Ti Ming, the golfer, is on the left. His caddy, Tem Po, is on the right. Together they'll turn your kid into a 4 handicap.
When golf pro Roy McAvoy gives a little “nod to the gods” at the top of his backswing, his puzzled student asks, “A nod to the gods?”
“To the gods. That he is fallible. That perfection is unobtainable.”
Budding young golfers — or their parents — can learn the lessons of those mysterious deities in “Finding Ti Ming and Tem Po: Legend of the Golf Gods,” by Mark Button. Targeting younger readers, the book is the story of how the golf gods appear in the dreams of children to teach them to become champion golfers by swinging the club with perfect "timing" and "tempo” (get it?). More important, the golf gods impart the values that can be learned from golf — honesty, respect, sportsmanship, etc.
“The marketing pitch,” adds Button, “is that it's a magical story filled with character-building morals and lessons.”
“Finding Ti Ming and Tem Po” came out in November, and was released in Nook and Kindle form this week. (If you’re some kind of out-of-touch freak dinosaur caveman who still plays with a wooden 3-wood and still prefers the feel of pulp in your hands, you can buy it in actual book form at Barnes and Noble, Amazon and AuthorHouse.)
Button and I worked together at SI.com in Atlanta, and he went on to become the editor of Texas Links Magazines.
It was on a business junket to New Orleans in 2009, when he won the little media golf tournament, that he was awarded a trophy with two strange Chinese figures on it. They were the invention of the tournament host Paul Buckley, a former hotelier now in the golf business.
“I called him up to thank him and we got to talking about Ti Ming and Tem Po. I said it would make a great kids' book, and he asked me to write it. We both thought the story should be them somehow helping kids learn to play golf and become good people, too.”
The result was “Bagger Vance” meets “The Karate Kid” — half motivational speech, half instruction manual and half fairy tale. All Button has to do now is franchise this thing, figure out how to get Ti Ming and Tem Po figurines into every Happy Meal from Augusta to St. Andrew’s. Then he needs to get the good people at Pixar on board for a movie. (Buckley, by the way, used to sell talismans on his Web site, and Button says the intention is to get the merchandising up and running again.)
“I thought writing the book was going to be the hard part,” he told me. “After that, I realized that getting it published was really the hardest part. Well, after that, I now realize that marketing it and promoting is really, really the hardest part.”
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