Tales from Q School


Book Description

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.




Open


Book Description

Tiger Woods has called the U.S. Open "the most difficult national championship." With Open, John Feinstein goes behind the scenes to tell for the first time the full story of how the 2002 U.S. Open Championship came into being-how a public course was transformed into one of the most difficult and surprising in the tournament's history, and how the greatest golfers in the world rose to its almost insurmountable challenges. The Black course at the public golf club in Bethpage, New York, has long had a mythic status among golfers. Designed by legendary course architect A. W. Tillinghast in 1936, it is known as a work of genius-with long fairways, gorgeous vistas, and roughs and bunkers that stymie all but the very best golfers. It is a course where any player can compete, but its cult reputation means that golfers often have to camp overnight in the parking lot to get a tee time the next day. The 2002 U.S. Open at Bethpage Black was the first time in history that golf's greatest championship had been held at a true public course. Open is the full drama of that championship, from the moment that officials first considered holding it there until the last putt rolled in at dusk on Sunday. Along the way, John Feinstein reveals the full glory of golf as it's never been explored before. He digs deep to find out what it really takes to make golf's most famous event worthy of the champions who compete in it. He tells the remarkable story of the artisans who transformed the Black from a downtrodden and rough-around-the-edges public course to one that top pros hailed as "unbelievable" and "the toughest par-70 I've ever played in my life." He also tracks the drama of the masters who battled for supremacy at the Black-Tiger Woods, Sergio Garcia, Nick Faldo, Phil Mickelson, Jeff Maggert-to show how true champions respond to the toughest conditions. Open is the story of people who devote their entire lives to golf, both behind the scenes and inside the ropes. Their struggles and exhilarations as they master the monster known as Bethpage Black make for a story every golf lover will want to read again and again.




Are You Kidding Me?


Book Description

June 2008's US Open produced one of the most unexpected and dramatic showdowns in golf history. Day after day the invincible Tiger Woods was challenged by Rocco Mediate, a respected journeyman. On Sunday, both ended play tied at par, forcing a playoff. Defying expectations, Mediate played Woods to yet another tie, losing only after forcing a sudden-death showdown. Through it all, Rocco Mediate emerged as one of the most likable, open, and fascinating golfers. In Are You Kidding Me?, he tells the full story of these five life-changing days. With John Feinstein, whose insider knowledge of the golf world is unparalleled, Mediate relives one of sport's greatest feats, how one man overcame every obstacle to challenge the game's finest.




A March to Madness


Book Description

It's the book in which America's favorite sportswriter returns to the arena of his most successful bestseller, A Season on the Brink. It's the book that takes us inside the intensely competitive Atlantic Coast Conference & paints a portrait of how college baskettball is coached & played at the highest level. It's the book that takes us onto the courts, into the locker rooms, & inside the high-pressure world of the talented coaches who have helped make the ACC's nine colleges - Duke, North Carolina, North Carolina State, Clemson, Georgia Tech, Virginia, Maryland, Wake Forest, & Florida State - world-renowned for their championship basketball teams. The author's afterword to this edition will recap the ACC's current season & preview the 1998-99 rivalries.




Paper Tiger


Book Description

Traces the author's year-long attempt to earn a competitor's spot at the PGA Tour Qualifying School, an endeavor marked by such challenges as crash diets, sports psychiatrists, and obscure tournaments.




The First Major


Book Description

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Good Walk Spoiled, a dramatic chronicle of the bitterly-fought 2016 Ryder Cup pitting a U.S. team out for revenge against the Europeans determined to keep the Cup out of American hands. Coming into 2016, the Americans had lost an astounding six out of the last seven Ryder Cup matches, and tensions were running high for the showdown that took place in October, 2016 in Hazeltine, Minnesota, just days after American legend Arnold Palmer had died. What resulted was one of the most raucous and heated three days in the Cup's long history. Award-winning author John Feinstein takes readers behind the scenes, providing an inside view of the dramatic stories as they unfolded: veteran Phil Mickelson's two-year roller-coaster as he upended the American preparation process and helped assemble a superb team; superstar Rory McIlroy becoming the clear-cut emotional leader of the European team, and his reasons for wanting to beat the US team so badly this time around; the raucous matches between McIlroy and American Patrick Reed - resulting in both incredible golf, and several moments that threatened to come to blows; the return of Tiger Woods not as a player but an assistant captain, and his obsession with helping the US win - which was never the case when he was playing. John Feinstein's classic bestseller, A Good Walk Spoiled, set the bar for golf books. Now Feinstein provides his unique take on the Ryder Cup, which has clearly become golf's most intense and emotional event...it's 'first Major.'




The Little Green Book of Tennis


Book Description

Golf is a disease, not a game. Especially when you take the game up in your fifties, as I did. After a series of injuries stopped my recreational tennis play, and my retirement from a lifetime of coaching and teaching tennis, I tried golf. It didn't take long to realize it was not an easy endeavor. Someone said, "You can't learn anything from a golf book, but you have to read a lot of golf books to find that out!" I found the gurus of golf instruction: Ledbetter, Pelz, and Hogan, who was said to have written the book with the secret! I did find one that really attracted me but in a somewhat different way.




Q School Confidential


Book Description

In 1999, the PGA TOUR Qualifying Tournament---known to many as Q School---found itself sitting on 35 years of unique history. Q School Confidential chronicles this tournament's deep, dense story of heartbreak, black humor, back-room politics and magnificent golf under dire circumstances. Using the 1998 PGA TOUR Qualifying School finals as his backdrop, golf writer David Gould recounts for the first time ever the history of the pro tour's annual qualifier, with revealing anecdotes about raw rookies, aging veterans and every dreamer in between. The vintage stories in the Q School's near and distant past tell of emotional and physical breakdown---and courage, as well---under pressure: Jim Carter's self-confessed "choke stories" of 1990 and 1992; Mark McCumber's recurring lost-scorecard nightmare; Peter Jacobsen's ordeal with a cheater on the Mexican border; Jim McLean's bizarre arrest on the qualifier's eve; and Mac O'Grady's violent celebration of his long-awaited Q School success. The players captured in these pages turn white with panic, vomit their breakfast, sleep in their cars, practice on interstate ranges, lose golf shoes, forget contact lenses and make fateful decisions based on faulty information. Sifting back through several eras, Gould explains the innocent aims of the first Q Schools and uncovers the tournament's pivotal role in the momentous split-up of the PGA and the PGA TOUR. He examines the difficult question of how professional golf should go about bringing in new players and letting former players regain their privileges. In the voices of forgotten or never-known tour pros from the 1970s, he narrates the frustrating "rabbit era" that Q School helped create, and revisits the infamous "breakaway Q School" of 1968. In notes that accompany this book's exclusive year-by-year scoring records, the author picks out hidden turning points, bits of trivia and strange coincidences in the lives of tour players past and present. These profiles and snapshots of the earliest Q School survivors and the most recent graduates, as well, are woven together in a warm, engaging and insightful narrative. Q School Confidential, sometimes bleak, sometimes triumphant, provides the first and only inside look at a cruel and unusual tournament that many consider golf's toughest test of all.




Making the Cut


Book Description

The success of the PGA Tour lies in the compelling stories of the individual quests for achievement--making the tournament cut, winning a tournament, qualifying for the FedEx Cup Playoffs, and the ultimate challenge of making it onto the Tour, where victory is often determined by a single stroke. Based on interviews with more than twenty professional golfers, this book provides new insight into the PGA Tour system, the events affecting tournament outcomes, and the career-changing opportunities that result.




Coyote Tales


Book Description

Two tales, set in a time “when animals and human beings still talked to each other,” display Thomas King’s cheeky humor and master storytelling skills. Freshly illustrated and reissued as an early chapter book, these stories are perfect for newly independent readers. In Coyote Sings to the Moon, Old Woman and the animals sing to the moon each night. Coyote attempts to join them, but his voice is so terrible they beg him to stop. He is crushed and lashes out — who needs Moon anyway? Furious, Moon dives into a pond, plunging the world into darkness. But clever Old Woman comes up with a plan to send Moon back up into the sky and, thanks to Coyote, there she stays. In Coyote’s New Suit, mischievous Raven wreaks havoc when she suggests that Coyote’s toasty brown suit is not the finest in the forest, thus prompting him to steal suits belonging to all the other animals. Meanwhile, Raven tells the other animals to borrow clothes from the humans’ camp. When Coyote finds that his closet is too full, Raven slyly suggests he hold a yard sale, then sends the human beings (in their underwear) and the animals (in their ill-fitting human clothes) along for the fun. A hilarious illustration of the consequences of wanting more than we need. Key Text Features table of contents illustrations Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.2.5 Describe the overall structure of a story, including describing how the beginning introduces the story and the ending concludes the action.