Review: The Playing Lesson (2025)

By Michael Bamberger

Michael Bamberger has the bug. The golfing bug, that is. 

He's always enjoyed all of the various parts of the sometimes addictive game, which doesn't put him in a particularly small club. But Bamberger had something else going for him. He could write - and that eventually landed him a job at Sports Illustrated magazine. That led to several good golf books, including one called "Men in Green" - profiles of golf's greatest generation. If you couldn't be one of the best players in the world, playing the best golf courses in the world, well, hanging around people who are wasn't a bad substitute. 

What's more, there would be the odd fringe benefit - like personally playing some interesting courses. How many people take "business trips" in which carrying golf clubs along is part of the deal?

Bamberger now is in his mid-60s, and is a writer for Golf.com. Last year, he decided to take a look at golf in a variety of different ways. From there, Bamberger was off on a journey through the golfing world - almost literally. He takes the reader along for the pleasant ride in "The Playing Lesson."

The supposed goal - "excuse" might be a better word - for the author was to experience golf in a variety of new ways. Therefore, Bamberger volunteered to work at a tournament. He was a caddie at another. Michael took part in several pro-ams on the men's and women's tours at various levels. He talked to a variety of people along the way, including instructors and equipment pros.

On one level, this gives Bamberger a chance to offer opinions on the golf scene, past and present. It's a complicated situation at the moment, with the LIV and PGA Tours fighting for attention, power and money (those three items go together). The viewpoints are offered in no particular order, along the lines of a typical long conversation with someone. 

On the other hand, this is a chance to feed a golfer's universal quest: play better. So Bamberger is always on the lookout for tips on improving his game from anyone who will stop to think about it. Who couldn't use a little advice on putting from Brad Faxon, one of the best n the golf business among pros in that particular aspect of golf? 

It's all goes down quite smoothly, like a fast round of golf on a perfect summer day. Bamberger is good company, with a lifetime of memories to draw from. There are only a couple of occasions when the story bogs down a little bit. One is a good-sized discussion on equipment specifications, which is a little dry for most. The ending is something of a tribute to his love of golf and to those who helped develop it in his life, which some might find a little syrupy.

The people who published "The Playing Lesson" obviously aren't fools. They put it in the stores shortly before Father's Day - and no doubt it was turned into a gift many times around the country. The recipients no doubt offered a big smile in return for the present, and promised to start reading it soon ... right after finishing 18 holes. (Take it from a guy whose father fit that description well.) 

If you fit into the world in which golf plays a big part of your life, then it will be as good as a birdie on a tough par-4. 

Four stars

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Review: Beyond Fast (2025)

By Sean Brosnan with Chris Lear and Andrew Grief

Welcome to the world of cross-country running. It's familiar, yet different. 

Most of us are familiar with running in competition, mostly in the form of events on a track (hence, track and field). A group of runners line up together, go a particular distance, and find out which one is the fastest. Conditions usually are ideal for running in terms of elevation, with flat surfaces and no elevation.

Cross country is a different animal. It comes from a childhood game in England in the middle of the 19th century, as kids would run through the countryside chasing their friends. Conditions in the current incarnation of the sport are often not ideal, since hills are expected and surfaces can vary. I once saw a 5-kilometer race held in a park that had a layer of snow on the grass in a sub-freezing temperature, which meant it didn't take much for the course to become a sea of mud. Guys turned up at the finish line crying. You wouldn't believe how many shoes got left behind on turns.

Cross-country events usually are staged in the fall while their track counterparts go in the spring. There are no formal NCAA championships in XC, the usual abbreviation. It's not in the Olympics, either. Cross country isn't associated with big crowds;  usually it's family, friends, and runners past and present watching.

Sean Brosnan takes us into the world of high school cross country in his book, "Beyond Fast." It's the story of how, in automotive terms, he took a team from 0 to 100 almost overnight. 

Brosnan had more or less wandered through life until he arrived at Newbury Park High School in 2016. He had been a very good runner, but not quite good enough to challenge for national fame and glory. Brosnan loved running through, and he bounced around the country looking for information and the chance to interact with the best in the business. Eventually, he landed at a high school that had been decidedly mediocre. It hadn't reached the state finals in California cross country in about a quarter of a century. 

He promised he'd change all that right from Day One, and then went about the business of doing it. There was plenty of work involved, as there always is with running. But the athletes bought in, and - sure enough - some success followed. Suddenly it was cool to be a runner, and Newbury Park got better and better. Good runners became relatively great runners, and the rest of the group was inspired to try to keep up as best as it could. One of those runners was an Olympian in 2024, and the team won three straight unofficial high school national championships - breaking records for scholastic athletes along the way. Brosnan does something of a play-by-play about how it all happened. 

The book generates one key thought along the way. Go to any area in the country, and you'll find a school and a program that is something of a dynasty in something. There's a good coach behind it in most cases, but it's tough to know how much credit to give him or her. After all, the athletes are the ones doing the work. Almost certainly, success breeds success in high school sports. It's cool to be on a state champion, and the younger kids who are top athletes might pick that sport over a less successful one.

From there, Brosnan obviously needed a little help for his methods to succeed. The proper attitude and support from parents and athletes are necessary. When Brosnan decided to take his team to a higher elevation for training during four weeks of summer vacation, the runners had to be willing to do it and their parents had to be on board financially (as well willing to do some driving to see their kids every so often). It sounds like Newbury Park is in a reasonably wealthy area, and that must have helped. But some family vacations and summer jobs might have been sacrificed. This might have been a perfect spot for Brosnan to try out his methods. The coach pounded the message that his runners could be great if they did the work, and many wound up that way by any standard.

Along the way in those championship years, Brosnan had to deal with Covid-19 for a couple of them. Even in a sport involving somewhat solitary runners, the coach's drive for excellence may have bent (but not broken) the rules just a little bit. He certainly fought for his athletes with administrators and sanctioning groups along the way.

Brosnan teamed up with Chris Lear and Andrew Grief for the writing of this book. It's a straight-forward account of the rise of the Newbury Park program and of his life, which is far from conventional. Some of the runners themselves even have the chance to express their stories along the way, which is a nice touch. 

The story that's printed ends in 2022, when Brosnan decided to leave high school coaching to take a similar job at UCLA. But this book is coming out in 2025, so what happened in the meantime? Brosnan only lasted a year coaching the Bruins' distance runners before UCLA fired him. He has said he believes he was fired because there were allegations that he tampered with runners from other schools before they entered the transfer portal. It's tough to tell about what happened there; this isn't the Alabama football program when it comes to media scrutiny. There's no sign that Brosnan has landed a full-time coaching job in the two years since his departure from Westwood. That's all a little disquieting from a distance.    

"Beyond Fast" ought to interest those who have a strong connection with cross country, particularly at the high school level. It's always good to read about how championship teams come together. More casual readers, though, might get a little bogged down at the description of training schedules and races. In other words, the book falls into a very cozy niche without room for most. 

Three stars

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Book Review: Baddest Man (2025)

By Mark Kriegel

You wouldn't expect a biography of Mike Tyson to be boring. 

But put it in the hands of a skilled reporter and writer like Mark Kriegel, and you truly have something special. 

That's a short description of "Baddest Man," which in itself is a shortened version of the phrase "The Baddest Man on the Planet" - one of Tyson's nicknames during the course of his career.  Such a description used to come automatically when someone was the heavyweight boxing champion of the world, which Tyson was back in the day. An old-fashioned way of saying it was "He can lick any man in the house." 

These days, no one has been able to say that without a possible argument. There are three or four heavyweight boxing champions these days, and none of them at a given moment can be identified by most sports fans. The greed that caused boxing officials to split up the title into parts in an attempt to have more title fights caught up with the sport quickly. 

Therefore, it's a little easy to become nostalgic about Mike Tyson, although the accompanying noise that came with his years in the spotlight. were overwhelming for all concerned at times. Especially Tyson. He had quite a run, keeping the public's attention from 1985 until 2005 even as parts of his life were crumbling. 

Tyson came out of Brooklyn with a father that dropped out of sight pretty quickly, and with a mother who was willing to do almost anything to keep the family together in some form or another - even if meant a spiral downward in their living conditions. Mike was much more interested in an education from the streets than he was from the schools. Tyson was said to be arrested 38 times by the age of 13. The fact that he was built like a fire hydrant made it easy in some ways to take liberties with others, and he ended in the government system that tries (and often fails) to straighten out the lives of teens.

An unhappy life and a young death usually is the end product of such a combination, but Tyson received an unexpected lifeline in the form of an invitation to spend time with legendary boxing manager Cus D'Amato in upstate New York. D'Amato had heard that Tyson had some boxing ability, and brought him into his home. 

There Tyson fine-tuned his boxing skills, with D'Amato telling anyone that would listen that Mike was destined to be a great champion. Once he got in the ring for formal matches, people started to understand D'Amato's enthusiasm. This was someone who could clobber almost anyone who was matched up with him. Certainly he had a chance to rank with the great sluggers in heavyweight history, like George Foreman and Sonny Liston. Those are the types of fighters who generate buzz, which leads to ticket sales, which leads to dollars floating around. 

This being boxing, of course, people flocked to take advantage of that situation. The history of the financial side of the sport is one where others try to take money away from those who actually earn it, while the fighters themselves usually aren't financially sophisticated enough to fend them off. Tyson made plenty of money ... but not as much as he should have earned. The in-fighting in that sense was tougher for Tyson than it was in the ring itself. He won three championship belts. The book comes to an end just as the champ needs about 90 seconds to knock out Michael Spinks - the only legitimate threat that was left to him. As we know now, Tyson had few new worlds to conquer, and he let the ones he had get away eventually.   

The research here is extraordinary. There are several details in Tyson's life that come out here, and the reader must ask the question, "How did Kriegel find that out?" He tracked down almost everyone, and also has a variety of other sources available - such as Tyson's own volumes of his autobiography. The authenticity is present throughout the book.

The Mike Tyson we meet here has some contradictions built into his mind. At times he's a bully and a narcissist, but at other times he capable of loyalty and kindness. Tyson obviously knew he missed out on a more normal childhood, and it sounds like he was longing for one that era. It's also clear that Tyson was not unintelligent but simply uneducated. It would be easy to wonder what might have happened to him had he grown up in better circumstances. 

Along those lines, Kriegel starts his book with something of a final chapter. Mike is in the present day, playing tennis dad while watching a daughter practice. It couldn't be more "normal." But who could have predicted it?

Kriegel wrote superb biographies of Joe Namath, Ray Mancini and Pete Maravich. He told a former coworker of his and mine that he enjoyed probing the father-son relationship in his books. It wasn't present in Tyson's life, so "Baddest Man" is a slight change of direction for the author. Even so, this book might be even better than his other three works. 

Five stars

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Review: Big Loosh (2025)

By Jim Leeke

Let's start this review of "Big Loosh: The Unruly Life of Ron Luciano" with a story.

When Luciano was pushing one of his many books, he even took a half-hour to appear on my sports talk show back in the day. I knew that Ron had umpired in Buffalo when the Bisons were playing in War Memorial Stadium in the International League back in the 1960s. I asked if he had any particular memories of those days. 

As a matter of fact, he did. It seemed that that was a particularly loud woman who sat behind home plate back then every night. She seemed to think it was her job to criticize the umpires, no matter what happened in the game. "That pitch was outside!" "He was safe!" "You guys are terrible." And on and on it went. 

Ron and his crew grew tired of it all. Then they received a tip that the woman was a breakfast waitress at a suburban restaurant. So the three umpires got up early one morning and visited the restaurant, and they gave it to her with all sorts of orders. "These pancakes are cold." "I need more coffee." "How did you burn the toast so badly." "Where's the bill?" And so on. Finally, the woman came over to their table. "Guys, if you leave this place right now, I promise that I will never yell at you at a game again."

They left, and she kept her word. In fact, she became the umpires' best friend. She always said hello before the game, and would bring them a freshly baked pie to start the homestand. 

The rest of the 30-minute show was fun too. But that's a side of Luciano that doesn't really turn up in "Big Loosh." It's a straight biography about a surprisingly complicated man. 

If you were a baseball fan, it was tough to avoid Luciano during the 1970s and 1980s. He seemed like an unlikely choice to be a celebrity umpire. Ron came out of the Binghamton area as a young man large enough to receive a scholarship as a lineman on the football team at Syracuse University. Injuries were a problem there, but he was still good enough to be drafted by the Detroit Lions. But injuries were an issue there too, and he bounced through Minnesota before landing with the Buffalo Bills for two games in the American Football League. Yup, more injuries. Luciano's pro career was over before it started. 

What next? He ended up at umpire school, and he happened to be good at it. Who is going to argue with a man big enough to play defensive tackle in pro football? Luciano was good enough to work some of the game's Crown Jewels, like the All-Star Game and the playoffs. Yes, he didn't get along well with Baltimore manager Earl Weaver, but then again no umpire did. Luciano also showed a little flair with his work, sometimes using a pistol-shooting gesture to call a runner out instead of the traditional thumb going up. The fans seemed to like it, and Ron liked the attention - although baseball still had a tradition-bound reputation at that point, and forced separation seemed likely.

NBC called at just the right time, and Luciano signed up for work as the analyst for backup "Game of the Week" on Saturdays - in the days when only two regular-season games were nationally televised per week. The backup game was the broadcast that went into blacked-out markets, or was used during rain delays with the primary game. (Kids, ask your parents for a further explanation of all that if necessary.) The relationship lasted a short time; as he put it, by the time he got done at NBC, it was behind Atari in the ratings. From there, Luciano moved into the unlikely position of author. He was always naturally funny, and he knew how to tell a story, so "The Umpire Strikes Back" became a hit. There were four more books along those lines. 

But the literary gravy train eventually ended, and Luciano became a bit lost. His sporting goods store back home rose and fell along the way, and after a while he started receiving treatments for depression. Luciano committed suicide in 1995. 

In one sense, a straight-forward look at Luciano's life is a pretty good idea. Ron did have trouble keeping his facts straight, particularly when he was headed toward a punchline. Facts could be exaggerated beyond recognition. No, Luciano didn't eject Weaver every time they were in the same ballpark, although the possibility always seemed to be lurking in the background. It's also nice to see that Luciano really was a good umpire, particularly when he first arrived at the majors before fame started to turn his head a little. 

There's not much insight into what happened at the end, but Luciano was well out of the public eye at that point and probably wasn't giving too many clues to what he was thinking. But as co-author David Fisher told Leeke, "He didn't look or ask for any help because he didn't want to bother people." 

"Big Loosh" - a nickname picked up as a youth for obvious reasons - moves right along, a short book that tells the truth about this interesting man. That's fine. It's just that much of the fun came out of the story, and that guy that told the story about the waitress in Buffalo enjoyed a good laugh. It's easy to wish that side had come out a bit more.

Three stars

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Review: Rory Land (2025)

By Timothy M. Gay

It's difficult to read "Rory Land" and not think about how much the book would have changed had he written it a few months later ... or a few years later.

Timothy M. Gay obviously put a lot of effort in this biography of Rory McIlroy, one of the world's best and most famous golfers. The story line must have seemed set when it was finished, oh, probably late last year. Rory was the comet who blossomed into a superstar at an early age, only to develop the habit of not winning major championship soon after that. 

Then in April, McIlroy finally went out and slayed that dragon. He won the Masters title in slightly messy but a typically exciting way. The arc of the story has been altered, and we don't know where it's headed. 

It's easy to wonder, then, what the reaction of Gay might have been when McIlroy sank that last putt to win the playoff in Augusta. Certainly he couldn't have been upset that the subject of the soon-to-be-published biography was a topic of conversation around the golfing world for days, growing the fan base of the Northern Ireland native in the process. On the other hand, McIlroy is no longer the sympathetic equivalent of Sisyphus, the Greek mythology figure doomed to push a rock up a hill only to have it fall back down the slope.

McIlroy's golf career seems to have entered a new phase. Now he's one of the handful of golfers who have won the career Grand Slam - victories in the four major championships. It will be fascinating to see how McIlroy reacts to that. Free from the constant pressure of expectations, he may start winning majors with regularity through the peak of his playing days (at 36 as of this writing, he has some prime years left). On the other hand, he could relax a bit with the dragon slayed, even if he doesn't realize it at the time. It will be fascinating to watch.

Marketing matters aside, most of the book wouldn't be changed if it had been written this morning - so don't let that stop you if you're interested in McIlroy. He has had an uncommon life, with plenty of influencing factors ... starting with his birthplace.

McIlroy hails from Northern Ireland, born to a Catholic family in a mostly Protestant region. You probably know about the Troubles that took part in the world for many years. Rory's family tree has some difficult twists and turns, as Gay discovered, because of all that. But the situation has settled down a bit in the last 25 years ago. McIlroy never chose to make religion a big part of her life. He was too busy worrying about getting a tee time later in the week. If anything, the golfer became a unifying factor for both sides of the divide in that area. 

McIlroy was playing golf by age three, and dreaming at age seven of becoming a pro golfer someday. Upon reaching double digits, it was obvious that McIlroy was something of a prodigy and had a chance to be something special. His working class parents had to sacrifice a great deal to support their son, as they worked extra jobs and spent little on themselves. In his teens Rory was headed to the United States every so often to find better competition. 

McIlroy was a young man in a hurry by that point, and he wasn't too interested in books unless they were written by Nicklaus and Hogan. Rory left school and was playing in top events by the age of 16. He turned pro at 18 in 2007, and didn't need much time to make an impact. In 2009, Rory bought his parents a house and told them they'd never have to work another day in their lives. That promise certainly has been kept. 

McIlroy won four majors between 2011 and 2014 inclusive, and seemed to have a chance to be one of the all-time greats. Along the way, he's been very visible in the public eye, whether it's through endorsements or relationships (the tabloid press, you know). The 10-year drought changed the script a bit. He's still a great player, but perhaps not as good we thought he might be. McIlroy has become a thoughtful, interesting personality along the way, and it's easy to wonder what he might be like if taken the more traditional route of finishing high school and enrolling in college, But, as we know now, there's still some time to add to his life story.

Gay starts off a little slowly, trying to capture the whirl around McIlroy's life in recent years. The now-veteran has been involved in the "fight" between the PGA Tour in America and the Saudi's LIV Tour - all while trying to win a major. And there are a lot of golf shots described here, especially in describing the wins and near-misses. But for the most part, the author settles in nicely to presenting the story, aided by the occasional use of some hilarious footnotes. Gay - who has a couple of other good sports books to his credit - put in the hours of research to make this work, and it shows.

"Rory Lane" fills the assignment of showing what the first act of Rory McIlroy's life has been like. The book no doubt will increase your interest in following along as he takes it into the second act.

Four stars

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