The Bogey Man: A Month on the PGA Tour

Description

What happens when an average golf player joins the professional circuit for a month? George Plimpton finds out in this masterpiece of sports writing From the author of Paper Lion What happens when a weekend athlete - of average skill at best - joins the professional golf circuit? George Plimpton spent a month of self-imposed torture on the PGA tour to find out, meeting amateurs, pros, caddies, officials, fans and hangers-on along the way. In The Bogey Man we find golf legends, adventurers, stroke-saving theories, superstitions, and other golfing lore, and best of all, Plimpton's thoughts and experiences - frustrating, humbling and, sometimes, thrilling - from the first tee to the last green.

George Plimpton (1927-2003) was the bestselling author and editor of nearly thirty books, as well as the cofounder, publisher, and editor of the Paris Review. He wrote regularly for such magazines as Sports Illustrated and Esquire, and he appeared numerous times in films and on television.

Humorous but also agonizing and also unfailingly fascinating regardless of one's interest in golf. For the psychology of the sport - and this is what Mr. Plimpton is probing - there is nothing more revealing around * New York Times * Plimpton will interest even the man who can't tell a pitching wedge from a putter... This is really a book about a kind of madness with rules, and anyone can appreciate the appeal of that * Newsweek * Golf is a lonely and private game, lacking the natural drama of football, but Plimpton, by subsituting improvisation for plot, has caught its mad comedy and bizarre effects on people in a book just as charming, in its own way, as Paper Lion * Life * With his gentle, ironic tone, and unwillingness to take himself too seriously, along with Roger Angell, John Updike and Norman Mailer he made writing about sports something that mattered * Guardian * What drives these books, and has made them so popular, is Plimpton's continuous bond-making with the reader and the comedy inherent in his predicament. He is the Everyman, earnests and frail, wandering in a world of supermen, beset by fears of catastrophic violence and public humiliation, yet gamely facing it all in order to survive and tell the tale... A prodigious linguistic ability is on display throughout, with a defining image often appended at the end of a sentence like a surprise dessert. -- Timothy O'Grady * Times Literary Supplement *