Just in time for golf's annual rite of spring, the Masters, comes Men in Green, Michael Bamberger's celebratory, personal meditation on aging and golf. In 2012, while covering the Ryder Cup outside Chicago, Bamberger, a writer for Sports Illustrated, sat down in a restaurant and wrote "Living Legends" and "Secret Legends." He listed nine names under each. The former were all players, while the latter included a club pro, a teaching pro and a tour caddie. Inspired by Roger Kahn's The Boys of Summer, Bamberger (The Green Road Home) concocted a plan to try to see each of them.
To accompany him on his road trip, he brings along his good friend Mike Donald (on his second list), famous for his playoff loss to Hale Irwin in the 1990 U.S Open: "Another lunch-bucket pro trying to knock off a legend in the most demanding event in golf."
Jack Nicklaus--Bamberger's golfing hero, the "one I admire most"--talks to them with a casual, genuine intimacy. Bamberger describes the famous 1977 British Open duel between Nicklaus and Tom Watson as "some kind of artwork." He and Donald then travel to Jackson, Miss., seeking out "caddie-yard legend" Dolphus Hull (aka "Golf Ball"), who caddied for Raymond Floyd and two of the great black players, Calvin Peete and Lee Elder. They find Hull in failing health in a nursing home.
Bamberger's book reads like a diary--conversational, funny and easy-going, filled with great golf stories and anecdotes, as well as fine mini-portraits of his Legends. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher