Cinderella Story: My Life in Golf
Bill Murray is one of the best comedians in American television and movies. His list of movie credits after his stellar national exposure on Saturday Night Live is truly impressive, from Caddyshack to Groundhog Day to Rushmore.
My personal favorite was his lounge lizard act on SNL.
There’s no question the boy’s got talent in front of the camera. Unfortunately, Murray needed more help than he received in writing this book.
George Peper is the Editor-in-chief of Golf Magazine and normally puts out a great product, both with his magazines and his prior golf books.
Something went wrong here.
There are nice moments, to be sure, in this mix of pro-am anecdotes and autobiographical pieces. Murray does well in describing what it was like to be a caddie, following in his older brothers’ footsteps. He can wax poetic at times on the appeal that golf has for him.
Murray glosses over the difficulties his family underwent when his father died, but it clearly had an effect on him. Murray’s bits on kids and play, whether on the course or in the streets and playgrounds, were charming and rang true. Murray also wrote a great little segment on the importance of replacing divots and repairing ball marks that is surprisingly serious.
The book is liberally sprinkled with a nice mix of pro-am pictures and “Bill as a boy” shots.
On the other hand— Many of the stories are disjointed. Really disjointed. So out of whack in logical sequence, so peppered with digressions and nudging side comments, that it takes a couple readings to work through to a dim understanding that the effort wasn’t really worth it.
I assume they were trying to recreate in writing the riffing oratorical style that Murray does so well, but it just didn’t work.
These problems are exacerbated by the frequent structural interruptions. Readers will be in the middle of an extended anecdote, and suddenly the story is stopped for a page or two by a separate segment, shaded in gray, on some other short topic or testimonial.
You’ll find yourself holding a page in place to finish the piece to then go back to the gray sections.
The editors could have helped if they placed these segments at the ends of the short chapters, and not haphazardly through the book. Overall, I had the disappointing sense that Cinderella Story could have been better.
The book’s okay. It’s just okay. That’s the problem.
Review Date: July 16, 1999