Books for the Golf Professional

     The following are a list of books that should be of interest to all golf professionals.

Elegy for a Golf Pro
Written by Dexter Westrum

     A poignant portrait of the author's father. "Deeply moving, funny, and authentic."-- Bud Shrake, coauthor Harvey Penick's Little Red Book

Chasing the Dream: A Mid-Life Quest for Fame and Fortune on the Pro Golf Circuit
Written by Harry Hurt III

     At 18, Harry Hurt's goal was to become a pro golfer. At 19, he virtually gave up the game. Almost a quarter century later, now an accomplished journalist, he went out again on a quixotic quest to make the golf tour. He got his wish--on a secondary circuit for over-40s--but, as they say, be careful what you wish for. Hurt's recounting of his year is filled with frustration, a scorecard's worth of admitted self-deception, and just enough triumph to keep him going. His prose captures highs and lows well, and his narrative offers some engaging insight into the mindset of professional golf, and some of the teachers and players--including Greg Norman, Ben Crenshaw, and Fred Couples--he meets, and learns from, as he navigates his impracticable course

Increasing Your Pro Shop's Bottom Line
Ngf Infopacs

Rookie on Tour: The Education of a Golfer
Written by Carl Paulson, Louis Janda

     An unusual perspective on the grinding routines of the pro golf circuit: A rookie player recalls his road to the PGA Tour and his first years' experience playing with the big boys. Paulson was a moderately successful junior golfer, earning a four-year golf scholarship to the University of South Carolina, where he was an All-America selectee. Turning pro and winning big on the tour should be a piece of cake, right? Hardly. As Paulson and co-author Janda (Psychology/Old Dominion Univ.) explain.

Q School Confidential : Inside Golf's Cruelest Tournament
Written by David Gould

     There is no event in golf quite like Q School. It's the grueling, six-round, end-of-the-year tournament for golf's dreamers, the mostly up-and-coming wannabes eager for a place on the tour, and the recent washouts anxious to reclaim what they see as their rightful positions. "This is one tournament," writes David Gould, an experienced golf writer, "that Samuel Beckett might have competed in.... The tournament is a specter of failure on which all the success of the pro-golf tour is built." The top few handful of finishers qualify for promotion to the PGA tour's roster of players who get to beat each other up every week for the big money and the prestige titles. Everyone else gets to go home and try again. The stakes are high, and the pressure is enormous. Given that every swing of the club has potential for disaster, the Q School story is one of some triumph, lots of despair, and bucketfuls of dark comedy.

Tin Cup Dreams : A Long Shot Makes It on the PGA Tour
Written by Michael D'Antonio

     The PGA tour needs more stories like this...Esteban Toledo is a poster child for how to make it." --Peter Jacobson, six-time PGA tour winner What kind of passion propels a man, against all odds, to the top of the world of golf? What is life really like inside the pressure cooker that is the PGA tour? The answers come to life in the remarkable golf odyssey artfully rendered in Tin Cup Dreams. At the grueling Q. school, a ragtag collection of thirty-something pros overcome every obstacle golf can throw in their way to win a spot on the PGA tour. But now their test is only beginning. To make it, they must succeed against the best players in the world. Tin Cup Dreams follows them for the season, focusing on a self-taught golfer named Esteban Toledo, an unlikely hero from a literally dirt-poor background. With uncommon grit and determination, Toledo triumphs where others fail, and along the way teaches us about mastering the mental side of the game, about ignoring the odds, and about when to lay up and when to go for it. Traditionally golf was a dreamer's path to glory. Tin Cup Dreams, one of the most intimate and exciting books ever written about golf, shows that it still is.

The Fine Green Line : My Year of Adventure on the Pro-Golf Mini-Tours
Written by John Paul Newport

     What happens when a man obsessed with golf leaves home for a year to pursue his dream? This is the story of that journey. One day when John Paul Newport was in his mid-thirties, he attended a corporate outing at a golf course. He had hacked around on the fairways for a couple of summers as a kid, but had always found other sports, especially football, more compelling. Golf was a game he had played only a handful of times in the past twenty years. But that day on the course he more or less accidentally nailed a drive more than 300 yards. The feeling he had as he watched the ball soar was incredible--grace, power, and purity combined. Much to his surprise, he was hooked. Within a month he had bought a set of clubs--the first he'd ever owned--and discovered he had a knack for the game. With practice, his scores improved steadily, until one day two years later, he miraculously shot a three-under-par 69. This amazing experience triggered all sorts of questions in his mind: How was such a round possible? Having shot 69 once, what prevented him from shooting 69 every time? In golf, as elsewhere in life, why is one so consistently incapable of fulfilling one's clearly established potential? Projecting into the world of professional golf, he wondered what was it that allowed some pros to stay at the top of the PGA Tour golf rankings year after year while others with seemingly just as much talent got stuck in the bush leagues? In pursuit of some answers, John Paul Newport spent a year playing in the bush leagues himself, the dark, comic underbelly of professional golf. This is a world in which even highly talented players sometimes live out of their cars, sneak food from country clubs, and gamble away their meager earnings in an attempt to stay afloat. But it is also the world many top pros--including John Daly, Paul Azinger, and Tom Lehman--first had to conquer before becoming the stars they did. Newport's year culminated in a bold, some might say ill-advised effort to make it through the PGA Tour's infamous Q School.