Hitting the road in pursuit of golf, albeit for different reasons, is the subject of three entertaining books: Sean Zak spent three months Searching in St. Andrews (Triumph Books, $28) hoping to find a deeper meaning to golf. Michael Bamberger spent a year looking for tips to help his game in The Playing Lesson (Avid Reader Press, $30). And Cayce Kerr spent decades Walking With Greatness as a caddie on the professional tours (Triumph Books, $30).
A fourth title, James Sitar’s The Golf Courses of New England (Back Nine Press, $89.99) will whet your appetite for your own journey.
The overreaching subtitle of Zak’s book is “Finding the Meaning of Golf During the Game’s Most Turbulent Summer,” the latter phrase referring to 2022, when LIV Golf was about to hold its first tournament. Zak, soon to turn thirty, was a ten-year veteran with GOLF Magazine and Golf.com having something of a Is-this-all-there-is? career mid-life crisis.
Nothing that escaping Chicago and spending three months in the Home of Golf won’t cure, right? Well, right. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that a three-month dose of golf in and around St. Andrews rekindles Zak’s love for the game. The good news for readers is that he ably conveys all the joy entailed from his playing, traveling, pub-crawling and reporting while there.
He indeed covers the first LIV tournament with an understandable sense of discombobulation. And there’s a fine extended chapter on the 150th Open Championship when Cameron Smith virtually snatched the Claret Jug from Rory McIlroy at the Old Course.
But most of the charm of the book is outside the tournament ropes as Zak gets to know Scottish taxi drivers, meets a 91-year-old new golfer who putts daily for an hour, has coffee a couple of times with two amiable local golf blokes, breaks 80 at and falls in love with the North Berwick course (as who would not?), gets blotto at a Royal Burgess Member-Guest, has a memorable day caddying—and later imbibing—with pro Joel Dahmen, and playing in some riotous matches on the Old Course. Good fun.
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Zak refers to Michael Bamberger’s To the Linksland (the reissue of which we reviewed here), and Bamberger makes a cameo in Zak’s book. In his own new The Playing Lesson: A Duffer’s Year Among the Pros,” Bamberger cites the late George Plimpton’s The Bogey Man (the reissue of which we reviewed here).
Enough Russian dolls, although like his earlier book Bamberger is again in pursuit of help to improve his game, and he does make it back over to Scotland in the process. But most of the book involves his dipping in and out of men and women’s tournaments in the U.S. as a caddie, a pro-am player, a volunteer that, as he repeatedly says, he manages to get himself invited to.
References to Plimpton become a kind of organizing principle to the book; he keeps reappearing throughout. The Bogey Man involved Plimpton’s mostly fruitless efforts in a month hovering around the PGA Tour. Bamberger spends about a year in what he calls “Tour ‘24: Do the Loco-Motion.”
So there is a rough chronology, but it’s really a smokescreen—the structure is only there so Bamberger can drape it with anecdote after anecdote drawn from his some fifty-year love affair with and writing about golf. And the beauty of it is that they’re all gems.
Besides Plimpton we meet some characters from previous Bamberger books—former pro Mike Donald, Ryan French—the creator behind the Monday Q Info website, and many more involved in the game. And we get a lot of Arnold Palmer stories, which are tough to overdose on. (As, say, compared to Tiger Woods.) I think I’ve said this before about Bamberger’s work, but if you’re only going to read one golf book this year, make it this one.
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Cayce Kerr can also lay claim to a 50-year relationship with golf, but his perspective is as a looper. Walking With Greatness: My Caddie Life on the Tour With Fred, Fuzzy, Vijay, Tiger, and More was written with Andrew Both, and as might be expected it’s a rollicking ride from a guy who toted bags in over 1,000 tournaments on the PGA and Champions Tours.
I recently reviewed the Steve Williams account of his years with Tiger Woods, Together We Roared. Kerr lauds Williams as a superstar caddie, along with Fluff Cowen, Bones MacKay, Joe LaCava and the like. But Kerr edges Williams in the storytelling department; this is simply a far more entertaining account of the caddie life, even though Kerr keeps it mostly clean.
Kerr, something of an entrepreneur as well as a raconteur, figured out as a young man that caddying was more lucrative than his liquor store gig. And once he had a taste of looping at the Congressional Country Club near Washington he set his sights on the pro tour.
After a few jobs with various journeymen Kerr approached Hubert Green who had, fortuitously for Kerr, just fired his caddie. Thus began a five year partnership and the path Kerr would follow for the rest of his career.
Kerr’s longest stint was with Fuzzy Zoeller, though he worked for years with Fred Couples as well, a few with Vijay Singh and Ernie Els. He was with Zoeller during Fuzzy’s infamous fried chicken comment after Tiger’s first Masters win, and he was on the bag for Els at the 2016 Masters when the Big Easy six-putted the first green.
You take the bad with the good in the pro game. Kerr caddied for 14 different major winners in his time, though it doesn’t appear he was ever on the bag when the wins occurred; how many wins he racked up in other events isn’t mentioned. But with ample funny tales about when the worlds of pros and caddies collide, the book is a winner.
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A hefty coffee table book whose width is just inside the leather, The Golf Courses of New England surveys 72 courses in Massachusetts (the most, with 35), Connecticut (12), New Hampshire (8), Rhode Island (7), Maine (5) and Vermont (5).
I was a little disappointed that my home course in Vermont, the Brattleboro Country Club, didn’t make the cut, especially as I played it last season with Patrick Koenig when he was on his record-breaking pursuit of playing the most 18-courses in a year’s time (580 for those looking to break it). Koenig did the vast majority of the photos in the book, and they’re gorgeous. This is golf pornography at its best, creating a rousing desire to head north.
Sitar does a more than credible job in describing the lure of the selected courses and he keys on the architects and those who came along later for renovations. He spotlights some of the key designers—Donald Ross to be sure, Seth Raynor, partners Wayne Stiles and John Van Kleek, Walter Travis and Geoffrey Cornish and others. And he has a Q&A section with some of the renovators—Tyler Rae, Brian Silva, Bruce Hepner, Ron Forse and Mark Mungeam.
I have two reservations about the work. One is that most of the courses are private, and other than some hints in the text there’s no obvious indication which are private and which are public. Sure, we have Google for that, but a few asterisks would have done the job for us.
Worse was the decision not to caption the photos, on the grounds that with over 500 photos they were bound to get some wrong, “… so we have politely avoided the inevitable upset those errors may have caused.” Big mistake. The inevitable upset is in having no clue what we’re looking at, over 500 times.
This piece originally appeared in the June-July 2025 issue of Golf Oklahoma, in slightly different form.
