Professional golfers often give credit to Arnold Palmer for turning the sport into the big-money spectacle it is today. That's all true, but Tiger Woods and company should also tip their logo-bedecked hats to Walter Hagen, who almost single-handedly created the idea of the golf pro as sports star. When Hagen, a working-class boy from Rochester, New York, decided to make his living winning golf tournaments, the sport was reserved for well-bred amateurs like Bobby Jones. Professionals weren't allowed in the clubhouses at the courses where tournaments were held. Hagen changed it all. It was the Roaring Twenties, and Hagen quickly established himself as the Babe Ruth of golf: partying all night, arriving at the course in his tux, and changing clothes in his limo. The public loved it, and with on-course heroics to match off-course flamboyance, Hagen soon pried open the clubhouse doors. A fascinating slice of golf history. > Buy Now

In 1956, millionaires Eddie Lowery and George Coleman made an off-the-cuff bet on a golf match and inadvertently set up one of the sport's most climactic duels; this one casual game has become the sport's great suburban legend. Two pros slightly past their prime, Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson, squared off against two top amateurs, Harvie Ward and Ken Venturi. It happened in the last hours of Hogan's playing career, and ten years after Byron had left the stage, but at the near pinnacle of the amateurs', whose personalities couldn't have been more diametrically opposed (Venturi the classic up-and-comer, and Ward the inveterate playboy who performed hungover on two hours' sleep). The match happened near the sport's great cusp, as it transitioned from something for amateurs to a professional career, from a pastime for wastrel aristocrats to a mainstream suburban obsession. The author captures an elusive magic in this improbable matchup and what it meant for those who played and witnessed it. > Buy Now

There have been numerous histories of the Masters Tournament, of course, but this book takes a fresh approach. Rather than following the tournament chronologically, from 1934 to the present, the author offers capsule histories of each hole on the Augusta course, noting facts about its construction and redesign over the years and then reporting on how the various holes have affected the outcome of the tournament through history. Even casual fans will remember the big moments associated with the most famous holes (e.g., Sarazen's double eagle on the fifteenth in 1935, the "shot heard round the world"); but Sowell digs deeper, unearthing forgotten but fascinating bits of action that bring out the flavor of the entire tournament and the personality of the 18 holes that make up golf's most revered course. Sowell gives us the Masters in full flower. > Buy Now

On those special days when your drives split the fairway down the middle and your wedge shots leave you putting for birdie, you think: "I wonder if I could do this for a living." A Good Walk Spoiled is a bit of a reality check. John Feinstein chronicles the struggles of the top golfers in the game, as well as those trying to get onto the PGA Tour. These are gifted players who've devoted their lives to the game, and on any given day they could just flat out stink. A Good Walk Spoiled is a completely engaging book from first page to last, a wonderfully observed and masterfully told story of pain and profit in the world's most frustrating sport. > Buy Now