The Foursome


Troon Mcallister - 2000
    He now presides over Swithen Bairn, an exquisite secret golf course that’s a kind of twisted Fantasy Island where the arrogant and pompous find their cherished dreams suddenly transformed into their worst nightmares. When four enviably successful business/golf junkies are lured to Swithen Bairn by an irresistible offer— "the most memorable golf vacation you ever had or you don't pay" —the old adage that you can learn more about people during one round of golf than you can by living next door to them for six months comes hilariously and powerfully true.Mixing equal parts of suspense, hilarity, and raw human drama, Troon McAllister deftly shows readers what can happen when money, friendship, ambition, and greed converge explosively in a single round of golf.

The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist


Dan Jenkins - 2001
    After thirty years of waiting for the follow-up, Jenkins returns to the world of big-time golf in The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist and finds a world where endorsements and course fashion matter more than the side bet. His hero, Bobby Joe Grooves, is a hell-raising two-iron-wielding rogue trying to turn his one annual tournament win and considerable Texas charm into a spot on the Ryder Cup team. Standing between Bobby Joe and his little spot of golf heaven are two ex-wives, a girlfriend, various pious PGA officials, and his embarrassing lack of a career major. A book that will teach you more about golf history than any weepy sunset-over-the-eighteenth-green retrospective, The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist is an uproarious portrait of what it’s really like to play on the PGA Tour. It’s vintage Dan Jenkins.

The Swinger


Michael Bamberger - 2011
    A sports hero seeks a comeback in this wild, funny, and ultimately redemptive novel.

Golf My Own Damn Way: A Real Guy's Guide to Chopping Ten Strokes Off Your Score


John Daly - 2007
    Looking for a sure cure to bunkerphobia? It's here. A one-hour golf lesson that's 100 percent guaranteed to make you a better golfer? Ditto. Want to know why you should occasionally leave your big dog in your trunk, how to watch your weight, and what golf and sex have in common? You came to the right book.And while he's busy explaining all these and many other things, Daly also tells you why you should keep your head out of the game, let your belly lead your hands, listen to your right foot, check your ball position—and buy a hybrid (the club, not the car).Following in the spike prints of his 2006 bestselling autobiography, My Life In and Out of the Rough, Golf My Own Damn Way is an off-the-wall and intensely personal yet imminently practical and accessible tip sheet on how to cut ten strokes off your score—now.Two things are certain: you've never seen a golf instructional book quite like this one, and you'll never need another one.Fairways and greens, Pard!

Missing Links


Rick Reilly - 1996
    Just adjacent to the municipal course lies the Mayflower Country Club, the most exclusive private course in all of Boston and a major thorn in their collective sides. Frustrated by the Mayflower's finely manicured greens and snooty members, three of Ponky's most courageous--Two Down, Dannie, and Stick--set up a bet: $1,000 apiece, and the first man to finagle his way onto the Mayflower takes all.One of the three will eventually play the course, but their friendships--and everything else--change as various truths unravel and the old Ponky starts looking like the home they never should have left.

The Kingdom of Shivas Irons


Michael Murphy - 1997
    Michael Murphy's Golf in the Kingdom is one of the bestselling golf books of all time and has been hailed as "a golf classic if any exists in our day" (John Updike) and "a masterpiece on the mysticism of golf" (San Francisco Chronicle).  Golf in the Kingdom introduced Shivas Irons, the mysterious golf pro and philosopher with whom Murphy played a mythic round of golf on Scotland's Burningbush links, a round that profoundly altered his game--and his vision.The Kingdom of Shivas Irons is the enchanting story of Murphy's return to Scotland in search of Shivas Irons and his wisdom about golf and human potential.  Murphy's quest takes him from the mystical golf courses of Scotland, across the world to the first Russian Open Golf Championship, and finally to Pebble Beach on the California Coast.  The result is a delightful exploration of the inner game of golf and a provocative inquiry into our remarkable possibilities for growth and transformation.

Two Years in St. Andrews: At Home on the 18th Hole


George Peper - 2006
    Andrews.

A Season in Dornoch: Golf and Life in the Scottish Highlands


Lorne Rubenstein - 2001
    A bit too far removed for the taste of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, the Royal Dornoch Golf Club has never hosted a British Open, but that has hardly diminished its mystique or its renown. In an influential piece for The New Yorker in 1964, Herbert Warren Wind wrote, "It is the most natural course in the world. No golfer has completed his education until he has played and studied Royal Dornoch." If any town in the world deserves to be described as "the village of golf," it's Dornoch. You can take the legendary links away from St. Andrews, and you'll still have a charming and beautiful university town with great historic significance; take the links away from Dornoch and it would be as little noted or known as its neighbors Golspie, Tain, and Brora. (The town is forty miles north of Inverness, generally thought of as the northernmost outpost of civilization in Scotland.) The game has been played in Dornoch for some four hundred years. Its native son Donald Ross brought the style of the Dornoch links to America, where his legendary, classic courses include Pinehurst #2, Seminole, and Oak Hill. Lorne Rubenstein decided to spend a summer in Dornoch to clear the muddle from his golfing mind and to rediscover the natural charms of the game he loves. But in the Highlands he found far more than bracing air and challenging greens. He found a people shaped by the harshness of the land and the difficulty of drawing a living from it, and still haunted by a historic wrong inflicted on their ancestors nearly two centuries before. Rubenstein met many people of great thoughtfulness and spirit, eager to share their worldviews, their life stories, and a wee dram or two. And as he explored the empty, rugged landscape, he came to understand the ways in which the thorny, quarrelsome qualities of the game of golf reflect the values, character, and history of the people who brought it into the world. A Season in Dornoch is both the story of one man's immersion in the game of golf and an exploration of the world from which it emerged. Part travelogue, part portraiture, part good old-fashioned tale of matches played and friendships made, it takes us on an unforgettable journey to a marvelous, moody, mystical place.

The Masters: Golf, Money, and Power in Augusta, Georgia


Curt Sampson - 1998
    It is the toughest ticket in sports, with black-market tickets selling for $10,000 and more. Success at Augusta National breeds legends, while failure can overshadow even the most brilliant of careers. But as Curt Sampson, author of the bestselling Hogan, reveals in The Masters, a cold heart beats behind the warm antebellum façade of this famous Augusta course. And that heart belongs to the man who killed himself on the grounds two decades ago. Club and tournament founder Clifford Roberts, a New York stockbroker, still seems to run the place from his grave. An elusive and reclusive figure, Roberts pulled the strings that made the Masters the greatest golf tournament in the world. His story--including his relationship with presidents, power brokers, and every golf champion from Bobby Jones to Arnold Palmer to Jack Nicklaus--has never been told. Until now.        The Masters is an amazing slice of history, taking us inside the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Augusta's most famous member. It is a look at how the new South coexists with the old South: the relationships between blacks and whites, between Southerners and Northerners, between rich and poor--with such characters as James Brown, the Godfather of Soul; the great boxer Beau Jack; and Frank Stranahan, the playboy golfer and the only white pro ever banned from the tournament. The Masters is a spellbinding portrait of a tournament unlike any other.

Flatbellies


Alan Berch Hollingsworth - 2001
    It's about life. Set in a small Oklahoma town in the mid-1960s—a simple place in a confusing time—Flatbellies is partly about the seemingly unreachable goal of a high school golf team: to win the state championship. But mostly it's about the way Chipper, Jay, L.K., Buster, the unforgettable Peachy, and their friends learn to deal with love, loss, friendship, fear, triumph, tragedy, growing up, and growing together. Fictionalized from the author's teenage years in the heartland of America, Flatbellies is a memorable and moving coming-of-age story.

If I Don't Six


Elwood Reid - 1998
    Elwood Reid first appeared on the literary stage with a powerful and bruising story called "What Salmon Know," which appeared in the March 1997 issue of GQ.  Here was a writer not afraid to examine the soulful underside of the American male, or the violence that accompanies disappointed dreams.  Now, in his first, extraordinary novel, Reid tells the story of Elwood Riley, a six-foot-six, 275-pound blue-collar kid whose ticket out of Cleveland is a "full ride" football scholarship to the University of Michigan.But Riley is cursed with intelligence and an awareness of the vicious inhumanity of the college football system.  If Riley doesn't want to "six"--lose his scholarship or get maimed--he has to become a "fella," a pain-loving freak too nihilistic to care what he does to himself or others.  And after Riley encounters the alluring, mysteriously damaged Kate, his dilemma becomes ever more painful.Elwood Reid's portrait of this world is at once blackly humorous, starkly tragic, and perfectly detailed.  With deft strokes, he portrays emotionally stunted coaches who have mastered the art of humiliating and manipulating young men, groupies attracted to the fame but undone by the shocking cruelty of the players, and the athletes themselves, who grow addicted to violence, alcohol, and steroids, too caught up in the glory of playing for Big Blue to notice they are mere meat to the coaches and the university.In tough, spare, beautiful prose that should invite comparisons to the works of Thom Jones and Denis Johnson, Reid describes a place where young men damage their souls and their bodies in pursuit of a worthless glamor.  This is a profound, unsettling book about a familiar yet hidden world--a Greek tragedy in cleats.

Final Rounds: A Father, a Son, the Golf Journey of a Lifetime


James Dodson - 1996
    So it seemed only appropriate when his father learned he had two months to live that they would set off on the golf journey of their dreams to play the most famous courses in the world.Final Rounds takes us to the historic courses of Royal Lytham and Royal Birkdale, to the windswept undulations of Carnoustie, where Hogan played peerlessly in '53, and the legendary St. Andrews, whose hallowed course reveals something of the eternal secret of the game's mysterious allure over pros and hackers alike.Throughout their poignant journey, the Dodsons humorously reminisce and reaffirm their love for each other, as the younger Dodson finds out what it means to have his father also be his best friend. Final Rounds is a book never to be forgotten, a book about fathers and sons, long-held secrets, and the lessons a middle-aged man can still learn from his dad about life, love, and family.Final Rounds is a tribute to a very special game and the fathers and sons who make it so.

The Game for a Lifetime: More Lessons and Teachings


Harvey Penick - 1996
    A return to the timeless wisdom that has made his first bestseller, Harvey Penick's Little Red Book, a modern classic, The Game for a Lifetime does not contain the technical swing tips and stance aids of today's instructional guides, but dispenses a philosophy on golf, and on life. Harvey Penick knew that the teachings in his book would stand the test of time, and he spent his lifetime pursuing and enjoying all that the game has to offer—physically, emotionally, and spiritually. The Game for a Lifetime, the final book by Harvey Penick, stands as a wonderful testimonial to this legendary career, his celebrated teaching style, and his ability to affect the lives of the people who had the good fortune to know him.

The Golfer's Carol


Robert Bailey - 2020
    Four heroes. Four life-changing lessons.On the morning of his fortieth birthday, Randy Clark believes the only way he can help his family is to end it all. Standing on the Tennessee River Bridge in Decatur, Alabama, with his dreams of a pro golf career long gone, his marriage struggling, and facing financial ruin, Randy sees no other alternative to help his wife and daughter but to jump, which he plans to do in the next twenty-four hours.But his plans are put on hold when the ghost of his best friend--who did live out the fantasy of playing the PGA tour--reveals to Randy that he will be given a wonderful gift: four rounds of golf with his four heroes, the champions he's looked up to his whole life, each with a life-changing lesson to impart.For anyone who has ever dealt with tragedy, adversity, or failure, The Golfer's Carol will bring grace that stays with you long after you've turned the last page.

Dave Pelz's Putting Bible: The Complete Guide to Mastering the Green


Dave Pelz - 2000
    Once golfers grasp his concepts, they can perform on the greens as never before.Using decades of scientific research from studying thousands of golfers, Dave shows readers the simplicity of putting that escapes most golfers and lays out the fifteen well-defined building blocks of the putting game that each of us already has and owns. This comprehensive guide from the internationally revered master of the short game and putting game--packed with charts, photos, and easy-to-understand instruction--will be the essential volume for all golfers who want to take strokes off their score with better putting. A former NASA physicist and founder of the World Putting Championship, Dave brings a scientific rigor to his instruction that has made him the top putting expert in the world.  Observing and teaching thousands of golfers to better their scores, Dave's body of knowledge in putting is unequaled.  By uncovering the mysteries of this part of the game, Dave Pelz's Putting Bible raises putting instruction to a new level.Dave Pelz's Scoring Game Schools and clinics are renowned worldwide, attracting top players like Jesper Parnevik, Tom Kite, Colin Montgomerie, two-time U.S. Open Champion Lee Janzen, Vijay Singh, Steve Elkington, and many LPGA players including Annika Sorenstam and Liselotte Neumann.