Q&A: Michael Bamberger on His 10th (!) Book and the One Sentence That Captures it All

Michael Bamberger is the dean of the golf beat, though he would never in a million years describe himself as such. He turned down one major lifetime journalism award because he did not want to give the acceptance speech; Bamberger doesn’t have stage fright, he simply finds it boring to talk about himself. He hated the idea of this Q&A. We have enjoyed countless meals and rounds of golf across more than 30 years of friendship and whenever we are together he spends the whole time asking questions, thus forcing me to do all the talking. But I tricked Bamberger into doing this by claiming the focus would be on life, golf and typing…not him. He reluctantly agreed to chat because this is a special occasion: Bamberger’s 10th book just dropped, by way of Avid Reader Press.

The Playing Lesson evokes previous beloved Bamberger books The Green Road Home (1986), To The Linksland (1992) and Men In Green (2015)—it’s intimate, charming, reflective. Inspired by George Plimpton’s 1968 classic The Bogey Man, Bamberger spent a year inside the ropes trying to understand golf’s secrets and the game’s hold on him. Whether he is playing in pro-ams or caddying in TOUR events or getting lessons from legends, Bamberger always brings the reader along for the fun. The highest praise I can conjure: this book will make you love golf more.

AS: Many years ago I asked you a question and, since then life has changed and our industry has changed but I’m curious if your answer has: Why do books matter?

MB: I fell in love with the printed word as a kid and I've been very lucky to never fall out of my childhood loves: baseball, golf and writing. The printed word just means the world to me. The joy of reading it. The joy of creating it. On the evolutionary chain of what you could write, the daily newspaper story has a shelf-life of half a day and then there's the magazine story that lasts maybe a week and there's lots in between. And at the far end of the spectrum is the book. It might impact a person for the rest of his or her life. It is going to be on their bookshelf maybe forever and it might be shared with their friends, or their kids. It has a whole life of its own and I've always found an extreme joy in that.

And just to finish the thought, the actor Paul Giamatti is not a close friend but some years ago we were at breakfast and he said, “I feel like I'm a lousy writer and I feel like I'm a lousy actor.” Of course it’s not true—he’s won Golden Globes and Emmys and been nominated for Academy Awards. But it's just a very useful way for me to feel, and it's genuinely the way that I feel: I always am trying to get better. The joy of trying to get better— everybody who plays golf knows that joy, but the person who's committed their life to writing also knows the joy of trying to get better. And much like golf, when you lose one thing—which you do over time—you develop in another area. So this weird balancing act of what it means to be a working writer, I just find endlessly joyful.

AS: It is an intimate relationship between the writer and the reader. I just spent a cross-country flight reading your book, and, not to make it weird, but me and the book were all alone in a hotel room for a couple of nights, too. As I’m chuckling over a passage, or enjoying a turn of phrase, or feeling your secondhand embarrassment when you screw up at caddying or while playing in a pro-am, there are actual, real feelings there. And not just with you, who’s a friend in real life, but I feel these things any time I read a book, usually with authors I’ve never met.

MB: You and I were both around John Feinstein a lot. He would be the first to admit he was not a gifted writer. But he was a gifted reporter in that he always got people to talk to him and tell him intimate things. And he was an incredible force of energy. I recently went to his memorial service, in a big ballroom at Congressional Country Club. It was packed with basketball people, but they weren't there because John was a basketball person. He was certainly knowledgeable about basketball, but all those people know more about the game than he did. They were there because John told their stories in impactful ways, in moving ways. He gave meaning to their lives. We lost John way too young, at 69, but I felt great for him knowing that he had that impact on people. Okay, you’ve done an excellent job getting me to talk but, Alan, I have a question for you.

AS: Oh boy, here we go.

MB: You wrote your first book in your mid-20s—what drove you to do that?

AS: My dream in life was to write one book. By my early teens, sportswriters were my gods. I've never been starstruck by any athlete but when I was 21, covering the Clambake for Sports Illustrated, I met [Los Angeles Times columnist] Jim Murray and I couldn't formulate a sentence. I had spent every breakfast since I was 10 years old reading his columns—I had laughed so many times, probably cried a few times, and the idea that he could do this to so many people with just his fingertips was unbelievable to me. I had done a report about him in middle school and my English teacher said, You know, you’re a good writer, too. Which was news to me. She also oversaw the school newspaper and she signed me up and that began my journalism career. She started giving me sports books to read and that was like tablets coming off the mountaintop. So, like you said, you start writing newspaper stories and then longer magazine pieces and then there’s only one more frontier… Dang it, I lost focus. Let’s go back to what you were saying, because it deeply interests me: How are you getting better as a writer? What are you consciously doing to improve?

MB: You and I had a colleague at SI, Rick Reilly. Many will know this name, I hope. Rick was very gifted and on the back page he had to get a week's worth of reporting into, let's say, 800 words. He had to leave so much out and I really studied those columns—not in an academic way, just reading those columns over and over again and thinking of everything he left out. You show so much respect for the readers by not over-explaining things. So I feel like for the past maybe 20 years I've been trying to get in and get out, as they say in the movie business. I want to show respect for the reader in that they're gonna pick up on what's going on here. That's sort of on the mechanical side, but I think the bigger thing is, in my 20s and my 30s, I used to often think that the single most important quality for a reporter was…wait, can you fill in the blank?

AS: Hmmmm, is it being a good listener?

MB: Well, you're halfway there. I used to say curiosity. You cannot be a good reporter without being curious. I still believe that, but when I got to, say, my 40s, I realized there's one quality that's even more important than curiosity. Do you want to try another guess?

AS: I'm gonna feel bad if I get this wrong. Ummm, you have to love writing? Like, you have to love the craft. Some people get into sports media now because they want to be close to the athletes or they want to have a high profile on social media or whatever but, to me, you have to love the act of writing so much or you won’t last. It has to bring you so much joy because it can be hard and be lonely... By the way you’re looking at me I can tell that’s the wrong answer. Put me out of my misery.

MB: Empathy. I think the writer cannot have enough empathy. To answer your question about what's changed, I think as I’ve gotten older I want to dig deeper, deeper, deeper to try to understand the person so I can write about the person truthfully. Take this young waitress, Renata, we’ve spent the last two hours with. We've seen her react to different things. We know she has a sense of humor. We know she's self-deprecating. We know she's smart. She’s a problem-solver. We already know a lot about her, but it's just the tip of the iceberg. To write about someone you have to know them, and the more time you get together the better and richer the portrayal will be.

AS: That was one of my big takeaways from reading The Playing Lesson—the affection you have for the people you're writing about. Like, it just drips off the page, how much you're enjoying being in their presence. And then the ones you didn't connect with quite as deeply you still have an empathy for them. Did you set out with the goal of introducing so many people to the reader or did that just happen?

MB: That did just sort of happen. But I think it was you who told me that Malcolm Gladwell said he only wants to write about people who want to be written about? You can't do it all the time for everything, but in this book, yes, I'm writing about people who want to be written about. So there is an intimacy there because I had time with them and I could get to know them.

AS: This is sort of a technical question, but it's more about you as a person: I admire many things about how you do the job, but the tone of your writing and especially in this book seems so casual and off the cuff, which of course is something that takes a lot of work. What would you say to young writers about finding your own voice and trusting it and doing it your own way? Because there's certain things in your book that would not be taught in any English class, but they're fun and they make the reader smile and they bring pizzazz and personality to it. How have you found and preserved that voice?

MB: Nice of you to say that. I kind of do know what you're talking about. I mean we all know young writers who are simply trying too hard. We see it all the time, even in prominent magazines and newspapers. Every day. I think it sort of comes with time. Two of my writing heroes, E.B. White and Roger Angell, had a very casual writing style. Pauline Kael, I know you’re also a fan of hers but for those who don’t know her, Pauline Kael was a movie reviewer for The New Yorker. She was incredibly casual in her writing. And one of Pauline Kael's things was to make the experience very universal. She made you feel that you were there watching the movie with her. I have made a conscious effort to do that for the reader. A major, major influence for me is a legendary sportswriter, Red Smith. He covered the Yankees in their heyday. You’d go to the press box and you'd have 50 guys with cigars all watching the same game, all writing their own version of the same thing. And Smith's thing was, Go in the corridor and smell the cabbage. That was one of his phrases. In other words, no one's writing about the guy who was making the cabbage for the players to eat. Or the very famous example is, Jimmy Breslin covering JFK's funeral, and do you know the…

AS: The grave digger!

MB: Yes, he writes up the grave digger. And it's brilliant. It was brilliant in ‘63, it's brilliant today. So, just because of a personality defect, I don't have to look at the world in an off-kilter way. It just comes to me naturally. I'm not being modest or immodest, it's truthful. You know, [my wife] Christine tells me this every day, I'm just sort of floating through this world in some atypical way. And for the purposes of journalism, it has served me well.

AS: Another one of your heroes is George Plimpton. How long have you nursed this idea to recreate The Bogeyman in some fashion?

MB: I loved Plimpton as a kid, even in high school. I think I've read literally everything he's written. For those who don't know anything about Plimpton, the starting point, very easily found on the Internet, is his Sports Illustrated profile of an incredible Mets prospect named Sidd Finch. For an issue dated April 1st.

But I've caddied on the pro tours and written books about that experience so, in my own way, without really even thinking that, I was doing Plimpton. But for this particular book, to go on a journey to experience so many different levels of golf, it never crossed my mind at all. You and I share an incredibly talented book editor named Jofie Ferrari-Adler. Jofie and I were playing golf and he said, ‘Nobody's done the Plimpton thing since Plimpton.’ And in that instant I said, ‘I'm in.’ I could see it immediately. Now, Plimpton somehow talked the PGA TOUR into putting him in the field of its tournaments even though he was a 90 shooter. That was never going to work for me but just the spirit of the thing started me down this path.

AS: Another thing that amuses me is that you're one of the most modest people I know but you have put yourself at the center of some of your books. How do you square that? Maybe it's the ultimate dedication to the art because I know it causes you physical pain to write about yourself.

MB: It’s true that in my daily life I really don't like talking about myself. Maybe I'm sort of building a reservoir so I can do it in the books as a service to the reader. I get to go to Augusta National, the reader at home doesn't, so I want to give them the feeling of what it's like to actually be there. That's a privilege. So if that requires me to go first-person, where I’m literally standing in for the reader, I think that's an okay excuse.

AS: There are a handful of folks in The Playing Lesson who have appeared in some of your previous books. Like Brad Faxon, who was part of the The Green Road Home, which came out 40 fucking years ago! Do they express any amusement that they have recurring cameos in so many of your pieces of writing?

MB: Yeah, for sure, for sure. Brad and I are both tickled about it. He was a guy in his early 20s trying to make it in his craft, golf. And I was a guy in my early 20s trying to make it in my craft, writing. And we've stayed at it a long time. So we're very aware of that. This is so pretentious to say, but I've seen Brad grow. And I would like to think he's seen me grow. I've seen him face the complexity of things: child rearing, tour politics, growing older, everything.

AS: At the Philadelphia Inquirer you were a very good baseball writer. Do you ever think about how different your life would be if you had only ever written about baseball?

MB: It’s all been a happy accident. You know, golf writer, baseball writer…it's all writing. It's applying the same skill set of empathy and curiosity and all the things we've been talking about and ordering the words on a piece of paper, or now you’d have to say on a screen. But what you said is very significant and 100% true because the communal aspect of golf does really give it a richness that's just unimaginable in any other sport.

AS: At the end of the book you are hosting a dinner party with your closest friends at the conclusion of this casual golf tournament you've run for three decades, the Shivas. And you read from that passage in Golf in the Kingdom where Abigail is saying that golf is a way for friends to express love for each other in a way they otherwise can’t. And that's my number one takeaway from this book is how much you love golf in such a pure way, almost a childlike way. And reading your book made me love golf a little more.

MB: That's very nice. Thank you. Do you ever have one sentence that you think captures the meaning of one of your books?

AS: Definitely. What’s yours from The Playing Lesson?

MB: This little tournament that you’re speaking of, one of the club pros who came was David Clark from Pine Valley. It was 12 pros and 12 ams for this event that I had. One of the amateurs was saying how encouraging the pros had been and David said, “Everybody needs encouragement.” Period. That’s the sentence. Everybody needs encouragement. Tiger Woods needs encouragement. Probably more than most. You can't go through this life without encouragement. So I felt good about that one sentence.

AS: That's cute, I love that. There's probably 10,000 sentences in the book—nice that you got one right.

MB: Yeah, I surprised myself. There’s one other sentence I feel good about, it’s at that same dinner party. You know, we’ve just played in this tournament and on the golf course you're trying to make a score. Everyone's keeping score, it's a real thing. Then you get into the evening, you have drinks and you have dinner. And this is part of golf I love, and this is part of why we're so lucky to do what we do. This: The numbers turn into words. The numbers turn into stories. And that's an incredible gift for us as writers.