Just in time for Father’s Day, a new golf book is out by Michael Bamberger, the award-winning golf writer and journalist who spent 22 years at Sports Illustrated (in its glory days) and is now found at Golf.com. Simply put, Bamberger is one of the best golf scribes around. His books are a must-read. After his first book appeared, none other than John Updike, the late esteemed novelist and avid golfer, contacted him and asked to meet him, so impressed was he by Bamberger’s writing.
Titled The Playing Lesson: A Duffer’s Year Among the Pros, Bamberger delivers a rollicking adventure by playing in various pro-ams across the country in 2024. In the process, he mines nuggets of insights and lessons from a host of names and journeyman pros, insiders, and devotees of the game. The author converses with Lucas Glover, Ernie Els, Jake Knapp (who won his first tournament last season), David Feherty, Brad Faxon, Greg Norman, Tom Doak, Robert Garrigus, his longtime friend Mike Donald, and many others..
Donald, born in Grand Rapids, MI, is a cult-like figure in the game, having played in 550 Tours starting in 1980 and winning once. He’s best known for being runner-up in the 1990 U.S. Open at Medinah, where he lost to Hale Irwin in the Open’s first-ever sudden-death playoff after being tied in the Monday 18-hole playoff. I covered that Open and was inwardly pulling for Donald, wondering at the time, along with many of my colleagues, why we had to wait 24 hours for a sudden-death playoff.
Early on, Bamberger sets down the motivation for the book: “I’m on a mission, in my life, and in these pages. I’m seeking the wonder of golf, wherever it may be.”
He admits to modeling himself after George Plimpton, the celebrated writer of the Baby Boomer generation, famous for his Walter Mitty-type articles and books in which he embedded himself among famous athletes and artists—a forerunner of “participatory journalism.” Among golf aficionados, Plimpton is best known for writing The Bogey Man, Plimpton’s comical and embarrassing exploits playing among Tour pros for three weeks in 1966.
Like Plimpton, Bamberger is a gifted and facile writer, and unlike Plimpton, he has a much higher golf IQ. (Incidentally, I disliked the inclusion of the inappropriate and lame use of “duffer” in the title.) But they are both equally entertaining.
Here are some of the gems I noted and relished while reading:
In writing about green reading tips, he remembered talking to Lee Trevino about his famous and enormous caddie, Herman Mitchell. “All putts break toward Herman,” cracked Trevino.
Regarding golfers’ superstitions, he discovered that Jack Nicklaus wore the same lucky pants all four days to win the U.S. Open in the summer heat at Oakmont in 1962.
President of the USGA, Fred Perpall, offered this advice about those PGA Tour players who left for the LIV Tour: “Let them go. It’s hard to confer the value of what you have to people who don’t appreciate that value.”
About the allure of playing competitive golf, Bamberger writes: “When you’re playing a match or in a tournament, the course comes alive, and your opponents do, too; your head gets in it, and so does the rest of you.”
Comparing Minor League baseball players versus their counterparts in golf: “Baseball players have to prove themselves to coaches, managers, general managers and owners. In golf, you don’t have anyone to approve you…to advance all you have to do, and all you can do, is to shoot the scores.”
As someone who has covered a number of Masters, I loved this nifty word picture of some Masters patrons and VIPs seen under the famed oak tree between the clubhouse and the first tee: “It’s a gathering place for the embroidered-belt crowd, plus a few lucky stragglers.” Priceless.
After conversing with the staffers of the Tour equipment vans seen at Tour stops, Bamberger writes: “The equipment guys, for all their tech, are about the last vestige of the old tour, when the tour was a tour, and your life was on the road.”
My favorite quote and one most telling about why certain players make it on Tour and others fall by the wayside, is this one by Ryan French, aka ‘The Monday Q guy’ who’s a maven tracking the journey of Tour aspirants: “The players who make it have a superior ability to identify where they are weak, in body, in mind, in technique. And then they do something about it.”
There are several surprises in the book, including how Bamberger played golf with French in his hometown of Alpena, MI, where they competed in The City Open, a two-day event with one round on the city course and one round at the country club. You also learned another backstory about when Greg Norman unfairly accused fellow Tour player Mark McCumber of cheating at a tournament in the 1990s.
Sometimes, the book and Bamberger ramble and get sidetracked, but Bamberger never loses his way. His compass is fixed:
“The search for golf, real golf, our golf.”
