THE KINGDOM OF SHIVAS IRONS

Ghosts on the golf course! Phantom visitations on the ninth green! Platonism, the paranormal, and psychedelic whiskey at Scotland's most famed but fictional golf course! Yes, Murphy, golf's greatest mystic, humorist, and founder-director of the Esalen Institute, has at last spawned a sequel to his otherworldly Golf in the Kingdom, which has sold 750,000 copies since 1972. In volume one, Murphy went to the fictitious Burningbush course in Scotland's County Fife (""The Kingdom""), where he had a metaphysical encounter with Shivas Irons, a guru/pro of supernatural perfection whose line of mystical palaver would leave Madame Blavatsky drooling enviously. Since that encounter, many parts of which, Murphy explains, he could not put into volume one because they'd not fully matured and developed (such as Murphy's sighting of Irons's own gum, Seamus McDuff, three years after McDuff's death), Murphy and his buddies have been hyperaware of luminous bodies on the green--paranormals guiding balls through shots only a witch could make. He returns to Scotland once more to seek out Shivas Irons. There, he finds himself well-known, his book read to tatters by the locals, all of whom try to wheedle from him how much of his account is true. Meantime, Murphy falls in with Buck Hannigan, a James Joyce look-alike and theoretical physicist hooked on the paranormal, and together they visit the late Seamus's glowing house and his preposterously difficult seven-hole personal golf course, designed to help raise otherworldly spirits. A visit to Hannigan's mistress, a Russian mystic and channeler, shows the ties between angels and eros, while all comes to a head at the '93 National Pro-Am at Pebble Beach. Do they find Shivas? Well, spiritually. A big hit? Doubt it not. These are the occult dimensions of golf, straight from the Easter bunny.