Paper Tiger: An Obsessed Golfer's Quest to Play with the Pros [Paperback]

?Think country-club clinic meets Navy Seals training. I will pay any price, bear any burden, leave my home to follow the seasons, build my own swing studio in the basement, construct a practice green in my backyard. . . . Everything the big boys have access to, I want double.?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 Tigertakes readers from the Michelob tournament (a win for Tom) to the Australian Tour, where forty-mile-per-hour winds and a driving rain scare off his Japanese partners. With each chapter, he tracks his weight alongside his handicap, pursuing his dream with a reckless abandon that comes to involve hardcore diets, pricey technology, even psychologists. With echoes ofDead Solid PerfectandWho?s Your Caddy?Tom brings his uniquely edgy, deeply human perspective to a game that can simultaneously bring out the best and the worst in everyone who tries to master it.