The Fine Green Line: My Year of Golf Adventure on the Pro-Golf Mini-Tours - Softcover

Newport, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0767901177 ISBN 13: 9780767901178

Publisher: Crown, 2001

Synopsis

What happens when a man leaves home for a year to pursue his dream?

One day, playing a particularly spectacular round of golf, husband and father John Paul Newport suddenly tastes what it's like to be a pro. Deciding to take a year off and hit the road playing golf's mini-tour circuit, Newport embarks on a wild trip through America's fairways. Over the course of his journey inside the somewhat shady, often hilarious underbelly of professional golf, he uncovers a world of people so totally addicted to golf, to the delusion of achievable perfection, that they sacrifice everything else to the quest. He also discovers the nature of his own obsession with the game, and how this constant pursuit of perfection on the golf course reflects the same challenges and frustrations one encounters in life. What does it take to master such an intricate, unpredictable game? In golf, as in life, why is one so consistently incapable of acting up to one's clearly established potential?

As Newport struggles to cross that Fine Green Line--the infinitely subtle yet critical difference between the top golf professionals and those who never quite make it--he realizes that life, like golf, doesn't let you get away with anything. This is a story about letting go of fear, facing challenges, and embracing risks--a compelling personal journey that captures many of the frustrations and elations of midlife both on and off the course.

About this title

Review:

Some stories regularly refresh themselves. The Walter Mittyesque tale of the dreamer chasing the dream is one of them. In The Fine Green Line, John Paul Newport's dream is a golf dream, and he relates it with good grace and humor, quite willing to analyze its inherent improbability and interpret the mysteries at its core. In his mid-30s, recently remarried, a new father, and playing to a handicap of less than 3, he sets out to focus on his game for a year, take his lumps on the minor-league tours, see how much he can improve, and finally test how he and his game stand up by trying to qualify for the PGA Tour via the murderous Q School tournament in the fall.

Like all worthwhile journeys, the destination is of less consequence than the trip itself. Newport's is a long and strange one, filled with small successes, big humiliations, reality checks, the kindness of strangers, and a colorful cast of wannabes on the golfing fringe, guys who live from week to week out of the back of their cars. Ultimately, Newport must come to terms with his own obsession with the game as he tries to figure out exactly where the fine green line of his title falls. He searches on and off the course for this abstract and invisible--and, he finally accepts, insurmountable--barrier that keeps the game's aristocracy on one side and those who can post the occasional 69 on the other. It's a search that takes him within himself and to anyone--such as Golf in the Kingdom's Michael Murphy, respected teaching pro Michael Hebron, swing doctors, and psychologists--who might be able to shed enlightenment, improve his swing, or focus his mind with laserlike intensity. It also sets off on some pretty memorable rounds of golf and the kind of grip-it-and-rip-it soul-searching that every hacker who's ever hit a ball with purpose--and shanked it anyway--is bound to understand. --Jeff Silverman

From the Back Cover:

My infatuation with golf was baffling, even to me. Almost none of my friends in New York played. Most, in fact, still viewed the game as a shameful, bourgeois absurdity. But I was forever dreaming about my next fix.

Part of its appeal no doubt had to do with the personal troubles I was going through at the time. Golf was a refuge. At home and at the office I hardly knew which end was up, but on the golf course the rules were clear. Order prevailed. Plus you had the tweeting birds and the gentle breezes and the bright green grass everywhere--the same elements that make mental asylums such pleasant places to spend time.

In addition to all that, I was steadily getting better, which was good for my ego. But this led to delusions. The primary cause of golf's maddening addiction, I soon discovered, is that every golfer knows for a fact that he or she is actually much, much better than his scores would indicate.
--from The Fine Green Line

About this edition

• Publisher: Crown
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0767901177
• ISBN 13: 9780767901178
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336