The Playing Lesson: A Duffer’s Year Among the Pros

You are cordially invited to join Michael Bamberger on a year-long golfing adventure--playing alongside the pros of the PGA Tour, the LPGA Tour, LIV Golf, and more--as he seeks to unlock golf’s most stubborn secrets in various and surprising ways, all in the name of...improvement!

Nearly fifty years after taking up the game, Michael Bamberger made a pair of startling discoveries: golf had never meant more to him, and he knew almost nothing about it. He decided to cover himself in green in a whole new way. He spent a year inside the ropes of professional golf--playing, caddying, competing, volunteering, and interviewing--looking for a door into the sport’s sanctum sanctorum.

In The Playing Lesson: A Duffer’s Year Among the Pros, Bamberger goes on the ultimate golfing bender. You’ve read about St. Andrews before, but here you will experience the home of golf in a whole new way. You’ll join the author as he volunteers in one tournament, caddies in others, plays in men’s and women’s pro-ams, and conducts intimate interviews with elite figures in the game. You’ll mooch off the lessons Bamberger takes from instructors, famous and obscure, who teach golf in novel ways. You’ll learn how to buy a better golf game.

Maybe you’ve had club fittings, but not like the one Bamberger experiences in various tour trailers. In a pro-am, Bamberger gets driving tips from one of the tour’s longest hitters, Jake Knapp. He receives a putting lesson from Brad Faxon. He learns how to hit hook wedges from Gary Player. He lives through the intense pain of Rory McIlroy’s misses and rejoices at Lydia Ko’s triumphs. He plays Pebble Beach and Royal Oak, a down-home nine-hole public course in Detroit with perfect greens. He receives an unexpected hug from Greg Norman at a LIV Golf event in Miami, along with the words, ＂Come on in here, you asshole.＂ He spends a lot of time at driving ranges, some of it productive.

What Bamberger has done here, when you get right down to it, is create his own tour. The Playing Lesson is a report on a real-life golfing safari, with stops inside the heads of the game’s high priests, his own--and yours.

Michael Bamberger was born in Patchogue, New York, in 1960. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982, he worked as a newspaper reporter, first for the (Martha’s) Vineyard Gazette, later for The Philadelphia Inquirer. After twenty-two years at Sports Illustrated, he is now a senior writer at Golf.com. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Christine.