George Plimpton chronicles his month spent on the PGA tour in The Bogey Man, repackaged and including a foreword by Rick Reilly and never-before-seen content from the Plimpton Archives.
What happens when a weekend athlete -- of average skill at best -- joins the professional golf circuit? George Plimpton, one of the finest participatory sports journalists, spent a month of self-imposed torture on the tour to find out. Along the way, he meets amateurs, pros, caddies, officials, fans, and hangers-on. In The Bogey Man, we find golf legends, adventurers, stroke-saving theories, superstitions, and other golfing lore, and best of all, Plimpton's thoughts and experiences -- frustrating, humbling and, sometimes, thrilling -- from the first tee to the last green.
This intriguing classic, which remains one of the wittiest books ever written on golf, features Arnold Palmer, Dow Finsterwald, Walter Hagan, and many other golf greats and eccentrics, all doing what they do best.
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"A delight--more entertaining, if possible, than I remembered... the reader leaves George Plimpton's wide world of sports with deep reluctance.... His prose is as elegant and seemingly effortless as Ted Williams's swing or an Arnold Palmer iron shot.... His teammates recede--like the old baseball players vanishing into the cornfield in Field of Dreams, taking their magical world with them but living on in fond memory."
— Edward Kosner, Wall Street Journal
Humorous but also agonizing and also unfailingly fascinating regardless of one's interest in golf. For the psychology of the sport-- and this is what Mr. Plimpton is probing-- there is nothing more revealing around.
— The New York TimesPlimpton will interest even the man who can't tell a pitching wedge from a putter.... This is really a book about a kind of madness with rules, and anyone can appreciate the appeal of that.
— NewsweekGolf is a lonely and private game, lacking the natural drama of football, but Plimpton, by substituting improvisation for plot, has caught its mad comedy and bizarre effects on people in a book just as charming, in its own way, as Paper Lion.
— LifeSports memoirs, like humor collections, rarely outlive their authors, but Plimpton's books have aged gracefully and even matured. Today they have the additional (and unintended) appeal of vivid history, bearing witness to a mythical era.
— Nathaniel Rich, New York Review of BooksBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
George Plimpton (1927–2003) was the bestselling author and editor of nearly thirty books, as well as the cofounder, publisher, and editor of the Paris Review. He wrote regularly for such magazines as Sports Illustrated and Esquire, and he appeared numerous times in films and on television.
Jeff Bottoms is known for his work on Grand Theft Auto IV and Iron Man 3: The Official Game. The multi-talented voice of many cable networks now lends his voice to radio imaging. Jeff can be deep, dramatic and intense at one moment and lighthearted, warm and storytellerish the next.
Rick Reilly, screenwriter and author, worked for years for Sports Illustrated and ESPN. In addition to being voted the NSMA National Sportswriter of the Year eleven times, he has also been recognized with the Damon Runyon Award for Outstanding Contributions to Journalism. USA Today called him, “the closest thing sportswriting ever had to a rock star.”
Tom Wolfe (1931–2018) was the author of numerous books considered contemporary classics, including The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, and The Bonfire of the Vanities, among others, and several of his books have been made into major motion pictures. He was also a journalist and founder of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s. He is credited with introducing such terms as “the right stuff,” “radical chic,” “the Me Decade,” and “good ol’ boy” into the English lexicon. A native of Richmond, he earned his BA degree at Washington and Lee University and a PhD in American studies at Yale.