The Playing Lesson
A Duffer's Year Among the Pros
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- €15.99
Publisher Description
You are cordially invited to join Michael Bamberger on a year-long golfing adventure—playing alongside the pros of the PGA Tour, the LPGA Tour, LIV Golf, and more—as he seeks to unlock golf’s most stubborn secrets in various and surprising ways, all in the name of…improvement!
Nearly fifty years after taking up the game, Michael Bamberger made a pair of startling discoveries: golf had never meant more to him, and he knew almost nothing about it. He decided to cover himself in green in a whole new way. He spent a year inside the ropes of professional golf—playing, caddying, competing, volunteering, and interviewing—looking for a door into the sport’s sanctum sanctorum.
In The Playing Lesson: A Duffer’s Year Among the Pros, Bamberger goes on the ultimate golfing bender. You’ve read about St. Andrews before, but here you will experience the home of golf in a whole new way. You’ll join the author as he volunteers in one tournament, caddies in others, plays in men’s and women’s pro-ams, and conducts intimate interviews with elite figures in the game. You’ll mooch off the lessons Bamberger takes from instructors, famous and obscure, who teach golf in novel ways. You’ll learn how to buy a better golf game.
Maybe you’ve had club fittings, but not like the one Bamberger experiences in various tour trailers. In a pro-am, Bamberger gets driving tips from one of the tour’s longest hitters, Jake Knapp. He receives a putting lesson from Brad Faxon. He learns how to hit hook wedges from Gary Player. He lives through the intense pain of Rory McIlroy’s misses and rejoices at Lydia Ko’s triumphs. He plays Pebble Beach and Royal Oak, a down-home nine-hole public course in Detroit with perfect greens. He receives an unexpected hug from Greg Norman at a LIV Golf event in Miami, along with the words, “Come on in here, you a*****e.” He spends a lot of time at driving ranges, some of it productive.
What Bamberger has done here, when you get right down to it, is create his own tour. The Playing Lesson is a report on a real-life golfing safari, with stops inside the heads of the game’s high priests, his own—and yours.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Golf.com writer Bamberger (This Golfing Life) shares in this discursive and eccentric account what happened when he set out to "play golf with more focus and more purpose" and seek "the wonder of golf, wherever it might be." In 2024, Bamberger participated in multiple tournaments, both as an amateur player and as a caddie. The Florida's Natural Charity Classic, for instance, with its "Double-A baseball" vibe, reminded Bamberger of a past era when most players "didn't have equipment deals or traveling caddies or creased new tour clothes." He also describes finding meaning at California's "recess-gone-wild" Pebble Beach pro-am tournament, where he caddied for Fred Perpall, president of the United States Golf Association. "I felt like I was in my mid-twenties again, caddying for George Archer, Bill Britton, Tony Cerdá, Mike Donald, Steve Elkington, Brad Faxon, Al Geiberger, Jamie Howell—I could go on," notes Bamberger, who cadied at pro-ams in high school and college. The author manages to cleverly convey some of the appeal of the sport, describing, for instance, how golfing "promotes a tingly anxiety." But not everything advances his goals—Bamberger's rambling approach to his narrative, which he at times concedes is overly technical, can be a bit much. It's a mixed bag.
