The goods Former OGA champion inspires tale of government gone wild by ken macleod
Burdened with a crushing national debt, an activist president decides to nationalize the oil industry as a desperate means to pay for his calculated scheme, which is either to take the U.S. down in flames and then rebuild from the ashes a socialist utopia, or to spend more time playing Pine Valley and Congressional. You’re never quite sure which and that’s a good thing about Don’t Mess With Travis, the new Bob Smiley novel inspired by a former Oklahoma Golf Association Mid-Amateur champion. Unlike the misery merchants
Jim Hays outside Prosper’s Cotton Gin Cafe, where Travis and Leary square off.
on right-wing radio, this book will keep you chuckling and entertained while taking a hard look at the downside of spending trillions of dollars you don’t have. Smiley, who spent 2008 trailing Tiger Woods from outside the ropes for the book Follow the Roar, has a quick and breezy style and he’s done his homework, much of it assigned by Jim Hays, a former Oklahoma oilman and sportsman now retired and writing a conservative blog from his home in Prosper, Texas. In the book, accidental Texas Gov. Ben Travis calls ruddy Irish President Michael Leary’s bluff (doesn’t Barack O’Bama claim Irish descent?) and leads Texas on a path toward secession. In the zaniness that en20 •••••• www.golfoklahoma.org
sues, you won’t have any trouble identifying most of the cast of characters with their real-life counterparts. Hays, who birdied the 18th hole at Oakwood Country Club in Enid to win the 1993 OGA Mid-Amateur Championship, is familiar to many Oklahomans for a variety of athletic and business pursuits. A member of three Big Eight championship baseball teams at Oklahoma State, he was a founding member of The Golf Club of Oklahoma and an original hole donor at Karsten Creek. After selling his successful company Mega Natural Gas in 1991, the two-time OGA president began gearing up for a run at the Champions Tour, moving to Scottsdale, Ariz., a few years later and playing full time. He did not earn a full-time card on the closed shop Champions Tour, but played his way into six events through Monday qualifiers and did win 13 mini-tour professional events. A 19-time club champion over the years, Hays regained his amateur status in 2002 and moved to Texas in 2007 where he briefly jumped back into the oil business before retiring again to his home overlooking Gentle Lakes Country Club in Prosper, where he writes a political blog which can be found at www.stateofjim.com. Although he still loves golf and plays competitively, he also devotes a great deal of time to studying the world through the prism of not only a longtime independent conservative businessman but one who has studied the value of the individual and his freedoms through the teachings of Plato, Aristotle and Socrates. Hays is also a student of the U.S. Constitution. He knows how the Federal Reserve is supposed to work versus the way it currently functions and he has some definite ideas about how the U.S. – and consequently the planet – can be saved. But you’ll have to wait for the second book for most of the solutions. Hays began to put the story together in his head a few years back and took months to persuade Smiley, a friend of Hays’ son Rob and a fellow golf-team member at Princeton, to spend a year on the book. Eventually Hays, along with a few individuals, including Bob Tway, put together an arrangement that would pay for Smiley’s expenses for a year in return for a share of the book profits. “I made a decision the last three years to focus on this because of the intensity I
have in my heart and soul that America needs to be right,” Hays said. “And it’s not right. If we could do it through history and comedy and tell a story that people can understand without coming off as vitriolic and mean-spirited, that would be the approach we would want to take. “The end result, we think, is pretty special.” Hays had a long meeting with Smiley to sell him on the project, poring over Texas history and selling him on the bones of the story. Smiley fleshed it out, adding his comedic touch which delighted Hays. “The story is probably 70 percent Bob’s and 30 percent mine, but all the writing is his and he brought it back to me in a form that was much funnier than I had envisioned,” Hays said. Smiley said he spent the first six months of the collaboration “just catching up with Jim,” The two found an established publisher in Thomas Dunn which, along with early reviews, gives them hope the book will make quite a splash nationally. Ann Coulter has already evinced interest and the hope is other national talk show hosts on both sides will discuss the book, giving it invaluable publicity. “It’s different than a lot of books,” Smiley said. “It’s an entertaining novel with a lot of laughs but written from a politically conservative standpoint. That’s probably not a long list.” Smiley got nothing from Tiger on his first book. Working with Hays was the opposite experience. “He is a smart business guy and a great leader in general,” Smiley said. “When he gets excited about something, he’s really unstoppable.” Don’t Mess With Travis is available for preorder on Amazon.com and will be in major bookstores beginning May 8.