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Q School Confidential: Inside Golf's Cruelest Tournament | 
 enlarge | Author: David Gould
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
Buy Used: $0.64
You Save: $15.31 (96%)
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Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 308127
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.1 x 1
ISBN: 0312289170
Dewey Decimal Number: 796
EAN: 9780312289171
ASIN: 0312289170
Publication Date: January 16, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Standard used condition.
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
There is no event in golf quite like Q School. It's the grueling, six-round, end-of-the-year tournament for golf's dreamers, the mostly up-and-coming wannabes eager for a place on the tour, and the recent washouts anxious to reclaim what they see as their rightful positions. "This is one tournament," writes David Gould, an experienced golf writer, "that Samuel Beckett might have competed in.... The tournament is a specter of failure on which all the success of the pro-golf tour is built." The top few handful of finishers qualify for promotion to the PGA tour's roster of players who get to beat each other up every week for the big money and the prestige titles. Everyone else gets to go home and try again. The stakes are high, and the pressure is enormous. Given that every swing of the club has potential for disaster, the Q School story is one of some triumph, lots of despair, and bucketfuls of dark comedy. Gould actually caddied at Q School back in the '70s, and he's been fascinated by the process ever since. Focusing on the 1998 event, he moves back and forth in time to produce an account of golf's annual torture chamber--complete with yearly results back to its 1965 inception--that is a' brim with anecdote and filled with detail. The harrowing account of the eccentric and peripatetic Mac O'Grady's 17 trips through Q School hell is worth the greens fees alone. "Golf tested my faith from the beginning," he concedes. "Q School was just a test I had to go through...." Kind of like walking on coals, only walking on coals, from Gould's richly absorbing viewpoint, looks somewhat easier. --Jeff Silverman
Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Good facts, poorly edited... February 5, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
While there are interesting facts to be gleaned from this book, it is way too disjointed to read comfortably. I literally got lost as I was reading more than a few times in the first couple of chapters alone, as the author jumps around without properly tying the disparate parts of a story into a cohesive narrative. I gave up trying to read the book in its natural order, and jumped around in search of points of interest.
I get the sense that the author went back and forth while editing the book, and somehow got lost himself when he tried to add more sub-stories within each chapter. If there was no professional editor for this book, then that explains the quality of the final product.
Final Analysis: It is very difficult to read, but some of the stories and facts are worth the price of the book. It's just too bad that the reader has to work so hard to find them.
If you ever wondered what it is all about October 12, 2004
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Most golf writing is non-fiction, often because to write a novel centered on golf would probably be one of the least interesting reads around. Much of the non-fiction writing that tells a story, though, just like a novel, has its harrowing moments where our heros battle the odds to somehow come out on top (or as close as they can get to it, which is still better than most of us).
Q School Confidential makes us wish we were reading fiction. The stories about the few greats that went through and kept fighting are few and far between. Most of the focus is on those people whose name remains only as a record held by the PGA. Gould hunted as many of them down as he could, it seems, to get as full a picture of what is termed the cruelest tournament in golf as possible.
For someone who plays to a single-digit handicap and thinks, just maybe, they have what it takes, this is good medicine. Many of the names we see on the leaderboards at tournaments never had to run this gauntlet. For those that did, and survived, their future is far from assured.
Well researched and easily read, the only weakness is that it can become monotonous to read. A chapter every few days should help to keep one's attention, but this is not something to flip through before bedtime.
 Well-written, but a little heavy July 24, 2001
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Gould is an excellent writer and researcher and this book shows it. The book definitely gives a satisfactory overview of Q School, whether you are just curious about it or a potential qualifier. The problem is that the book goes into far greater depth than the typical reader will care about and I found myself skimming large portions of it. I think most readers expected a book that dealt with today's Q School, how it works, and colorful anecdotes from the past years.However, the book is bloated with the school's history which I was not particularly interested in. In fact, the greater part of the book focused on the history, rather than the contemporary structure, which is what most of us are curious about. There isn't anything else like this out there to my knowledge, so if you are really curious about Q School then by all means buy it. But be prepared for less info about contemporary players you know and love, and more about the obscure and confusing history of Q School.
Disappointing, Difficult to read as leisure reading May 25, 2000
6 out of 9 found this review helpful
I picked this book up for some light, entertaining reading but the overall structure is so garbled that I gave up in the final chapter when I realized it had run out of time to improve.The beginning of this book tried to outline the history of the Q School, but jumped around in time so much that it was very difficult to get a good grasp on the chronology of events. There are lots of anecdotes as promised in the promo literature, but for the most part they each about 2-4 paragraphs long and not nearly in depth enough to get a sense of the characters involved. Some of them don't have a real point (Golfer A has 5 good rounds, he needs just one more to get his card and is very upset, he has a good round and the story becomes a non-story). They are strung together often in an unrelated way. Finally, the last third of the book is appendices showing results from all the Q-Schools in history - nice for historians, but extra weight to carry around for the casual reader. I guess it gives the book more heft when you're looking at it in the store. Some anecdotes are entertaining and I did learn a little about Q-School, so I did give up a couple stars.
 Q Review January 18, 2000
12 out of 15 found this review helpful
If you've ever watched golf on television and thought "Yeah, I can do that," it's time to read Dave Gould's excellent, insightful, and entertaining account of how guys like you would really go about trying to qualify for the PGA Tour. Gould's stories and observations are funny and poignant, and his book captures all the drama and comedy of the people crazy and dedicated enough to try to earn a living playing professional golf. A must read for anyone who's ever thought that maybe, with a little more practice . . .
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