The Scorecard Always Lies: A Year Behind the Scenes on the PGA Tour

A golf correspondent for Sports Illustrated, Chris Lewis freely admits that John Feinstein’s best-selling “A Good Walk Spoiled” was the model for this behind-the-scenes look at the 2006 PGA season. Lewis spent 30 weeks traveling the circuit to collect the small stories and off-beat (and occasionally slightly off-color) tales from locker rooms and after hours that you won’t learn even from the windiest announcer’s efforts to fill time.

It’s not a bad life to eavesdrop on. The successful tour player’s lifestyle, thanks to the millions of dollars that one Tiger Woods has brought to the game, can be one to envy. It is a world of  
such luxury that Lee Westwood’s son Sam once asked during a rare commercial flight, “Daddy, what are those people doing on our airplane?” At Vijay Singh’s annual party for 200 or so at The Players Championship, Lewis informs us, the wine budget alone topped $20,000, and Tommy Armour III once famously threw a party where raw sushi was served on the body of a nude woman.

But at times these iconic figures are, well, normal sorts. Lewis writes of Kenny Perry’s fondness for drag racing, notes that John Riegger is “the Tour’s best duck caller and leading hunting purist” and reveals that Singh’s weight trainer, Joey Diovisalvi, previously worked for Bruce Springsteen and was in fact “the man responsible for the iconic rear end of the cover of 'Born in the U.S.A.’ ”

A modest quibble: Lewis writes that Woods made the “only hole-in-one of his Tour career” at the 1997 Phoenix Open, when we all know the first came at the 1996 Greater Milwaukee Open; but that’s a small mistake. Mostly Lewis fills the addict’s need for all things golf, and does so in a most enjoyable style. Anyone who describes mop-haired Charlie Hoffman as “the secret love child of Craig Stadler and Cousin It” can write for me any time.