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A Good Walk Spoiled : Days and Nights on the PGA Tour
by John Feinstein
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company (1996-06-01)
ISBN: 0316277371
EAN: 9780316277372
Dewy Decimal #: 796.35266
Paperback: 544 pages
Edition: 1
SKU: 01787
Condition: Collectible: Good
Comments: First edition paperback in good condition. Has full number line
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Editorial Reviews
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Amazon.com
On those magnificent days on which your drives split the fairway down the middle and your wedge shots leave you putting for birdie, you think: "I wonder if I could do this for a living." After all, guys in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, guys no one heard of until recently, are making planeloads of money on the various golf tours (and buying private planes to take them from one big-money tournament to the next). A Good Walk Spoiled is a bit of a reality check. John Feinstein chronicles the struggles of the top golfers in the game, as well as those trying to get onto the PGA Tour. These are gifted players who've devoted their lives to the game, and on any given day they could just flat out stink. A Good Walk Spoiled is a completely engaging book from first page to last, a wonderfully observed and masterfully told story of pain and profit in the world's most frustrating sport.
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Product Description
On those magnificent days on which your drives split the fairway down the middle and your wedge shots leave you putting for birdie, you think: "I wonder if I could do this for a living." After all, guys in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, guys no one heard of until recently, are making planeloads of money on the various golf tours (and buying private planes to take them from one big-money tournament to the next). A Good Walk Spoiled is a bit of a reality check. John Feinstein chronicles the struggles of the top golfers in the game, as well as those trying to get onto the PGA Tour. These are gifted players who've devoted their lives to the game, and on any given day they could just flat out stink. A Good Walk Spoiled is a completelyengaging book from first page to last, a wonderfully observed and masterfully told story of pain and profit in the world's most frustrating sport.
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Customer Reviews
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A Good Idea Spoiled
Rating  (2)
Date: 2008-01-29
This book has not aged well. It successfully recaps the 1994 season, but fails in nearly every other regard. It doesn't give a great sense of what it is like to play on the PGA Tour, it offers little new information, it covers too much territory too thinly, and most damaging of all, it is boring.
Much of the book reads like a newspaper recap of the year's highlights. It uses a dry and repeatable format that doesn't give the reader much more than scores and a bland summary of events. For those not interested in this particular season, the book has little to offer.
Feinstein does track individual golfers, but it's nearly impossible to care about any of them because they all feel like carbon copies of one another. There are too many examples of the pretty good player who is so close to breaking through, but instead is constantly struggling to make cuts, keep his card, stop playing the Nike Tour, etc. Also too many examples of the established professional golfer who isn't in danger of losing his card, but can't recapture the swing he had when he was really successful. Everything runs together in a forgettable blur. Feinstein presents John Daly as spoiled brat (which is no doubt accurate), but Daly is one of the few people in the book whose escapades don't put the reader to sleep.
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You don't need to be a golfer to enjoy this one
Rating  (5)
Date: 2007-09-12
Excellent work on a frustrating and fun game. The background info was particularly interesting.
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Mark Twain said it
Rating  (1)
Date: 2007-07-09
0 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
You would think from all of the hype over the years that Mark Feinstein uttered the phrase, " a good walk spoiled". Not true. Mark Twain said, "Golf is a good walk spoiled". Nice try Feinstein.
David Pendergrass
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40% cliches
Rating (2)
Date: 2007-04-24
1 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
My real rating is 1.5 stars. The book won't put you to sleep, but it's not going to teach you anything you won't have known glancing through newspaper articles for a few years.
Readers will learn nothing about golf if they have any acquaintence with the sport: though the closest I've ever gotten to golf in my 47 years is frequently passing by a club shop in my neighborhood, I learned almost nothing about the sport from this book save uninteresting gossip about golfers who are now no longer prominent.
Feinstein makes no attempt at analysis and no attempt to fit any of what he writes into any context: what the reader gets here is a sketch of an insular world with no acknoledgment of that insularity. Hence, for any but the big golf fan who wishes cereal-box writing to pass time, the book will be useless.
Bad points: besides that mentioned, the prose is (as mentioned in my title) in large measure cliches and reads, as other reviewers have pointed out, like a newspaper article knocked out under deadline and length pressure. For newspaper articles, such is no great handicap, but for a book is makes for tediousness. Next is a quibble, perhaps, but in the trade paperback edition I picked up the four photos on the cover are far better than the bubblegum snaps in the interior of the book. The book photos do nothing to enhance the content and waste paper.
If you're looking for extremely light reading that will tax you none (as I was when I selected this book to read in a period of extreme exhaustion), "A good walk spoiled" will suffice. If you're looking for a good book, look elsewhere.
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A chronicle of modern golf without Tiger Woods
Rating  (4)
Date: 2007-02-08
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
This book is an interesting read, written during the 1995 PGA season. The timing of it is such that Tiger Woods hadn't really hit the scene yet. Because of his dominance in golf, the comparisons in the book are really out of date. This is not a reflection on the author, he worked with what he had at the time, and did a splendid job. At that time on the tour, a three win season was a spectacular feat, where now it is not the case any more for the elite players. The game has changed. A lot of the players who got extra attention in the book are still on the scene, and it was interesting to compare the perception of them in the mid-90's to what it is now. Still very much worth the read.
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