Walking With Tigers

Qualifying for the Professional Golfers Association (PGA) Tour can be one of the most difficult challenges in sports. Almost as difficult once a golfer gets there is to maintain adventure is chronicled in this informative and entertaining book by John Black.

The book starts at the last hole of the Web.com qualifying rounds at the end of the 2016 season. A golfer must place in the top 25 spots of this playoff format in order to qualify for the PGA Tour. Joel qualified when another golfer missed a birdie putt and finished just behind Dahmen. It was a lifetime dream for Dahmen – he had survived testicular cancer as had his brother and they lost their mother Jolyn to pancreatic cancer. While this helped him place the game of golf in the proper perspective, it was nonetheless a time to celebrate for Dahmen and his longtime caddie Geno Bonnalie.

However, life on the PGA tour was not the same glamourous life for Dahmen and his girlfriend Lona Skutt as it was for the top players, called “Tigers” throughout the book. They had to scramble for travel and accommodations frequently. When Joel failed to make a cut, that meant he wasn’t paid and when he was struggling the money was tight. When Joel finally brought home his first check, Lorna was able to not only pay the bills but also to make their “first major purchase…a vacuum cleaner.” Reading that passage, and many others like that one, makes the book one that will entertain as well as inform.

As much as Dahmen had to scurry for these accommodations, it was even more so for Bonnalie. While money was a little easier for him and his wife Holly because she had a good paying job, Geno still tried to keep his expenses to a minimum as he would only be able to earn a share of Dahmen’s earnings. His thriftiness on travel and lodging expenses were legendary. The flights Bonnalie would book when he traveled from his hometown of Lewiston, Idaho would often take strange paths for connections. These would become the “Lewiston Flightmare”.

But through it all, both golfer and caddie were enjoying the experience tremendously. The book takes the reader through each tourney they entered, the good shots and the bad ones and has a short write-up about the winner at each one of them, whether or not it was a “Tiger” or another golfer just trying to earn a good paycheck for the week. The golf writing is superb in the book as the reader will feel the emotions of every shot, good and bad. The descriptions of the course, lie of the ball, putts, even the gallery when an errant ball struck a spectator – all of them are richly illustrated by the author’s talent. As for walking with a “Tiger”, the best story of these is when Joel was playing in the same group as Dustin Johnson, who was the top ranked player in the world at the time, and was matching him shot for shot – easily the best experience Dahmen and Bonnalie had on the 2017 Tour.

A golfer has to place in the top 125 of the FedEx Cup standings in order to be assured a spot on the PGA Tour for the next year. If a PGA tour golfer fails to do so, then he must quality in the Web.com playoffs – which is how Dahmen qualified in 2016 and because he was outside the top 125 golfers, he had to do again at the end of 2017. This can be just as stressful as any tourney and this time, Joel was able to qualify without needing a missed putt by another golfer.

This book is a wonderful account of the ups and downs of a young golfer trying to succeed in the grind of the PGA tour without a lot of the fancy perks that are provided to the “Tigers”. The reader will close the book smiling for Joel Dahmen and Geno Bonnalie and will be rooting hard for Joel to become one of the” Tigers”.

I wish to thank Black Rose Writing for providing a copy of the book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is a book about a good, but not great golfer and his caddie who must survive on the PGA tour without any of the perks or financial pay-offs given to the very best golfers (the "Tigers"). It is well-written and sometimes amusing. However, I would recommend this book primarily to golfers or those with a strong interest in golf. Because I am neither of those things, I often had my eyes glaze over at the immense detail - it felt like each stroke on each golf course was described in detail. For the right audience, this will be a great book to read.

My thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an eARC in exchange for my honest review.

An enjoyable enough read about how to get/keep your card on the golf circuit. A golf fanatic would have probably enjoyed it more than I did as it was purely about the American circuit rather than/including the majors.