Men in Green (eBook)

Was golf better back in the day?
In Men in Green, Michael Bamberger, who fell for the game as a teenager in its wild Sansabelt-and-persimmon 1970s heyday, goes on a quest to find out. The result is a candid, nostalgic, intimate portrait of golf’s greatest generation—then and now—that readers will cherish.

One night in a Chicago restaurant, drunk on chocolate and with the siren song of the road in his head, Bamberger draws up a list of golf heroes. Nine are living legends, like Arnold and Jack. Nine are secret legends, like Dolphus “Golf Ball” Hull, a windblown tour caddie from Jackson, Mississippi. What they all share is a game that courses through their collective veins like a drug.

Accompanied by a sidekick and friend, a former tour player who is a secret legend himself, Bamberger seeks to locate and get to know these luminaries. All the while, he is hopeful they will answer a certain difficult question: When and where were you happiest?

In their travels, these detectives from the Golf Division uncover life and death, sickness and health, unusual marriages and unlikely friendships, trophies lost and won, comic tales from lives lived on the road, lost loves and second chances, and a cheating scandal that reveals volumes about an icon in their midst. They take us from Arnold Palmer’s private warehouse in Latrobe, Pennsylvania to the twelfth green at Augusta National to a trailer park in Northern California, where an aging tour beauty lives alone with her memories of high times and bright lights. Men in Green time-travels to forgotten places in a lost world.

Inspired by the Roger Kahn classic The Boys of Summer, Bamberger, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, has written a book that is a meditation on aging and a celebration of the game and the men and women who made it what it is. Men in Green is a book by a man in middle age revisiting the power of first love, and a testimony to the truth of an observation once made by the actor Laurence Olivier: “Inside, we’re all seventeen, with red lips.”

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The instant New York Times bestseller from acclaimed Sports Illustrated writer Michael Bambergera warm, nostalgic, intimately reported account of golf's greatest generation, and ';maybe the best golf book I've ever read' (Bill Reynolds, The Providence Journal).With exceptional insight into some of Americas greatest players over the last half-century (The Philadelphia Inquirer), Men in Green is to golf what Roger Kahns The Boys of Summer was to baseball: a big-hearted account of the sports greats, from the household names to the private legends, those behind-the-curtain giants who never made the headlines. Michael Bamberger, who has covered the game for twenty years at Sports Illustrated, shows us the big names as weve never seen them before: Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson, Curtis Strange, Fred Couplesand the late Ken Venturi. But he also chronicles the legendary figures known only to insiders, who nevertheless have left an indelible mark on the sport. Theres a club pro, a teaching pro, an old black Southern caddie. Theres a tournament director in his seventies, a TV director in his eighties, and a USGA executive in his nineties. All these figures, from the marquee names to the unknowns, have changed the game. What they all share is a game that courses through their collective veins like a drug. Was golf better back in the day? Men in Green weaves a history of the modern game that is personal, touching, inviting, and new. This meditation on aging and a celebration of the game is a nostalgic visit and reminiscence with those who fashioned golf historyand should be cherished (Golf Digest).