Golf Dads: Fathers, Sons, and the Greatest Game

by Curt Sampson

The interplay between fathers and sons has long been one of golf’s most essential and enigmatic relationships. In Golf Dads, the best-selling writer and former touring professional Curt Sampson brings to life ten remarkable stories of golfers, their fathers, and the game that brings them together. The stories feature well-known subjects such as Michelle Wie, Ben Hogan, Lee Trevino, and David Feherty, as well as some surprises, such as six-year-old phenom A.J. Beechler--not yet known to the world.
“This is a book about fathers,” Sampson writes, “using golf as a wedge to pry open a few insights.” We get up close with the embarrassing Byung Wook Wie and his talented daughter at a PGA Tour event in Pennsylvania; travel to the Mexican jungle for bogeys and butterflies with a club pro bearing his father’s ashes in a black Hogan shag bag; journey to San Francisco for transplant surgery for a golf pro father from his golf pro son; feel the wonder and weight of fathering a six-year-old golfing sensation whose future is too bright to see clearly.
For fans of James Dodson’s Final Rounds, Golf Dads is sure to resonate with anyone who has been handed a worn club by his father or who has watched his child swing a stick at a rock and marveled at the possibilities.

Genres: Sports

192 pages, Hardcover

First published April 9, 2008

About the author

Curt Sampson, golf professional turned golf writer, came to golf the old-fashioned way—as a caddie. He looped for his father for a few years on summer Saturday’s, then turned pro, in a manner of speaking, at age 12, as one of the scores of disheveled boys and men in the caddie pen at Lake Forest Country Club in Hudson, Ohio. His golf game developed from sneaking on LFCC at twilight, an occasionally nerve-wracking exercise because the greens keeper intimated a readiness to call the cops on trespassers. Sampson—never caught—progressed as a player and as an employee, scoring a job as starter/cart maintenance boy at age 16 at Boston Hills CC, a public course, also in Hudson. His high water mark as a young golfer was a win in the Mid- American Junior in 1970. Sampson attended Kent State University on a golf scholarship and managed a municipal course for two years following graduation, worked a couple more as an assistant pro at clubs in South Carolina and Tennessee, then bummed around as a touring pro in Canada, New Zealand, and Florida.

In November 1988, Sampson began to write full-time, mostly about the game of his father, golf. Texas Golf Legends, his first book, was collaboration with Santa Fe-based artist Paul Milosevich. Researching TGL gained Sampson introductions with people he has written about many times since: Hogan, Nelson, Crenshaw, Trevino, and a few dozen others. His next book–The Eternal Summer, a recreation of golf’s summer of 1960, when Hogan, Palmer, and Nicklaus battled–is still selling 15 years after its debut, a rarity in the publishing world. Sampson’s biography of the enigmatic William Ben Hogan struck a chord. Both Hogan and his next book, The Masters, appeared on the New York Times bestseller lists. Subsequent books and scores of magazine articles cemented Sampson’s reputation as readable and sometimes controversial writer with an eye for humor and the telling detail.

Reviews

[Matthew Stetz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this book. It was a quick read. 200 pages. Some good stories. A good book.

[Willie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some chapters were drudgery, while others were really good. I felt like the author was really stretching on a few of them, like Lee Trevino. I think I would have left that chapter out.