Description:
Unless your name is Tiger Woods, there are no easy rides on the PGA Tour--particularly your first year--and no one's ever confused fun-loving Rich Beem's game with the Tiger's. Still, Sports Illustrated's Alan Shipnuck struck gold by picking Beem and his rookie season as subjects to chronicle in Bud, Sweat, & Tees: A Walk on the Wild Side of the PGA Tour. To begin with, he found a colorful player with a renegade personality who actually managed to confound the odds and post victory--at the 1999 Kemper Open. But there's more. As vivid a character as Beem turns out to be, his caddie Steve Duplantis, who'd previously toted for Jim Furyk, is a true rogue who makes Beem seem a choirboy by comparison. Shipnuck provides all the necessary drama of life on the course, but the real fun of Bud, Sweat, & Tees is life beyond it, how Beem and Duplantis survive the highs and lows the game provides. At his best, Shipnuck manages to bring together their shared existence within the ropes and beyond, nowhere better than in Memphis the week after Beem's victory. He and Duplantis, who first caddied for him at the Kemper, have gone to Tennessee to try qualifying for the 1999 U.S. Open. That Beem misses is but a sidelight of the tour de force sequence that sees their relationship form against the backdrop of Duplantis cheating on his ex-fiancée Shannon--recalled by both Duplantis and Shannon, who's nannying Duplantis's daughter--as Beem is trying to focus on his game. It begins in a bar, the three of them together, with Beem ogling Shannon as she walks to the ladies' room, and Duplantis calling him on it. "The player-caddie dynamic is always delicate," writes Shipnuck, "to the point that it is often discussed in the nomenclature of a courtship. For Beem and Duplantis, then, winning their first tournament together was like sleeping together on a first date--fun, to be sure, but complicated. If they were going to have a meaningful long-term relationship they would need a few more nights like this, getting to know each other." The nights--and days--that follow are as fun to read as the greens at Augusta. --Jeff Silverman
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