Cocktails and Range Balls: One's Too Many, Ten's Not Enough

by Steve Wheatcroft

There’s the life everyone sees—and then there’s the one you live when the crowds go home.

For nearly two decades, Steve Wheatcroft stood on golf’s biggest stages. From Pebble Beach to PGA Tour Sundays, he chased the dream he’d built since childhood. But somewhere between the airports, the hotel bars, and the missed cuts, that dream turned into something darker.

When the cheers faded, the silence hit louder. What started as a few drinks to take the edge off became a slow unraveling. The harder he chased the game, the more it slipped away—until the man who once lived for golf could barely recognize himself without it.

Cocktails and Range Balls is a story about success, failure, addiction, and redemption—but more than anything, it’s about identity. What happens when the one thing that’s defined you your whole life is suddenly gone?

Raw, unfiltered, and painfully human, this is the truth behind the scorecards—the journey from losing everything to learning that maybe, for the first time, you were never playing against the field… you were playing against yourself.

138 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 30, 2025

Reviews

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am not a golfer but I sailed through this golfer’s memoir like I usually sail through a good suspense novel. Steve Wheatcroft’s slim memoir is part golf (after many years on the PGA Tour) and it is part personal life in which the author addresses his depression and alcoholism after his pro golf career ended. The book is sprinkled with unique, & often amusing, vignettes about his golfer life on the road. The end of the book is, at first, heartrending and then hope filled. The author is unflinchingly honest throughout the good times and the dark times.