Close Encounters on a Golf Course

Hagman remembers days spent making friendships while playing favorite golf courses.

It is said that for some people golf is not just a game, it’s a calling. That could certainly be said of Hagman, who takes as many days as she can away from her day job as a Swedish government economist to hit the links. Here, she recounts 19 episodes in which golfing helped shape who she is, from experiencing the courses in a deep, near mystical way, to gathering a good handful of friendships, some fleeting, some enduring, some seemingly destined. The memoir is a curious, ultimately enjoyable and illuminating exercise in unvarnished clarity, taking advantage of the English-as-a-second-language voice with disarming frankness. Superficially, the language may cry out for polish—“The aim and purpose of this book is to inspire every reader of this book to go out there and play on a course with an open mind towards players you never met before”—but the trick is to hear the written words, preferably in a Swedish accent, as Hagman seizes the magical qualities of linksland and why it moves her so. The allure for Hagman may be because these courses—the Old Course at St. Andrews, Belfry and the love of her life, the Ailsa Course at Turnberry—are such a far cry from her Northern climes, and her playing in mixed foursomes takes her out of her loneliness, a feeling she touches on more than once. These golf-related relationships, with both men and women, can blossom: “I was so happy to end up in the company of this man John, who enjoyed every minute out on the course….Don’t misunderstand out relationship though. We are just friends.” Much of Hagman’s charm is in her formality—“I sensed he had also chosen a life when he couldn’t become a friend with a person like me. It was a life with certain boundaries”—which melts into an elemental passion when she encounters the right golf course or the right golfer.

The prose needs to be ironed out, but this memoir offers an endearing look at golf as a skill and a cosmos of love.