“The Swinger” is a novel about a very famous golfer who has an amazing career record, a slew of endorsement deals, a gorgeous wife and a squeaky-clean reputation — until his extracurricular kinks become a huge public embarrassment and spoil everything. The authors, Michael Bamberger (“This Golfing Life”) and Alan Shipnuck (“Bud, Sweat and Tees”), call this golfer Herbert X. Tremont, known as Tree, and his wife, Belinda. But they don’t insult the reader’s intelligence by claiming that these characters bear no resemblance to persons living or dead. They don’t embroider the facts much, either. Sure, Tree lives in St. Petersburg, Fla., whereas Tiger Woods lived near Orlando. Tree has ankle surgery, but Mr. Woods had surgery on his knee. Tree’s wife comes from Italy, but Mr. Woods married Elin Nordegren, who was born in Sweden. When Tree’s raunchy correspondence with his many girlfriends is exposed, Belinda beats him up with a 5 iron. Ms. Nordegren may not have whacked Mr. Woods with a 5 iron at all.
Why read a novel that hews so close to glorified gossip? Why read any fiction about celebrities, even if the famous person (like Diana, Princess of Wales, in Monica Ali’s “Untold Story”) has been laboriously renamed, reimagined and packed off to the American Midwest? The answer, in the case of “The Swinger,” is that the authors know their man and know their game.
There’s a fair amount of golf in “The Swinger.” But the game that really shapes this funny, fast-moving book is the one played by the press and the public. Mr. Bamberger and Mr. Shipnuck, senior writers at Sports Illustrated, understand the trade-offs that were part of Mr. Woods’s predebacle career and that are essential to keeping any star athlete out of trouble. Tree’s public and private personae may be very different (“He was often playfully profane unless he was in public or his mother was around”), but if reporters want to get anywhere near him, they’d better not say so. When a sports prodigy who is this two-faced proclaims publicly that “family is everything to me,” no eyebrows had better be raised.
But Tree Tremont’s hubris leads him to forget these ground rules. While certain athletes — the book mentions Derek Jeter — have the humility to keep their private exploits reasonably private, Tree pushes his privilege to the breaking point. “Tree wanted everything,” the authors write. “He wanted the hot nightlife and the kiddie-soccer home life and the glamorous wife and the get-rich-now corporate life that was the foundation of the P.G.A. Tour. To keep it all going, he had to wallpaper his life with lies.”
In “The Swinger” this arrogance is viewed with both astonishment and regret. And it is seen at very close range. The book requires a narrator who is not Tree, so it invents Josh Dutra, a longtime sports journalist who “settled into the golf beat in middle age because I liked the people, the game, the travel and the stories, the ones you could print and the ones you couldn’t.” When Josh is one of the first writers covering Tree to get wind of his spectacular philandering, he is recruited by Tree’s company to handle public relations and damage control. He also works at fine-tuning Tree’s social-media image, adding blog posts and tweets with Tree’s opinions about movies Tree may or may not have seen.
“He really was one of a kind: polite assassin on the field, model citizen off it,” the book says in one of its dead-on appraisals of Tree/Tiger. But that composure vanishes once Tree’s so-called “designer,” a woman who is “all heels and hair and attitude,” makes herself too conspicuous. Soon Tree is sharing confidences about his home life, and Josh speaks for the reader as he reacts to this.
“Listening to him talk about his marriage was unbearably uncomfortable,” Josh says. “Naturally, I couldn’t get enough of it.”
The mortifying events in the book unfold much as those in Mr. Woods’s life did a year and a half ago, at a time when “sext” was still a fairly new word, and the itty-bitty text message’s ability to destroy lives was still underestimated. Once the ruination starts, the newspapers are brutal, making Tree puns about splinters, sap, pulp, etc. “Had I not been the director of communications for Tree Corp.,” Josh says, “I would have been amused.”
As for Tree, the authors draw him so credibly that he remains in a weird, half-cheerful state of denial. See “The Politician,” about John Edwards, for another famous philanderer who flatly denies rumors about infidelity to an aide even when they both know the rumors aren’t wrong.
When “The Swinger” — nice title — isn’t dwelling on Tree’s meltdown, it’s describing his athletic style with familiarity and ease. Golf’s best-known courses and tournaments figure in the book, as do the rumors of steroid use that dogged Mr. Woods. Combining both, the authors capture the exact sound of Scottish heckling at St. Andrews. (“Ya canna pleh without the magic drugs, ken ya?”) They also write about the unexpected schadenfreude and resentment that emerged after Mr. Woods tumbled off his pedestal, expressing genuine surprise at the depth of ill feeling that he prompted. And they write about the embarrassment of riches that overwhelmed reporters trying to cover such a many-faceted mess.
“The Swinger” is overgenerous enough to leave Tree happily roasting marshmallows, facing the likelihood of a brighter future. But in most other ways it is credible and brightly apt. And the authors incorporate an excuse for airing the dirty laundry that can be found here. For one thing, they haven’t exaggerated its luridness. For another, they don’t think journalists ought to lie. As a newspaper editor in the book puts it: “It’s always the same. They want to know what the dude is, quote, really like, right? So how good a job were we doing?” Not a very good one until the dude chose to self-destruct.
by Janet Maslin, NY Times
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