A GENTLEMAN’S GAME

An unsparing debut about golf reaches the green in reasonable shape, but then leaves the putt short.

The title is ironic. Around the course at suburban Delaware's Fox Chase Country Club gentlemen are, in fact, a scarce item, though fakes and phonies are not. Check out “the caddy hole,” however, and if you're the right kind of observer you'll find more authentic types, even a gentleman or two—not in the conventional sense, of course, but in terms of bedrock worth. To young Timmy Price it's all a revelation, a nonstop parade of often confusing, sometimes wrenching experiences. It’s been discovered that Timmy, at age 11, is a natural golfer gifted with a swing so “pure” that it sets him instantly apart and makes him the object of rapt attention whenever he addresses the ball. From his father, the attention is mostly anxious. An inept though unquestionably caring parent, the senior Price decides that hubris is involved and draconian measures are called for. As a result, Timmy is suddenly consigned for his own sake to the caddy-hole subculture. He makes friends there, but he encounters a lot that 11-year-olds shouldn't have to confront. The caddies are a disparate group encompassing the fiercely competitive, the near-heroic, and the hopelessly abject. Too soon, Timmy is forced to conclude that there are only “two kinds of people in the world, people who carry things and people who own the things they carry.” By age 14, he's confirmed in a cynicism that saps his pleasure in a game he once loved and perhaps will darken the rest of his life as well.

Honest to the point of bleakness, but too loosely constructed to be really involving. And yet the talent is unmistakable.