Sports Golf

The Masters golf tournament weaves a hypnotic spell. It is the toughest ticket in sports, with black-market tickets selling for $10,000 and more. Success at Augusta National breeds legends, while failure can overshadow even the most brilliant of careers. But as Curt Sampson reveals in The Masters, a cold heart beats behind the warm antebellum facade of this famous Augusta course.

In 2009, Tiger Woods was the most famous athlete on the planet, a transcendent star of almost unfathomable fame and fortune living what appeared to be the perfect life - married to a Swedish beauty and the father of two young children. Winner of 14 major golf championships and 79 PGA Tour events, Woods was the first billion-dollar athlete, earning more than $100 million a year in endorsements from the likes of Nike, Gillette, AT&T, and Gatorade. But it was all a carefully crafted illusion. As it turned out, Woods had been living a double life for years.

Golf is a Zen sport. If you leave the present moment, you will likely feel the immediate karmic consequences like a hammer hitting your thumb. In The Mindful Golfer: How to Lower Your Handicap While Raising Your Consciousness, Stephen Altschuler helps you nail it all right - hard and true and into another level of surrender, satisfaction, and, self-awareness. He uses the tools of Zen to raise the game several notches on the ladder of consciousness.

Putting Out of Your Mind is an informative and valuable guide to achieving a better golf game. While most spend their time trying to perfect their swing, Rotella encourages golfers to concentrate on their putting: the most crucial yet often overlooked aspect of the game. From true-life stories of such greats as Davis Love III, David Duvall, and Brad Faxon, to dozens of game-changing practice drills, Putting Out of Your Mind is the new bible of putting for amateurs and pros alike.

Legendary sportswriter Red Smith characterized Ben Hogan’s comeback from a near-fatal automobile crash in February 1949 as “the most remarkable feat in the history of sports.” Now, more than 60 years later, that statement still rings true. The crowning moment of Hogan’s comeback was his astonishing victory in the 1950 U.S. Open at Merion Golf Club near Philadelphia, where his battered legs could barely carry him on the 36-hole final day.

Mark Broadie is at the forefront of a revolutionary new approach to the game of golf. What does it take to drop ten strokes from your golf score? What part of Tiger Woods’ game makes him a winner? Traditional golf stats can't answer these questions. Broadie, a professor at Columbia Business School, helped the PGA Tour develop its cutting-edge strokes gained putting stat. In this eye-opening new book, Broadie uses analytics from the financial world to uncover the secrets of the game of golf.

Acclaimed sports psychologist and best-selling author Bob Rotella has advised everyone from professional golfers to business executives on how to flourish under pressure and overcome challenges. As a sports psychologist, Bob Rotella’s work is to make average athletes exceptional. By focusing on incremental progress, Rotella demonstrates how you can achieve more than you ever imagined.

Wells Whitaker was once golf’s hottest rising star, but lately, all he has to show for his “promising” career is a killer hangover, a collection of broken clubs, and one remaining supporter. No matter how bad he plays, the beautiful, sunny redhead is always on the sidelines. He curses, she cheers. He scowls, she smiles. But when Wells quits in a blaze of glory and his fangirl finally goes home, he knows he made the greatest mistake of his life.

Many golf psychology guides offer mental strategies and techniques to cope with the apparent pressures of the game and to address how golfers feel on the golf course. This audiobook is different. It reveals the cause of the doubts and fears rather than trying to fix the symptoms.

The man who invented shock rock tells the amazing and, yeah, shocking story of how he slayed his thirsty demons with a golf club. It started one day when Cooper was watching a Star Trek rerun between concerts, bored and drunk on a quart-of-whiskey-a-day habit. A friend dragged the rocker out of his room and suggested a round of golf. Cooper has been a self-confessed golf addict ever since.

As coaches to some of golf's top players, Pia Nilsson and Lynn Marriott have designed and refined a revolutionary way of teaching the game, with great results. They don't believe in prescribing the same stance, grip, and swing to everyone, followed by hours of purposeless drilling. They don't even believe in beginning with physical technique. Their success has proven to them that a great game begins with a great vision. Every Shot Must Have a Purpose offers cutting-edge techniques for integrating the physical, technical, mental, emotional, and social parts of a player's game.

In The Little Book of Breaking 80, the author, a struggling amateur golfer who finally discovered the true keys to breaking 80 after more than 30 years of trial and error, blows the cover off of the hopelessly doomed conventional approach to golf improvement that keeps most golfers stuck on the endless merry-go-round of frustration and failure.

John Feinstein, who has spent four decades finding intriguing sports characters and narratives and turning them into classic books, chronicles the life and career of David Feherty. Feinstein tells hilarious true tales about Feherty’s time in the limelight and interactions with stars such as Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, Payne Stewart, and Seve Ballesteros. Feherty is fall-down-funny, self-deprecating, and a lifelong underdog who has thrived as a commentator and television interview host, and most recently as a touring standup comic.

The best stories about one of golf's most endearing courses, Pinehurst in North Carolina. Pinehurst, a pinpoint on the map of North Carolina, is a 100-year-old course beloved by all true golf fans. In Pinehurst, golf is more than a game; it’s a way of life. In Tales From Pinehurst, readers will experience historical tales and lore from those that have witnessed the growth of one of golf’s most endearing playing fields - from the infamous Donald Ross creation No. 2 course, which has baffled professional golfers for decades, to the US Opens it has hosted.

Any golfer will understand this: You go out to the driving range, you warm up with your irons, everything is going right. You pull out your utility clubs, you are hitting great. Your driver - boom. The ball flies far and lands just where you want it. You head for the practice green...you drain every putt from 30 feet in. But eventually, you end up quadruple bogey.

A beloved New York Times bestselling author and golf aficionado shares his insatiable curiosity, trademark sense of humor, and vast knowledge of the game in this cavalcade of original pieces about why we love the sport, now featuring three additional new pieces.

After sixty years of keeping notes on the things he's seen and learned and on the golfing greats he's taught, Penick lets the secrets in his Little Red Book be heard by the golf world in this classic work. His simple, direct, practical wisdom pares away all the hypertechnical jargon that's grown up around the game, and lets all golfers play their best - whatever their level.

Golf is a beloved yet technical game, so a sound swing and precise technique are essential. Most golfers who want to improve their skills go to the range and work painstakingly on their swings, not realizing it's often their performance state on the course that needs work, not their technique. Simple things such as awareness of your balance, tension, and tempo, as well as the ability to control mental, emotional, and social variables you encounter while playing, can quickly take your game to a new performance level.

Like most amateur golfers, Tom Coyne had often wondered whether the pros won because they were more talented or because they were more obsessed. Overweight and burdened by a 14 handicap, he decided to find out for himself what it takes to play like a pro. Charting his journey - which included hiring top golf gurus such as Dr. Jim Suttie - Paper Tiger takes listeners from the Michelob tournament (a win for Tom) to the Australian Tour, where 40-mile-per-hour winds and a driving rain scare off his Japanese partners.

Veteran golfers know that the secret to a lower score is a solid short game, but mastering those small strokes can be maddening - even for the pros. One of golf's most revered instructors, Stan Utley now reveals the step-by-step tactics behind his revolutionary short-game techniques in The Art of the Short Game.