Description:
There is no event in golf quite like Q School. It's the grueling, six-round, end-of-the-year tournament for golf's dreamers, the mostly up-and-coming wannabes eager for a place on the tour, and the recent washouts anxious to reclaim what they see as their rightful positions. "This is one tournament," writes David Gould, an experienced golf writer, "that Samuel Beckett might have competed in.... The tournament is a specter of failure on which all the success of the pro-golf tour is built." The top few handful of finishers qualify for promotion to the PGA tour's roster of players who get to beat each other up every week for the big money and the prestige titles. Everyone else gets to go home and try again. The stakes are high, and the pressure is enormous. Given that every swing of the club has potential for disaster, the Q School story is one of some triumph, lots of despair, and bucketfuls of dark comedy. Gould actually caddied at Q School back in the '70s, and he's been fascinated by the process ever since. Focusing on the 1998 event, he moves back and forth in time to produce an account of golf's annual torture chamber--complete with yearly results back to its 1965 inception--that is a' brim with anecdote and filled with detail. The harrowing account of the eccentric and peripatetic Mac O'Grady's 17 trips through Q School hell is worth the greens fees alone. "Golf tested my faith from the beginning," he concedes. "Q School was just a test I had to go through...." Kind of like walking on coals, only walking on coals, from Gould's richly absorbing viewpoint, looks somewhat easier. --Jeff Silverman
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