The Fine Green Line: My Year of Golf Adventure on the Pro-Golf Mini-Tours
Some stories regularly refresh themselves. The Walter Mittyesque tale of  the dreamer chasing the dream is one of them. InThe Fine Green Line,  John Paul Newport's dream is a golf dream, and he relates it with good grace and  humor, quite willing to analyze its inherent improbability and interpret the  mysteries at its core. In his mid-30s, recently remarried, a new father, and  playing to a handicap of less than 3, he sets out to focus on his game for a  year, take his lumps on the minor-league tours, see how much he can improve, and  finally test how he and his game stand up by trying to qualify for the PGA Tour  via the murderousQ  Schooltournament in the fall.Like all worthwhile journeys, the destination is of less consequence than the  trip itself. Newport's is a long and strange one, filled with small successes,  big humiliations, reality checks, the kindness of strangers, and a colorful cast  of wannabes on the golfing fringe, guys who live from week to week out of the  back of their cars. Ultimately, Newport must come to terms with his own  obsession with the game as he tries to figure out exactly where the fine green  line of his title falls. He searches on and off the course for this abstract and  invisible--and, he finally accepts, insurmountable--barrier that keeps the  game's aristocracy on one side and those who can post the occasional 69 on the  other. It's a search that takes him within himself and to anyone--such asGolf in the Kingdom'sMichael Murphy,  respected teaching proMichael Hebron, swing doctors, and psychologists--who might be able to shed enlightenment, improve his swing, or  focus his mind with laserlike intensity. It also sets off on some pretty  memorable rounds of golf and the kind of grip-it-and-rip-it soul-searching that  every hacker who's ever hit a ball with purpose--and shanked it anyway--is bound  to understand.--Jeff Silverman--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.