Chris Condon/PGA TOUR/WireImage.com
As captain at DePauw, Quayle was a scratch player.
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Swing Vote
With a TV tee time, a former VP talks about the game
By
Dan Quayle
Published: July 10, 2007
In May the
Wall Street Journal asked me to review John Feinstein's new golf book,
Inside Q School: Tales from Golf's Fifth Major, and I thought, Why not? I had read and liked several of Feinstein's books and, like many golfers, I enjoy reading about the game almost as much as playing it.
Everyone remembers Feinstein's 1986 best seller on Bob Knight's Indiana Hoosiers,
A Season on the Brink. (Coach Knight once gave me a capsule review that's unprintable.) I enjoyed
A Season on the Brink as well as Feinstein's
A Good Walk Spoiled, which to me ranks up there with the greats: Harvey Penick's
Little Red Book;
The Legend of Bagger Vance; the unforgettable
Golf in the Kingdom;
Dead Solid Perfect (what a great title); my fellow hoosier Pete Dye's
Bury Me in a Pot Bunkerand even Rick Reilly's books, which crack me up.
Tales from Q School struck me as good but not great, with so much on-course detail that its anecdotes can blur together. "I suspect that many fans of
A Good Walk Spoiled will find themselves longing for that book's adept storytelling," I wrote in my review. Still, I recommended
Tales from Q Schoolto devoted golfers, and I know from friends that I helped Feinstein sell a few books.
As for my own golf, it's a work in progress. I have loved the sport since I was eight, and while I was never a great player, I had some game —captained my college team at DePauw, won the Congressional Golf Tournament, got my handicap down to scratch. Then I had back surgery in 2004 and began shooting more 80s than 70s.