Swinger (eBook)

A Novel

Michael Bamberger, Alan Shipnuck (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2011 | 1. Auflage
272 Seiten
Simon & Schuster (Verlag)
978-1-4516-5757-9 (ISBN)

Infos

A sports hero seeks a comeback in this wild, funny, and ultimately redemptive novel.

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A sports hero seeks a comeback in this wildly funny and ultimately redemptive novel.His name, as we all know, is Herbert X. Tree Tremont, and hes the richest and most celebrated athlete of our timea multicultural golfing icon with fifty-three Tour wins, thirteen major victories, a smoking hot wife, and two adorable kids. But when a reporter uncovers evidence that Trees sexual appetites are as prodigious as his tee shots, his public and private lives collide, producing the juiciest scandal in sports history. In this wickedly funny novel that takes readers between the ropes and the sheets of the PGA Tour as never before, the only thing more entertaining than Trees downfall is his quest for redemption.

Textauszug

I took my bills to work, stuffed into the big pocket of my Target backpack with the crappy refurbished Toshiba laptop that the paper gave me five years ago. For the longest time, I'd still find eyelashes in the keyboard from the guy who had the computer, and the golf beat, before me.

'Joshuamon, what brings you to the paragraph factory?' Pete, the sports editor, asked me.

It was late December. The new golf season was still weeks away. The high school football season was over. I wasn't on the copy desk rotation. My paycheck--$1,362.50 biweekly, after all the deductions--was on automatic deposit. There was no reason for me to come in, no good reason.

'My kid needs mold samples for a science project,' I said to Pete.

The truth was that I had to make some calls that I couldn't do on my cell phone from my usual office, the crowded Starbucks on First Street in downtown St. Petersburg. I had to call the mortgage company about refinancing, I had to call Visa and American Express to figure out some kind of payment plan, I had to call my ex-wife and ask for more time on our son's tuition at his summer lacrosse camp, and I had to make sure my girlfriend, Lily, didn't get wind of any of this. I needed multiple phone lines and a soupon of privacy. Ten in the morning on a Saturday in winter, there shouldn't be anybody in the sports department of The St. Petersburg Review-American. But there was Pete, wearing his short-sleeved plaid shirt and plaid pants without a hint of irony.

I worked my way into a corner. I swept a week's worth of old papers into a big blue recycling bin. There was something comforting about being at the paper. We were dying a little death every day, but there was still an undercurrent of macho arrogance in the place, like We might not be relevant now, but you should have seen us back in the day.

I got out my Visa card and squinted at the 800 number. I had tried on some 1.0 reading glasses at CVS, but I'd left them on the rack, not ready to make another concession to middle age. Pete came ambling over. 'I heard something that might interest you,' he said.

I knew the various preambles of Peter Henry Hough down cold, and this was one of his favorites. Pete loved everything about the reporting game, and the editor-as-tipster was near the top. Pete loved news. If you had news, he wanted it. In the paper, on RevAm.com, on our blogs, in our Tweets, he didn't care, as long as we had it first and had it right. A few days earlier he had taken great delight in a little item I had posted about a local high school baseball coach who got ticketed and breathalyzed for doing 62 in a 25. The coach called and read Pete the riot act. That made Pete's day.

'I heard Tree's been stepping out,' he said.

Pete, drawling Southerner, milked this most unlikely of sentences, dripping Spanish moss on the whole thing.

Tree. What everybody called Herbert X. Tremont, Jr., the damnedest golfer who ever lived. Tree's father was a black Creole from rural Louisiana who spent twenty years in the army, he had a master's in political science from Howard and a jazz collection that rivaled Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's. Tree's white mother was from Chicago, where she had been a schoolteacher. The parents, who had married fairly late and were now separated, hadn't worked in years. Tree was their job. He was an only child, homeschooled by his mother and coached exclusively and secretly by his father until Tree entered, at age nineteen, the first tournament of his life, a U.S. Open where he finished ninth. Since then he had become not just the most dominant golfer of all time but also the richest, most powerful, and most popular athlete in the world. He was...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 12.7.2011
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Themenwelt: Sport ► Ballsport ► Golf
• ISBN-10: 1-4516-5757-9 / 1451657579
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4516-5757-9 / 9781451657579