Heatin' Words

by Victor Williams

Tales From Q School: Inside Golf’s Fifth Major
By John Feinstein
328 pages | Little, Brown | $26.99 Hardback
John Feinstein is the Tiger Woods of modern golf writers: All business, a prose style devoid of extraneous moves or flashiness, a pure and focused objective: To get his job done as cleanly and efficiently as possible. The Washington Post regular set such a journalistic tone in A Good Walk Spoiled, The Majors  and Open, and it serves him well in his newest PGA Tour tome, Tales From Q School. By avoiding melodrama or a judgmental tone (he’s by nature incapable of either), Feinstein manages to imbue the Tour’s annual three-stage qualifying crucible with a certain gritty drama, and the West Coast, both its places and people, play a solid supporting role — as do youngsters looking to make their first mark at the big show.

By documenting the 2005 competition, which ended in with a breezy six-round final in Orlando, Fla., he reacquaints us with Tour multi-winners like Dan Forsman, a seven-time champ, and Larry Mize, perhaps the nicest guy in golf who shocked the world with his Shark-beating chip-in at the 1987 Masters. Both return to the “Q” looking for one last shot at the main stage. He follows guys like Steven Gangluff, almost-stars like J.B. Holmes and hard-luckers like Jaxon Brigman, whose story of woe derailed his budding career and so engrosses the author that he returns to it again and again. It’s that heartbreaking, that revealing of golf’s vicious vagaries — and emblematic of the book’s main weakness: repetition, as if Feinstein has a page quota he’s gotta make, hell or high water hazard. Still, his methodical and unadorned look at golf’s most pressure-packed annual rite of passage — its history, quirks, surprising personalities and stunning turns of fate — adds up to a brisk and involving read. You come away wishing you could experience the madness and crushing pressure just once, if only to make your real-life job seem pretty damned good, and your real golfing life more than adequate.

The Scorecard Always Lies
By Chris Lewis
305 pages | Free Press | $26 Hardback
Whereas Feinstein spends most of his new tome on one six-round event, frequent Sports Illustrated contributor Chris Lewis pounds through 30 weeks of the 2006 PGA Tour season, following the world’s top players and also-rans alike from tournament to tournament with one explicit goal: To show how these guys really are. He puts all his journalistic skill to work here, positioning himself in just the right spots to catch choice bits of dialog among players, give us peeks into locker room battles (such as the well-publicized Philly Mick-Vijay Masters showdown), gets juicy after-hours scoops (such as Chris Couch’s tattoo parlor detour during the Zurich Classic) and conjures pithy, revealing commentary on the caddies, family members and friends who define PGA Tour stars’ lives on and off the course. Lewis is a better writer than Feinstein, employing novelistic detail and painting sharp pictures of pampered athletes in their element — bringing them more alive, warts and all, than any SportsCenter or Golf Channel sound bite could ever do. And he’s an expert interviewer; he even gets the famously recalcitrant Tiger to open up here and there. From the Mercedes Championships in Hawaii through the Ryder Cup and the Fall Finish, Lewis manages to set a fitting scene at every course, giving each event its own personality. And he doesn’t hesitate to hint at which players he prefers to hang with, though he’s even-handed with his praise, condemnation and moments of arch humor. The Scorecard Always Lies is like one long “60 Minutes” segment, and that’s a good thing. Even Mike Wallace would approve.

The Seven Principles of Golf: Mastering the Mental Game On and Off the Golf Course
By Darrin Gee
127 pages | Stewart, Tabori & Chang | $26.99 Hardback
Based on Hawaii’s Big Island, Gee is an MBA graduate with a head for business but a soul tuned into golf’s mysterious side. He put one FG reporter through his Spirit of Golf Academy a couple of years ago — a four-hour tour into the game’s mental side, complete with visualization and relaxation techniques — and now he’s crystallized his teachings into a great little book that, in the end, scrapes away the technical mumbo-jumbo that bogs down most instruction books and blows a dose of fresh island air through the reader’s attitude. From the first principle, “Get Grounded,” through the last, “Transform Your Golf Game, Transform Your Life” (where he takes his tenets well beyond the course), Gee wakes the reader up and, in a straightforward and conversational tone, ushers him through techniques to develop feel, visualization techniques, pre-shot ritual, finding a natural swing and that old but overlooked chestnut, playing one shot at a time. He ends every chapter with simple exercises and illustrates them with artwork reminiscent of Ben Hogan’s “Five Lessons.” If you can’t chill out, concentrate and let your favorite summer pastime flow through you after reading this book, you’re not paying attention. So read it again and get in Gee’s relaxing groove.

Quick Flips
Money Golf: 600 Years of Bettin’ on Birdies by Michael K. Bohn (Potomac, $25.95) packs everything you’d ever want to know about golf’s gambling side into 255 pages, and it’s fascinating stuff. Bohn zeroes in on the wagering habits of the game’s greats, from Sarazen and Hogan to Mickelson, and goes even further back to golf’s rough-and-tumble Scottish roots, where peons and royalty alike would lay it down. The book  ends with a slew of popular betting games, just so you’re ready the next time someone says, “game on.”

Bobby Jones and the Quest for the Grand Slam by Catherine M. Lewis (Triumph Books, $19.95 paperback) is the latest in a lengthy queue of books commemorating Jones’ epic feat of 75 years ago. Lewis, a golf curator at the Atlanta History Center, chronicles that magical year of 1930 when the world’s greatest amateur golfer and Masters patriarch pulled off the impossible. Jack Nicklaus wrote the foreword, and no doubt Tiger will pick up a copy for inspiration.

Teach Yourself Visually Golf  (Wiley, $24.99) joins a long list of written-by-committee manuals in the Visual “Read Less-Learn More” series, which also cover computer software and other modern pursuits. Decked out with full color photos over its 200 pages, the book gives amazingly in-depth overviews of great golf courses and architectural highlights, then dives clubhead-first into the nuts and bolts of swing fundamentals, types of shots, playing strategies, course management, etiquette and more. It’s designed for the rank amateur, but its quick-glance layout makes it useful for practiced hands, too.  FG