Q School Confidential: Inside Golf's Cruelest Tournament: Amazon.de: David Gould: Englische Bücher

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There is no event in golf quite like Q School. It's the grueling, six-round, end-of-the-year tournament for golf's dreamers, the mostly up-and-coming wannabes eager for a place on the tour, and the recent washouts anxious to reclaim what they see as their rightful positions. "This is one tournament," writes David Gould, an experienced golf writer, "that Samuel Beckett might have competed in.... The tournament is a specter of failure on which all the success of the pro-golf tour is built." The top few handful of finishers qualify for promotion to the PGA tour's roster of players who get to beat each other up every week for the big money and the prestige titles. Everyone else gets to go home and try again. The stakes are high, and the pressure is enormous. Given that every swing of the club has potential for disaster, the Q School story is one of some triumph, lots of despair, and bucketfuls of dark comedy.

Gould actually caddied at Q School back in the '70s, and he's been fascinated by the process ever since. Focusing on the 1998 event, he moves back and forth in time to produce an account of golf's annual torture chamber--complete with yearly results back to its 1965 inception--that is a' brim with anecdote and filled with detail. The harrowing account of the eccentric and peripatetic Mac O'Grady's 17 trips through Q School hell is worth the greens fees alone. "Golf tested my faith from the beginning," he concedes. "Q School was just a test I had to go through...." Kind of like walking on coals, only walking on coals, from Gould's richly absorbing viewpoint, looks somewhat easier. --Jeff Silverman -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verf�gbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

From Kirkus Reviews

For every Arnold Palmer and Tiger Woods, there is a platoon of Joe Hopefuls torturing themselves in qualifying school, the pro tour's proving ground and charnel house. Veteran golf writer Gould offers here a sympathetic, and often painfully funny, look at their predicament. Before you get to Augusta National or St. Andrews, Gould warns, the Professional Golf Association Tour Qualifying Tournament wants a donation of blood. Unless you are among the handful of the exemptthose who have won enough money the previous yearyou are required to compete in six rounds of golf over a like number of days to enter the professional tour. There are 35 happy endings; the other 1200 or so contestants get to go home, wait a year, and give their nerves a chance to mend. Gould paints the schoolan eerie mix of hope, free-floating dread, coiled up energy, and the knowledge that certain plot lines are destined to play themselves out''in all its malignancy: After a host of regional and the preliminary matches, you finally get a chance to delaminate in front of your peers. You can neither run nor hide when your swing or putter or confidence falters, when your ball sheers off to explore the woods and your three-figure score doesn't fit on the tally board. Then again, Gould suggests, the school is also one of the last bastions of golfing democracy, in a sport that has become a turbo-charged money scene populated with unapproachable celebrity pros. It is a place where spectators can still feel a subtle, personal identification with the people inside the ropes.'' As the stories artfully unspool, readers come to share Goulds respect for these golfers, each playing out a brief but life-shaping drama. A fine celebration of the journeyman golfer that goes a long way toward putting the game back in perspective. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verf�gbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

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Disappointing, Difficult to read as leisure reading 25. Mai 2000

Von Ein Kunde

Format:Gebundene Ausgabe

I picked this book up for some light, entertaining reading but the overall structure is so garbled that I gave up in the final chapter when I realized it had run out of time to improve.

The beginning of this book tried to outline the history of the Q School, but jumped around in time so much that it was very difficult to get a good grasp on the chronology of events.

There are lots of anecdotes as promised in the promo literature, but for the most part they each about 2-4 paragraphs long and not nearly in depth enough to get a sense of the characters involved. Some of them don't have a real point (Golfer A has 5 good rounds, he needs just one more to get his card and is very upset, he has a good round and the story becomes a non-story). They are strung together often in an unrelated way.

Finally, the last third of the book is appendices showing results from all the Q-Schools in history - nice for historians, but extra weight to carry around for the casual reader. I guess it gives the book more heft when you're looking at it in the store.

Some anecdotes are entertaining and I did learn a little about Q-School, so I did give up a couple stars.

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Q Review 18. Januar 2000

Von jcw@teleport.com

Format:Gebundene Ausgabe

If you've ever watched golf on television and thought "Yeah, I can do that," it's time to read Dave Gould's excellent, insightful, and entertaining account of how guys like you would really go about trying to qualify for the PGA Tour. Gould's stories and observations are funny and poignant, and his book captures all the drama and comedy of the people crazy and dedicated enough to try to earn a living playing professional golf. A must read for anyone who's ever thought that maybe, with a little more practice . . .

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Amazon.com: 5 Rezensionen

12 von 15 Kunden fanden die folgende Rezension hilfreich

Q Review 18. Januar 2000

Von jcw@teleport.com - Ver�ffentlicht auf Amazon.com

Format:Gebundene Ausgabe

1 von 1 Kunden fanden die folgende Rezension hilfreich

Good facts, poorly edited... 5. Februar 2007

Von Happy to be Here - Ver�ffentlicht auf Amazon.com

Format:Taschenbuch

While there are interesting facts to be gleaned from this book, it is way too disjointed to read comfortably. I literally got lost as I was reading more than a few times in the first couple of chapters alone, as the author jumps around without properly tying the disparate parts of a story into a cohesive narrative. I gave up trying to read the book in its natural order, and jumped around in search of points of interest.

I get the sense that the author went back and forth while editing the book, and somehow got lost himself when he tried to add more sub-stories within each chapter. If there was no professional editor for this book, then that explains the quality of the final product.

Final Analysis: It is very difficult to read, but some of the stories and facts are worth the price of the book. It's just too bad that the reader has to work so hard to find them.

3 von 4 Kunden fanden die folgende Rezension hilfreich

Well-written, but a little heavy 24. Juli 2001

Von Robert Graves - Ver�ffentlicht auf Amazon.com

Format:Gebundene Ausgabe

Gould is an excellent writer and researcher and this book shows it. The book definitely gives a satisfactory overview of Q School, whether you are just curious about it or a potential qualifier. The problem is that the book goes into far greater depth than the typical reader will care about and I found myself skimming large portions of it. I think most readers expected a book that dealt with today's Q School, how it works, and colorful anecdotes from the past years.

However, the book is bloated with the school's history which I was not particularly interested in. In fact, the greater part of the book focused on the history, rather than the contemporary structure, which is what most of us are curious about.

There isn't anything else like this out there to my knowledge, so if you are really curious about Q School then by all means buy it. But be prepared for less info about contemporary players you know and love, and more about the obscure and confusing history of Q School.

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