches full of action, and there were long stretches where very little happened, so I had to keep things moving and hanging together, mile by mile, and keeping the story focused on its finish line in Ballybunion. There's a quest at the heart of the story that I hope drives the whole thing, so I was careful to keep that idea at the forefront of the story--the mileages, the distances, getting closer and closer--and let the stories and the golf and the characters turn around that.
RS: It is a tough time to be a journalist now. At newspapers worldwide, writers are afforded less and less opportunities to pursue true investigative journalism and spend time with their subject/s. Can you elaborate on this point and the meaning of spending four months enveloped in a culture like Ireland for this book?
Tom: It's a very tough time--both my hometown newspapers just filed for bankruptcy, and if things keep going as they're going, there are going to be some very talented, young writers out there who are going to have nowhere to turn. I was blessed to be able to spend the time I did in Ireland -- blessed with a great publisher, and a great wife -- and I hope that comes through in the story, the self-indulgent nature of just throwing caution aside and setting off on an unlikely adventure. The fact that this trip happened at all is no small part of the overall story. I hope that this kind of work will always have its place in a world of blogs and streaming news and 24/7 sports coverage--journalism as we've known it can't keep up and compete with all the clatter out there, but what the clatter can't do is a project like this, one where you take the time and collect and distill and tell a story. It's my hope that the quicker our lives become, the more we'll need these kinds of tales, adventures that take a whole book to tell. Optimism to the extreme, perhaps, but people will always need thoughtful stories told well.
RS: As I read the book and thought about so many of your walks between towns, I couldn't help but think about some of the ideas of transcendentalists such as Thoreau. We live such hectic, rushed, technology driven lives—how did this journey affect your perception of modern culture?
Tom: In the book, I write about winning a certain sense of peace along the way, and while it reads a tad hokey when I look at it now, it was true--I wasn't a hiker, I wasn't in great shape, I didn't camp or seek out the glories of nature; I lived in the city, I sometimes found my way onto a treadmill, that was about it. I certainly wasn't a backpacker, but by forcing myself to become one, I slowly became a different person, a person who didn't mind if the room was dirty or the pillow too hard or the stew too salty. I found myself living in this simplified world of, right, left, right, where my whole life fit into the pack on my back, and where the only things I needed were tread on my shoes, a bit of food, and a bed at day's end. With those three things, there was nothing else on the planet to worry about, and the welcome exhaustion at every day's end only added to this traveler's euphoria. Traveling by foot, my world was only twenty miles big in each direction, and there was something so wonderful and comforting and liberating about that, I struggle to explain it. I'm not running back out there to walk another 1000 miles next summer, living out of a knapsack, but I'm glad that for at least a little while, I did.
RS: With all of the rain, inclement weather and blisters, I didn't read much about illness. Did you or any of your partners get sick at any point on "the course"?
Tom: Once. I got very sick in Northern Ireland. I had walked in the rain for about six days straight, and on one roadside beside a church outside Newcastle, my body just quit. We hailed down a bus, my buddy Julian poured me into a bed in the next hotel we found, and I slept for two days while he drank wine and watched the US Open. After loading up on liquids and vitamins, I was back out there and back at it, but there was a moment there where the trip felt like it was in some jeopardy. I was pretty lucky to have had just that one bout with illness, considering the wet conditions I walked in (38 straight days of rain on the east coast). There were a number of mornings where I woke up feeling not so wonderful, but that was an illness of my own doing, and usually went away after a pot of tea and a full Irish breakfast.
RS: If you had to ballpark it: Adding up the greens fees, lodging costs, food/pub expenses, and the two plane rides—how much did this four month venture cost?
Tom: Really tough to say, but it must have been damn expensive. Exchange rate was an absolute killer when I was there -- the euro has backed off since, but I was there at the height of currency cruelty. Sixty plus courses, average greens fee of $100 (thanks to the beneficence of Tourism Ireland, my greens fees were covered); nightly lodging, average price of $65; nightly pub allowance, $200; figure $800 for a plane ticket- -it adds up. $20,000, if you did it conservatively (shhh, my wife thinks it cost half that).
RS: I'm assuming you aren't walking 15-20 miles a day anymore—what kind of physical shape are you in now?
Tom: Highly mediocre. I've committed to some sort of ten mile run in the not too distant future, so I'm going to have to blow the dust off my gym membership and get out there. That's probably what I miss most about that time in my life. I could walk twenty miles up and down hills with a pack on my back, and feel wonderful doing it. Feels like a different life as I sit here typing, my mouth stuffed with Starbursts.
RS: Any other exciting adventures for the future that we should look forward to?
Tom: I'm going to walk around India with a cricket bat on my back...
