Ball in the Air

From Michael Bamberger, the New York Times bestselling author of Men in Green and our most celebrated contemporary golf writer, The Ball in the Air is a love letter to the amateur game, doing for golf what Friday Night Lights did for football.

Over Michael Bamberger's storied writing career, he has written five golf books and hundreds of Sports Illustrated stories about professional golf and those who play it. That is, the .001 percent. Now "the poet laureate of golf" (GOLF Magazine) trains his eye on the rest of us. In Bamberger's most intimate book yet, he takes the lid off a game that is both quasi-religious and a nonstop party. In this freewheeling and timeless book, an age-old question is posed early and answered over its pages: Why does the game cast such a spell on us?

The Ball in the Air is reported with deep curiosity and written with you-are-there intimacy. It captures golf as a way of life. You get to know a collection of golfers you won't find elsewhere: a young woman who was raised in a maintenance shed in South Asia and now plays on a college team in Southern California; a middle-aged globe-trotting caddie who is to golf what William Finnegan is to surfing; a renowned senior amateur from Chicago, a finalist in a long-ago British Amateur in St. Andrews, who is giving competitive golf one last go. You join golf societies with members who have fallen into various golfing rabbit holes. (Golden Age architects!) You visit some exalted private courses, and a bunch of good-time-Charlie public ones, across the United States and in the United Kingdom. You hang with a legendary pro whose childlike wonder for the game makes him the ultimate amateur. The Ball in the Air is a fast-moving and spirited tribute to people who can do the whole eat-pray-love thing in one green place (and adjacent clubhouse), lucky souls who, as Bamberger writes, "can marvel at a white ball in a high sky and get lost."