Tales from Q School: Inside Golf's Fifth Major
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 six day 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-or-nothing competition.Product Details
Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
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
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
It's clearly a book for golf junkies, maybe een golf wonks. Feinstein introduces such minute details about tournaments that at times it's hard to follow his reading. And this is the abridged version! The stories themselves soemtimes lack the kind of dramatic structure that lets the listener know when one ends and another starts. The author is accepted as narrator, but his volume seldom varies, so it's sometimes difficult to perceive when he's stressing a point.
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.
Customer Reviews
Marginal
Feinstein collects the best "Q-School stories" in this entertaining, if uneven, book. Q-School is the tournament marginal golfers must excel in to make it back to the PGA Tour. The lesson Feinstein teaches is that nearly every golfer is marginal at some point (and often at many points) in his career, so all roads lead to Q-School.
Q-School stories fascinate professional golfers for obvious reasons. But they also fascinate the average reader, who can identify with the challenges one often faces to keep ones status in life and to the insecurity that defines our current economy. To paraphrase Hemingway, the best and truest stories always end in death -- in this case death of the golfer's PGA Tour hopes.
The stories are fascinating, particularly given the maddening unpredictability of golf that is aggravated by the ridiculous shortness of one tournament and by the immense pressure on the golfers. One wonders why golfers put up with this. Why is it that the monetary payout is so skewed between the privileged few who make the "major" league of any sport and the barely-paid many who languish in the "minor" leagues? The difference in talent level is often razor thin. There seems something uniquely American about such a brutal meritocracy, but Feinstein does not explore it.
The book tells Q-School stories in a meandering and disorganized fashion until the end, when the stories from one-year's tournament are collected in one telling, and an epilogue is included. More concerning than the disorganization is Feinstein's failure to do what he did so well in his earlier books, such as "The Punch", when he was able to tell the story and backgrounds of the athletes so well that the reader is left with real empathy and affection for them. This requires an incredible amount of work by the journalist, and one suspects that Feinstein's latest books are simply researched and written too fast.
The topic is too interesting, and Feinstein too good a writer, to give this book a bad review. But Feinstein's letting his standards slip.
No more bogey cliches'
It seems no one writing a bad review of this book can stop themselves from describing it as either a double or triple bogey. I'll continue in theis vein. While certainly not an eagle or a birdie. it's a solid par. The stories have so much drama, it sometimes made me quake like standing over a 6' putt to win the club championship. Very few of us get to feel the pressure these players are under. The many years of work are on the line and the hopes and dreams of themselves and loved ones. Feinstein is a great sports writer. While this book is far from his best, it is still rife with the sweat and tears of professionals written with a big heart.
Ron Lealos author of Don't Mean Nuthin'
Q School
Couldn't put it down. If you're a golfer this is a must read. If you aren't a golfer, but like real drama this is also for you. Feinstein gives you everything you need to understand it all and be intrigued. He's a terrific writer.
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