Tales from Q School: Inside Golf's Fifth Major » (~)

John Feinstein is the bestselling author of Last Dance, Next Man Up, Let Me Tell You a Story (with Red Auerbach), Caddy for Life, Open, The Punch, The Last Amateurs, The Majors, A Good Walk Spoiled, A Civil War, A Season on the Brink, Play Ball, Hard Courts, and two novels. He writes for Inside Sports, Golf,Tennis Magazine and Basketball America and is a regular commentator on NPR and CBS.

It is the tournament that separates champions from mortals. It is the starting point for the careers of future legends and can be the final stop on the down escalator for fading stars. The annual PGA Tour Qualifying Tournament is one of the most grueling competitions in any sport. Every fall, veterans and talented hopefuls sweat through six rounds of hell at Q school, as the tournament is universally known, to get a shot at the PGA Tour, vying for the 30 slots available. The grim reality: if you don't make it through Q school, you're not on the PGA tour. You're out. And those who make it to the six day finals are the lucky ones: Hundreds more players fail to get through the equally grueling first two stages of the event. John Feinstein tells the story of the players who compete for these coveted positions in the 2005 Q school as only he can. With arresting accounts from the players, established winners, rising stars, the defeated and the endlessly hopeful, America's favorite sportswriter unearths the inside story behind the PGA Tour's brutal all-or-nothing competition.

Library Journal

An inside look at the annual PGA Tour Qualifying Tournament, also known as -Q School. Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.

Introduction     3
Dreams (and Nightmares) Come True     13
Forty Years Ago...     25
In the Beginning     42
Nine Hundred and Seventy-three Dreamers     59
Nineteen and Ties     75
On to November     94
Lake Jovita Blues     114
Moving Day     127
The Unkindest Cuts of All     145
What Is, Is     160
Endings     181
Six Days     195
"This Isn't a Sprint"     218
Cold and Wind and... Cold     232
Beginning of the End     256
Go Low or Bust     269
Final Countdown     282
Hawaii, Here We Come     291
Epilogue: December 2006     319
Afterword: 2007     329
Acknowledgments     337
Index     343