Tales from Q School: Inside Golf's Fifth Major - Hardcover

Feinstein, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316014303 ISBN 13: 9780316014304

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, 2007

Synopsis

It is the tournament that separates champions from mortals. It is the starting point for the careers of future legends and can be the final stop on the down escalator for fading stars. The annual PGA Tour Qualifying Tournament is one of the most grueling competitions in any sport. Every fall, veterans and talented hopefuls sweat through six rounds of hell at Q school, as the tournament is universally known, to get a shot at the PGA Tour, vying for the 30 slots available. The grim reality: If you don't make it through Q school, you're not on the PGA tour. You're out. And those who make it to the sixday finals are the lucky ones: hundreds more players fail to get through the equally grueling first two stages of the event. John Feinstein tells the story of the players who compete for these coveted positions in the 2005 Q school as only he can. With arresting accounts from the players, established winners, rising stars, the defeated, and the endlessly hopeful, America's favorite sportswriter unearths the inside story behind the PGA Tour's brutal all-ornothing competition.

About this title

About the Author

John Feinstein is the bestselling author of Last Dance, Next Man Up, Let Me Tell You a Story (with Red Auerbach), Caddy for Life, Open, The Punch, The Last Amateurs, The Majors, A Good Walk Spoiled, A Civil War, A Season on the Brink, Play Ball, Hard Courts, and two novels. He writes for Inside Sports, Golf, Tennis Magazine and Basketball America and is a regular commentator on NPR and CBS.

Reviews

Q School (or, more formally, the PGA Tour Qualifying Tournament) is golf's Long March, the winding road that aspiring professionals must negotiate if they are to qualify to play on the PGA Tour. Even though the players in the annual event are mainly unknowns, golf fans are fascinated by the grueling, heartbreaking nature of the competition--three separate tournaments during which more than 1,000 aspirants are winnowed down to 30 qualifiers, the survivors of the 108-hole, six-day Final Stage. It's surprising, really, that it's taken the best-selling Feinstein, master of the year-in-the-life sports chronicle, this long to write about Q School. The subject is made to order for his slices-of-life approach. There's plenty of dramatic shot-by-shot reporting here, as Feinstein follows the action at the 2005 Q School, but the core of the book is taken up with getting inside the heads of the competitors, whether it's overmatched also-rans who don't know when to quit, talented rookies seemingly on the verge of great careers, or former champions struggling to hang on one more year. (Masters winner Larry Mize says it all for the last group: "It's been a long time since I had to put my golf shoes on in the parking lot.") What makes this account so compelling is the way Feinstein drives home the point recreational golfers know all too well: golf is, above all, a humbling, even humiliating, game. Bill Ott
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Edition details

• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0316014303
• ISBN 13: 9780316014304
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 343