A Good Walk Spoiled

July 3, 2000
To Mark Twain, golf was ``a good walk spoiled,'' but to the 200 or so top professional players, it is a sometimes lucrative but always nerve-wracking career in which this week's hero can be next week's bum, and in which athletes have only themselves to blame if they fail. Feinstein's (A Season on the Brink) lively and anecdotal style makes for an interesting read but cannot overcome the 1990s' objection to the sport--that there is no superstar of the stature of Arnold Palmer or Jack Nicklaus to capture the public's fancy. So although there are media favorites such as Greg Norman, there are many outstanding players (Davis Love III, Paul Azinger) whom Feinstein brings to life here but who fail to generate the excitement of the greats. Feinstein, kind and upbeat, also points out that, almost without exception, golfers share a political viewpoint that is far to the right of Rush Limbaugh, with much self-pity for the taxes they have to pay on their six-and seven-figure incomes. Photos not seen by PW.

February 15, 1995
Golf talk from the author of the best-selling A Season on the Brink, LJ 4/15/89.

Starred review from May 15, 1995
Feinstein hit the ground running with "A Season on the Brink" (1986), his best-selling account of a year with Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight. Since then, his subjects have included professional tennis ("Hard Courts," 1991) and major-league baseball ("Play Ball," 1993); now he turns his microscope on pro golf. What separates Feinstein's year-in-the-life accounts of professional sports from many other, similarly constructed overviews is the way he manages to get inside the heads of the competitors. Intending neither to crucify nor to sanctify, he shows us both the inner and outer lives of the athletes, transforming them from heroes or villains into the kind of multidimensional characters you expect to find in good fiction. Along with revealing profiles of the game's big names--Norman, Price, Watson--Feinstein's sojourn through the 1994 PGA tour also offers remarkable glimpses of the marginal players who struggle to first qualify for the tour and then maintain their tenuous places on it. It's a fascinating look at a category of pro athlete unlike any other: no fixed salary, no guaranteed appearance fee, no meal money, no celebrity; only the dream of competing successfully with the "big boys." (Interestingly, one of Feinstein's unknowns, Brian Henninger, recently made his breakthrough, first qualifying for the Masters and then leading the tournament after the third round.) What emerges most forcefully from Feinstein's investigation is a sense of just how incredibly difficult the game of golf is for competitors at all levels: "No game is more imprecise, more elusive. The greatest players alive wake up most mornings having no idea whether the day will produce a 65 or a 75. If they have a gut feeling, it will be wrong nine times out of ten." Golfers of all ages simply won't be able to put this book down; it compares to all the other volumes written about the PGA tour like Jack Nicklaus in his prime compares to your local club champion. ((Reviewed May 15, 1995))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1995, American Library Association.)