John Feinstein has rightly been acclaimed as one of America’s
best sportswriters. I know him mainly from his books about golf,
starting with A Good Walk Spoiled in 1995, to The
Majors in 1998, The Open in 2002, and now his new
Tales From Q School. He has written so many books
you can hardly count them, including, most recently, Last
Dance: Behind the Scenes at the Final Four, co-authored with
legendary basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski; Next Man Up: A Year
Behind the Lines in the NFL (if you included all the
subtitles, this paragraph would never end); and the paperback
re-issue of Season on the Brink, his season-long profile
of Bobby Knight.
Feinstein faces one sort of challenge writing about sporting
events — and sporting figures — already well known. He has to
find and create drama where the big, on-stage drama has already
taken place in public, and is already known to the fan. At this
task, discovering the stories behind the flash, he has no peer.
In Tales From Q School, however, Feinstein faces
another problem entirely: How to make us care about a bunch of
golfers who — for the most part — nobody knows at all. He has
succeeded so brilliantly that Tales From Q School becomes
the very best of tension-fraught adventures, with some episodes
literally hair-raising in intensity.
SO WHAT IS “Q SCHOOL,” AND WHY SHOULD YOU CARE? The PGA Tour, the
ruling body of professional tournament golf, holds an annual,
three-stage tournament to admit new members. At each stage, only a
certain number of players passes through to the next stage. The
third stage, the real back- and heart-breaker, is a six-round
tournament that determines which 30 (or so) players will get a PGA
Tour Card, entitling them to full exempt status in golf’s
big-time.
Once, an amateur player might enter the first stage of Q School,
just to see what he could do. Usually, as the pros say, “he
couldn’t play dead.” That’s rare nowadays; the Tour has tightened
up its entry rules. Now, at every stage, every golfer can really
play. And, at every stage, these golfers play for their very
living: For status on the “big tour,” or on the fallback Nationwide
Tour (golf’s AAA ball), or on mini-tours, like the Hooters Tour
(you can imagine).
Q School entrants may include veterans trying to re-qualify for
pro golf — somehow their game has disappeared; they’ve finished
too far down the money list. They’ve got no other option. Perhaps
the most startling of those in last year’s Qualifying School? Lee
Janzen, two-time winner of the U.S. Open. (He didn’t pass.)
IN A GOOD WALK SPOILED, FEINSTEIN FOLLOWED three unknowns
in addition to the famous players then on Tour: Brian Henninger,
who won twice on the PGA Tour and led the 1995 Masters through
three rounds; Paul Goydos, who describes himself as winning “once a
decade” (he has won twice); and Jeff Cook, the least successful of
the three. We see two of them again in Tales from Q
School, Cook and Henninger.
We meet Bob Heintz, a 35-year-old Yale graduate who plays just
well enough to make a living (grossing $355,000) on the Nationwide
Tour, but not quite well enough to stay on the PGA Tour. We meet B.
J. Staten, who plays beautifully through the second stage, through
16 holes of the last round, six under par, well inside the cut
line, and then hits two balls in the water on the 17th.
These and dozens of others populate Feinstein’s pages, and he
devotes a hero’s attention to each — you marvel at Feinstein’s
capacity for hard work, for long interviews, for taking notes, for
endless walking. He seems to have seen everything, been everywhere,
the sportswriter’s Paul Johnson:
As Kelly Gibson…put it, “I’ve seen the pressures of Q
School make a grown man cry.”
Who have you seen cry at Q School? Gibson was asked.
Gibson smiled. “Me,” he said. “And I’m not making it up.”
FEINSTEIN’S GIFT — AND THE RESULT OF HIS HARD WORK — is the
way people open their hearts to him. Two quotes, from the end of
the book, after the Q School’s final round. Dan Forsman, a
47-year-old Tour veteran, has had to try to re-qualify to play. He
fails by a shot. Peter Tomasulo, at 24 just starting his career,
also comes up a shot short.
“From the moment I shook hands until the moment I got to my car,
I really don’t remember anything,” Tomasulo said. “It’s all a
blank.”
Forsman: “I’d spent hours on the driving range and the putting
green working toward one thing, and I’d come up one shot short.
Those two golf courses were my field of dreams, and now there was
nothing left for me to do except go home. All the years I’ve played
golf, I can’t remember a more melancholy feeling than right at that
moment.”
A father-son triumph brings the book to a joyful climax: Tour
veteran Jay Haas watches son Billy birdie the last two holes to get
his card. I’d love to quote the whole story, but it’s half a dozen
pages of riveting action, and it would sound corny just to quote
the ending.
MAYBE TALES FROM Q SCHOOL WON’T APPEAL to a non-golfer.
Somehow I suspect that anyone who loves a good story will love this
book. I can’t wait to leave it alone long enough to read it
again.
