Fore! Skins and sixes years - Daniel Cheng

Sixty going on eighteen: a whodunit of math as improbable as Benjamin's Button-or more accurately, Bottom-a nod to an arc of a unfortunate detour into the dark depths of a lake. The external equanimity of the Crosbie Golf Club belies the stagnant chaos that thrives within its manicured grounds. A membership completes the final marker of success in the 5Cs: Cash, Credit Card, Car, Condominium, and Country Club. Nothing quite shouts "Summit" like joining a country club, the exclusive preserve of the white-collared elite; strike that- white-collar qualification is strictly optional. Here, the roost is ruled as much by a demographic closer to Ho Kwon Ping as that of "Hokkien Pengs," where class and affluence are often mutually exclusive, and none more evident than in the Crosbie member roll. This is a material world called Singapore.

It is in this eclectic milieu that the story begins-or for most Crosbites, a transition from the last chapter of an existential journal to its epilogue. In this land of plenty with everything but room for it, the sport of kings made way for the gentlemen's game of golf which itself on short leash. Take "gentlemen's" with a pinch of salt when its practitioners graduated top of the class from a dog-eat-dog world. Eighteen holes beckon like a --- belle as a palliative for six decades of blood, sweat, and tears, all awashed in the great wide open without a care in the world.

Or so they thought.

Just when they thought they'd left all the corporate intrigue behind, the serpent slithered back into their Garden of Eden. Locker room gossip is even more acidic than the water cooler ever was. The guy from the department everyone loved to hate is resurrected in the rough. The office braggart has merely mutated. Cliques and fiefdoms thrive even more virulently, prima donnas more operatic. The standard-issue office leech and flirt reappeared in unforgiving (wrong word) color. Skirts chasing and straying eyes, more so. The alpha, the bully, the peacemaker, the slacker, the needy one, the blur king, imposter, cynic, smarty-pants, social butterfly, clown, wallflower all made the roll call. There's even the "office" romance-bromance and diversity galore that would bring down a Republican House. The only fresh variable is the frightening realization of bodies less willing, joints and sinews giving way-too much money and too little energy left to enjoy them. Call it a "happy" problem. Health is the new wealth that no money can buy.

In this familiar yet alien milieu of the Crosbie, a rag-tag bunch forge unlikely camaraderie as each individual stumble to find new footing, braving a world of impatient ticking clocks and sharing the inventory of joys, pains between laughter and tears. Here, executives of glory past battled over golf strokes more than quarterly targets and promotions. Fierce petty rivalries ignite like regressive second childhoods. The crème de la crème discovering that letting go is the hardest thing to learn, the simplest lessons from the most unlikely source.