The Fine Green Line: My Year of Adventure on the Pro-Golf Mini-Tours

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.

Traveling and competing throughout Florida, the Northeast, the Dakotas, and California, refining his game and consulting numerous "head coaches" and psychologists, Newport realized his number one goal was to solve the mystery of what he calls the Fine Green Line—that infinitely subtle yet critical difference that separates golf's top players from their nearest pursuers, but that also applies to golfers all up and down the ability spectrum. He also struggled to find meaning in the game that had become his obsession. As he questioned the people he encountered—from Eastern consciousness guru Michael Murphy to successful young Tour players like Kevin Sutherland—about practicing better golf, Newport realized that the answers he was given were also about practicing better life.

A compelling personal journey that captures many of the fears, frustrations, and elations of midlife, both on and off the course, The Fine Green Line is also a rich, honest, rollicking narrative set in a golf world few people know. It will appeal to anyone either afflicted or confounded by golf's mysterious tug.

John Paul Newport is a contributing editor for Maximum Golf and has also written for Men's Journal, Sports Illustrated, Golf, Golf Digest, Fortune, and numerous other magazines. He lives with his wife and daughter in Nyack, New York.