For those of us who love golf, the next best thing to playing is reading about it. In that realm, we’re fortunate to be able to choose among writers like Britain’s Bernard Darwin, the United States’s Herbert Warren Wind and Canadian Lorne Rubenstein, all of whom have illuminated the sport and its participants. They, and others like them, have produced not simply fine golf writing, but great writing period.

Michael Bamberger’s name certainly belongs on any list of the top contemporary golf writers. He’s consistently produced informative and entertaining prose about the game, first for Sports Illustrated for 22 years and now for Golf.com. Add to that output books like TO THE LINKSLAND, a memoir of the year he spent caddying on the European Tour and discovering the charms of Scottish golf, and he’s assembled an impressive body of work.

In his latest, THE PLAYING LESSON, Bamberger recounts his golfing experiences on a journey he named Tour ‘24: Do the Loco-Motion. With George Plimpton’s 1968 book, THE BOGEY MAN, as his touchstone, he embarked in January 2024 on an odyssey that took him from Pebble Beach to Pinehurst and an assortment of places in between, with trips to the Open Championship and Senior British Open in Scotland as a bonus. His book is a cornucopia of engaging tales from those encounters, all related with his characteristic easygoing style and affection for those as devoted to the often maddening sport as he is.

"THE PLAYING LESSON is a well-paced, enjoyable journey through the world of modern professional golf. Best of all, it comes as close as any book can to the experience of a foursome of longtime golfing pals sitting around a table after a round swapping stories of the game’s highs and lows..."

At various stops, Bamberger tested his game in pro-ams on different tours. For one of them, in Phoenix, he shelled out $7,000 of his own money. Thankfully, he spares readers the tedium of recounting his rounds shot-by-shot, instead offering more impressionistic accounts of those outings. Over the years, he has caddied for a variety of golfers and returned to that role on a few occasions during his tour, sharing his perspective on the game from that humble, yet unique, vantage point.

Professional golf currently finds itself in an unsettled state, due principally to the emergence in 2021 of LIV Golf, the Saudi-sponsored tour that’s lured stars like Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm away from the PGA Tour. Bamberger visits LIV’s tournament at Trump Doral in Miami, frankly acknowledging his “barely concealed disdain for this new league.”

“How you play is who you are,” Bruce Hornsby once sang about playground pickup basketball. At its heart, pro golf remains the ultimate meritocracy. That truth is reflected in the story of Jake Knapp, with whom Bamberger played a pro-am round at the PGA Tour event in Phoenix. Knapp toiled for eight years to attain full playing privileges on tour before his win at the 2024 Mexico Open opened up a world of potential riches.

At the other end of the spectrum is one-time PGA Tour winner Robert Garrigus, lacking any current status, and relegated at 46 to playing a nine-hole pro-am with novice golfers when Bamberger finds him at the PGA Tour tournament in South Florida. The realities of the professional game are much more complex and sometimes darker than they may appear on TV on Sunday afternoon, as Bamberger explains in the tragic story of Grayson Murray, who went from tournament winner in January to suicide in May last year.

Though he’s made his living for several decades covering golf, Bamberger has never lost his youthful enthusiasm for the game he first learned growing up on Long Island in the 1970s. Like every duffer, Bamberger (who, by his own report, plays to a respectable 12 handicap) is on a never-ending quest for improvement and hoped his tour might help him “play golf with more focus and purpose.” To that end, he shares instructional tidbits from pros like 88-year-old Gary Player, with whom he was paired at the Senior British Open pro-am, and Brad Faxon, who offered a handful of useful putting tips.

But even in a book that’s a chronicle of “a year among the pros,” Bamberger can’t resist spending time with fellow amateurs. He returns to the Monterey Peninsula for a visit with prosperous, unfailingly generous businessman and “magnet for golfers” Sam Reeves, whose story he told in his previous book, THE BALL IN THE AIR. And he joins in some precious twilight golf with Jason Snow, a college student with a “wild and energetic swing” whose dream is to become a caddie at Pebble Beach. There’s no end of memorable personalities attached to the game of golf, and Bamberger has a consistent knack for bringing their stories to life.

As his book nears its end, Bamberger introduces the Shivas, a casual golf competition he created in 1990 for some professional and amateur friends near his Philadelphia home and named for the mystical protagonist of Michael Murphy’s iconic book, GOLF IN THE KINGDOM. “Golf bonds people as few things do,” Bamberger writes. As his description of what he says will be the event’s final playing reveals, the camaraderie it inspired among the participants at their dinner that evening was as pleasurable as anything that took place on the course that day.

With many moments like these, THE PLAYING LESSON is a well-paced, enjoyable journey through the world of modern professional golf. Best of all, it comes as close as any book can to the experience of a foursome of longtime golfing pals sitting around a table after a round swapping stories of the game’s highs and lows and exchanging memories of time spent together that will endure long after the last putt is holed.