Search results for ""Author Michael Bamberger""

From Michael Bamberger, the New York Times bestselling author of Men in Green and our most celebrated contemporary golf writer, The Ball in the Air is a love letter to the amateur game, doing for golf what Friday Night Lights did for football. Over Michael Bamberger’s storied writing career, he has written five golf books and hundreds of Sports Illustrated stories about professional golf and those who play it. That is, the .001 percent. Now “the poet laureate of golf” (GOLF Magazine) trains his eye on the rest of us. In Bamberger’s most intimate book yet, he takes the lid off a game that is both quasi-religious and a nonstop party. In this freewheeling and timeless book, an age-old question is posed early and answered over its pages: Why does the game cast such a spell on us?The Ball in the Air is reported with deep curiosity and written with you-are-there intimacy. It captures golf as a way of life. You get to know a collection of golfers you won’t find elsewhere: a young woman who was raised in a maintenance shed in South Asia and now plays on a college team in Southern California; a middle-aged globe-trotting caddie who is to golf what William Finnegan is to surfing; a renowned senior amateur from Chicago, a finalist in a long-ago British Amateur in St. Andrews, who is giving competitive golf one last go. You join golf societies with members who have fallen into various golfing rabbit holes. (Golden Age architects!) You visit some exalted private courses, and a bunch of good-time-Charlie public ones, across the United States and in the United Kingdom. You hang with a legendary pro whose childlike wonder for the game makes him the ultimate amateur. The Ball in the Air is a fast-moving and spirited tribute to people who can do the whole eat-pray-love thing in one green place (and adjacent clubhouse), lucky souls who, as Bamberger writes, “can marvel at a white ball in a high sky and get lost.”

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One of the greatest and most beloved golf books ever written is triumphantly back in print—“a cause for celebration” (The Wall Street Journal)—with a new introduction by Golf in the Kingdom author Michael Murphy, a new afterword, and never-before-seen photographs.Thirty years (and counting!) after publication, To the Linksland still enthralls readers who pick it up for the first time—or return to the book for the sheer pleasure of it. In 1991, Michael Bamberger, a newspaper sportswriter, gave up his apartment, took a leave of absence from his job and his life, and, joined by his newlywed wife, set off to explore the wide world of golf. Bamberger’s first step in this madcap golfing adventure was to become a caddie on the European golf tour, where he encountered the game’s most dynamic players up close and personal, including golf’s greatest artist, Seve Ballesteros. Crisscrossing the Conti

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Written by a New York Times bestselling author and reporter who “knows the world of professional golf…like few others” (The Wall Street Journal) comes “the most insightful and evenhanded book written yet about one of the signature athletes of the last twenty-five years” (Booklist, starred review) detailing Tiger Woods’s remarkable comeback and his journey back into winner’s circle. Tiger Woods’s long descent into a personal and professional hell reached bottom in the early hours of Memorial Day in 2017. Woods’s DUI arrest that night came on the heels of a desperate spinal surgery, just weeks after he told close friends he might never play tournament golf again. His mug shot and alarming arrest video were painful to look at and, for Woods, a deep humiliation. The former paragon of discipline now found himself hopelessly lost and out of control, exposed for all the world to see. That episode could have marked the beginning of Tiger’s end. It proved to be the opposite. Instead of sinking beneath the public disgrace of drug abuse and the private despair of a battered and ailing body, Woods embarked on the long road to redeeming himself. In The Second Life of Tiger Woods, Michael Bamberger, who has covered Woods since the golfer was an amateur, draws upon his deep network of sources inside locker rooms, caddie yards, clubhouses, fitness trailers, and back offices to tell the true and inspiring story of the legend’s return. Packed with new information and graced by insight, Bamberger’s story reveals how this iconic athlete clawed his way back to the top. This is a “gripping” (Kirkus Reviews) and intimate portrait of a man who has spent his life in front of the camera but has done his best to make sure he was never really known. Here is Tiger, barefoot, in handcuffs, showing a police officer a witty and self-deprecating side of himself that the public never sees. Here is Tiger on the verge of tears with his children at the British Open. Here is Tiger trying to express his gratitude to his mother at a ceremony at the Rose Garden. In these pages, Tiger is funny, cold, generous, self-absorbed, inspiring—and real. The Second Life of Tiger Woods is not only the saga of an exceptional man but also a celebration of second chances. Bamberger’s bracingly honest book is about what Tiger Woods did, and about what any of us can do, when we face our demons head-on.

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