One night in a Chicago restaurant, Michael 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 that 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. Men in Green time-travels to forgotten places in a lost world.
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“Men in Green is peppered with appealing vignettes—such as Billy Harmon on what Bob Goalby said to himself standing over a four-foot putt on the last hole of the 1968 Masters—but Bamberger has a higher purpose. Identifying legends and trying to find out what makes them tick, he and Donald provide exceptional insight into some of America’s greatest players over the last half-century.”
— Philadelphia Inquirer
“The book is overwhelmingly a love song…Above all, what comes through is the sense of the Tour back then as an extended family, sometimes dysfunctional but never dull.”
— Wall Street Journal[E]namored with the game, [Michale's] prose is thankfully straightforward and free of sanctimony or syrupy, romantic sentiments, and his interviews and game accounts are extensive without being tedious.
— Kirkus“To be cherished…Will entertain and enthrall…A nostalgic visit and reminiscence with those who fashioned golf history.”
— Golf Digest