Review by Booklist Review
Feinstein hit the ground running with A Season on the Brink (1986), his best-selling account of a year with Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight. Since then, his subjects have included professional tennis (Hard Courts, 1991) and major-league baseball (Play Ball, 1993); now he turns his microscope on pro golf. What separates Feinstein's year-in-the-life accounts of professional sports from many other, similarly constructed overviews is the way he manages to get inside the heads of the competitors. Intending neither to crucify nor to sanctify, he shows us both the inner and outer lives of the athletes, transforming them from heroes or villains into the kind of multidimensional characters you expect to find in good fiction. Along with revealing profiles of the game's big names--Norman, Price, Watson--Feinstein's sojourn through the 1994 PGA tour also offers remarkable glimpses of the marginal players who struggle to first qualify for the tour and then maintain their tenuous places on it. It's a fascinating look at a category of pro athlete unlike any other: no fixed salary, no guaranteed appearance fee, no meal money, no celebrity; only the dream of competing successfully with the "big boys." (Interestingly, one of Feinstein's unknowns, Brian Henninger, recently made his breakthrough, first qualifying for the Masters and then leading the tournament after the third round.) What emerges most forcefully from Feinstein's investigation is a sense of just how incredibly difficult the game of golf is for competitors at all levels: "No game is more imprecise, more elusive. The greatest players alive wake up most mornings having no idea whether the day will produce a 65 or a 75. If they have a gut feeling, it will be wrong nine times out of ten." Golfers of all ages simply won't be able to put this book down; it compares to all the other volumes written about the PGA tour like Jack Nicklaus in his prime compares to your local club champion. --Bill OttTwo superb new mysteries look behind the classical ambience of Florence and Venice to find a uniquely decadent brand of crime.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
To Mark Twain, golf was ``a good walk spoiled,'' but to the 200 or so top professional players, it is a sometimes lucrative but always nerve-wracking career in which this week's hero can be next week's bum, and in which athletes have only themselves to blame if they fail. Feinstein's (A Season on the Brink) lively and anecdotal style makes for an interesting read but cannot overcome the 1990s' objection to the sportthat there is no superstar of the stature of Arnold Palmer or Jack Nicklaus to capture the public's fancy. So although there are media favorites such as Greg Norman, there are many outstanding players (Davis Love III, Paul Azinger) whom Feinstein brings to life here but who fail to generate the excitement of the greats. Feinstein, kind and upbeat, also points out that, almost without exception, golfers share a political viewpoint that is far to the right of Rush Limbaugh, with much self-pity for the taxes they have to pay on their six-and seven-figure incomes. Photos not seen by PW. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Golf talk from the author of the best-selling A Season on the Brink, LJ 4/15/89. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Best-selling sportswriter Feinstein (Running Mates, 1992, etc.) turns his attention to a new sport, golf, with this chronicle of a year on the men's pro tour. Golf is, by its very nature, a brutally winnowing game (as Tom Boswell once observed), a mental test as well as a physical one. At the professional level, as practiced on the PGA Tour, it is the last bastion of true athletic individualism; you win or lose because of your own efforts, with no teammates or coaches to blame. Moreover, in order to make any money at all on the pro tour, you have to play well. Unlike tennis, there are no appearance fees, and you have to survive the cut after two days of a tournament to collect a check. Therefore, there is a certain amount of inherent drama in the lives and games of the pros. Feinstein has chosen wisely in his subjects, a wide range of successful and not-so- successful players, from Davis Love III, who overcame memories of his father's death in a plane crash to score the decisive victory for the US in the Ryder Cup, to Paul Azinger fighting cancer. Some of the best moments in the book, however, are provided by lesser- known golfers like Brian Henninger and Paul Goydos, who are struggling just to stay on the Tour. Feinstein isn't the best prose stylist or the most poetic or humorous sportswriter in America; what he does better than anybody else is to make you understand the complex mix of psychology, group dynamics, and political pressures that make athletes tick. Although too much of the second half of the book turns into a monotonous replaying of individual rounds of golf, for the most part A Good Walk Spoiled (Twain's description of golf) is an insightful look at one of our best games. It's not A Season on the Brink, but even baseball stalwarts languishing for a sports fix might find this compulsively readable. (17 b&w photos, not seen)
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
