The pick this month, in honor of another PGA Tour season, is:
Here’s the back cover description:
Think country-club clinic meets Navy Seals training. I will pay any price, bear any burden, leave my home to follow the seasons, build my own swing studio in the basement, construct a practice green in my backyard. . . . Everything the big boys have access to, I want double. Like most amateur golfers, Tom Coyne had often wondered whether the pros won because they were more talented or because they were more obsessed. Overweight and burdened by a 14 handicap, he decided to find out for himself what it takes to play like a pro.
Charting his journey which included hiring top golf gurus such as Dr. Jim Suttie,Paper Tiger takes readers from the Michelob tournament (a win for Tom) to the Australian Tour, where forty-mile-per-hour winds and a driving rain scare off his Japanese partners. With each chapter, he tracks his weight alongside his handicap, pursuing his dream with a reckless abandon that comes to involve hardcore diets, pricey technology, even psychologists. With echoes of Dead Solid Perfect and Who’s Your Caddy? Tom brings his uniquely edgy, deeply human perspective to a game that can simultaneously bring out the best and the worst in everyone who tries to master it.
I first read this book many years ago and look forward to going through it again. It remains instrumental in reinforcing just how good the guys we watch play on television actually are. As the 2018-19 Tour season kicks off, I think this is a great time to read about the journey a good player (and writer!) takes to see just how much he can advance his game in a year’s time. I celebrate all of Tom Coyne’s writing and hope you’ll give this a read, especially if you haven’t yet read anything by Tom.