Q School Confidential: Inside Golf's Cruelest Tournament » (REVISED)

David Gould, is the former executive editor for Golf Illustrated and an award-winning contributor to such publications as Golf Magazine, the USGA’s Golf Journal, Men Health, and The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of The Golfer's Code, a humorous treatise on golf etiquette and manners, and a co-author of several books on golf instruction. He lives in Connecticut with his wife, the novelist Rachel Basch, and their two children.

In 1999, the PGA TOUR Qualifying Tournament - known to many as Q School - will find itself sitting on 35 years of unique history. Q School Confidential chronicles this tournament's deep, dense story of heartbreak, black humor, back-room politics and magnificent golf under dire circumstances.

Using the 1998 PGA TOUR Qualifying School finals as his backdrop, golf writer David Gould recounts for the first time ever the history of the pro tour’s annual qualifier, with revealing anecdotes about raw rookies, aging veterans and every dreamer in between. The vintage stories in the Q School's near and distant past tell of emotional and physical breakdown — and courage, as well — under pressure: Jim Carter’s self-confessed “choke stories” of 1990 and 1992; Mark McCumber’s recurring lost-scorecard nightmare; Peter Jacobsen’s ordeal with a cheater on the Mexican border; Jim McLean’s bizarre arrest on the qualifier’s eve; and Mac O’Grady’s violent celebration of his long-awaited Q School success. The players captured in these pages turn white with panic, vomit their breakfast, sleep in their cars, practice on interstate ranges, lose golf shoes, forget contact lenses and make fateful decisions based on faulty information.

Sifting back through several eras, Gould explains the innocent aims of the first Q Schools and uncovers the tournament’s pivotal role in the momentous split-up of the PGA and the PGA TOUR. He examines the difficult question of how professional golf should go about bringing in new players and letting former players regain their privileges. In the voices of forgotten or never-known tour pros from the 1970s, he narrates the frustrating “rabbit era” that Q School helped create, and revisits the infamous “breakaway Q School” of 1968. In notes that accompany this book’s exclusive year-by-year scoring records, the author picks out hidden turning points, bits of trivia and strange coincidences in the lives of tour players past and present.

These profiles and snapshots of the earliest Q School survivors and the most recent graduates, as well, are woven together in a warm, engaging and insightful narrative. Q School Confidential, sometimes bleak, sometimes triumphant, provides the first and only inside look at a cruel and unusual tournament that many consider golf’s toughest test of all.

Publishers Weekly

What was once a little-known and rarely covered golf tournament has become, as a result of the sport's growing popularity, a widely attended media event. Q School is the PGA's qualifying tournament, a grueling six-day, 108-hole competition in which golfers play for the chance to earn one of the 35 PGA Tour eligibility cards and the opportunity to win lucrative purses. Competitors include not only rookies and in-between journeymen, but also struggling veterans who have failed to remain in the top 125 ranking at the end of the PGA season. According to Gould, a former executive editor for Golf Illustrated, "the 108 holes of grim combat take on a morbid repetitiveness," especially for those who try, and fail, to qualify year after year; the end of the ordeal is filled with heartbreak. Anecdotes from former players about famous last-hole losses and long, slow collapses give credence to a tour rules official's description of Q School: "Hours of boredom, moments of terror." With a reporter's eye, Gould describes dramatic moments from the tour, as well as the Q School's history (it originated in 1965), including stories of many non-famous players. The weekend golfer will appreciate and identify with these players' stories of dogged perseverance, dramatically related in Gould's able account. 16 pages b&w photos not seen by PW. (Dec.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.