Bud, Sweat, & Tees: Rich Beem's Walk on the Wild Side of the PGA Tour »

Alan Shipnuck was a twenty-one-year-old intern when he wrote his first cover story for Sports Illustrated. Now a Senior Writer at SI, he lives in New York with his wife, Frances. He is at work on a book about the controversy surrounding Augusta National and the Masters.

Rich Beem became an overnight folk hero with his victory at the 2002 PGA Championship, where he dazzled fans with fearless shotmaking and glib one-liners. By the time Beem had stared down Tiger Woods in an epic back nine and then danced a goofy jig on the final green, the sports world was clamoring to know, "Who is this guy, anyway?"

That question is answered in Bud, Sweat, & Tees, Alan Shipnuck's no-holds-barred look at modern professional golf. Shipnuck began tracking Beem during his rookie year in 1999, when he was a logo-free rube only a couple of years removed from a seven-dollar-an-hour job hawking cell phones. Beem and his hard-living caddie, Steve Duplantis, would find sudden fame and fortune, and Shipnuck enjoyed unparalleled access in chronicling their wild ride — sharing endless drives across the desert and eventful nights at strip clubs, cutthroat golf matches and late-night confessionals at assorted watering holes.

The result is an intimate portrait of two exceedingly colorful characters. Beem and Duplantis invite us deep into the world of the PGA Tour, exposing the rowdy, randy reality of the most interesting subculture in sports, which has always been a well-protected secret — until now. Sometimes bawdy, often hilarious, and always unpredictable, Bud, Sweat, & Tees stands as the finest insider sports book since Ball Four.

The New Yorker

"Just remember the three ups," a seasoned caddy tells the sportswriter Rick Reilly, before Reilly makes his caddying début at the Masters. "Show up, keep up, and shut up." In Who's Your Caddy?, he carries the bag for the likes of David Duval and Casey Martin and listens in on the conversations taking place on those hushed sunlit greens. Reilly quickly becomes attuned to the demands of pros, who can be "just slightly more finicky than the Sultan of Brunei." Still, as he learns how to avoid rattling the clubs or knocking over Jack Nicklaus' bag, he gets plenty of experience approaching not only the greens but the golfers, both the famous and the famously avid. Reilly chats with Donald Trump about building seven-million-dollar waterfalls and asks Deepak Chopra, "Is cheating in golf wrong?"

Don Van Natta, Jr., takes up that same question in a round with Bill Clinton, in First Off the Tee, a look at America's various golf-playing Presidents. Theodore Roosevelt steered politicians away from the sport's apparent élitism, warning, "Golf is fatal." Likewise, John F. Kennedy, probably the best of the Presidential duffers, didn't want voters to know he was any good; unlike his predecessor, the golfophilic Dwight D. Eisenhower, Kennedy vigorously avoided being photographed on the links.

Today, golf has shed some of that high-class sheen; Alan Shipnuck's Bud, Sweat & Tees chronicles run-ins with strippers and gamblers as it follows the ascent of 2002 P.G.A. Championship winner Rich Beem on the pro tour. Beem's philosophy is similarly rebellious: "Pedal to the metal, fire at every flag. It's go low or go home."