Playing Through: A Year of Life and Links Along the Scottish Coast

C.E. (Kit) Lefroy is the director of the School of Sports Administration
at Laurentian University.

Playing Through is about golf as it was, and is, in the region long
regarded as its birthplace, the East Coast of Scotland. It is also about
relations among golfers and the author’s relationship with his father.

Gillespie first visited St. Andrews in 1986–87 as a Ph.D. student and
member of the university varsity golf team. Twelve years later, he
returned to the East Lothian town of Gullane. His book provides a
narrative of his young family’s experiences and his encounters with
the world of golf. Especially poignant is his account of the day he
scattered his father’s ashes on a golf course and scored a
hole-in-one. At the opposite end of the scale is a delightful
description of his five-year-old daughter’s first game of golf, in
which she managed to hit a ball off a stone wall and over a moving car.

As entertaining as it is thoughtful, Playing Through should be on every
golfer’s reading list.