To Win and Die in Dixie: The Birth of the Modern Golf Swing and the Mysterious Death of Its Creator »

Steve Eubanks is a bestselling author and award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in Sports Illustrated, Golf Digest, and Golf Magazine, as well as at FoxSports.com. He has authored or co-authored thirty books, including collaborations with such sports greats as Arnold Palmer, Lou Holtz, and Ty Murray. He lives in Peachtree City, Georgia.
 

A fascinating biography of a forgotten golf legend, a riveting whodunit of a covered-up killing, a scalding exposé of a closed society—in To Win and Die in Dixie, award-winning writer Steve Eubanks weaves all these elements into a masterly book that resurrects a superb sportsman and reconstructs a startling crime.

J. Douglas Edgar was the British-born golfer who broke every record, invented the modern swing, and coached such winners as Bobby Jones, the greatest amateur in history, and Alexa Stirling, the finest female player of her day. But on August 8, 1921, he was a man dead in the middle of the road, the victim, conventional wisdom said, of a hit-and-run.

Comer Howell thought otherwise. He was an Atlanta Constitution reporter and heir to the paper’s fortune, a man frustrated by his reputation as the pampered boss’s son. To Howell, the physical evidence didn’t add up to a car accident. As he chronicled Edgar’s life, Howell discovered a working-class striver who had risen in the world through a passion to succeed, a quality the newspaperman admired. And as he investigated Edgar’s death, Howell also found a man whose recklessness may have doomed him to a violent demise.

Cutting cinematically between Howell’s present and Edgar’s championship past, To Win and Die in Dixie brilliantly portrays one man’s quest for excellence and another’s search for redemption and the truth. Their stories meet in a Southern society of plush country-club golf courses, vast wealth, and decadent secrets.

Filled with the vivid golf writing for which its author is renowned, To Win and Die in Dixie is a real-life story both shocking and inspiring, a book that propels Steve Eubanks to a new level of literary achievement.
 

Publishers Weekly

Eubanks (Golf Freek) tells the story of long-forgotten golf professional J. Douglas Edgar, an Englishman from Newcastle who was one of the best players of the early 1920s. Edgar, who Eubanks argues created the modern golf swing, moved to Atlanta in 1919, where he influenced young Bobby Jones. Edgar died there on West Peachtree Street on an August night in 1921 at the age of 36 from a mysterious puncture wound to his thigh. Comer Howell, a 20-year-old reporter and son of Clark Howell, influential owner of the Atlanta Constitution, was one of three newspapermen who found a bleeding Edgar in the street and witnessed his last moments. The key question is whether Edgar was hit by a car, as first believed, or was the victim of murder by a jealous husband whom Edgar might have cuckolded. It makes for a fascinating tale, reviving Edgar’s legend and portraying the city of Atlanta and the game of golf in that era. Students of golf history and Atlanta’s past will find much of interest here. However, the narrative suffers from a lack of focus, with meandering passages that drift from the central story and overuse of dialect to recreate Edgar’s North English accent. (Apr.)