Humorous but also agonizing and also unfailingly fascinating regardless of one's interest in golf. For the psychology of the sport - and this is what Mr. Plimpton is probing - there is nothing more revealing around
New York Times
Plimpton will interest even the man who can't tell a pitching wedge from a putter... This is really a book about a kind of madness with rules, and anyone can appreciate the appeal of that
Newsweek
Golf is a lonely and private game, lacking the natural drama of football, but Plimpton, by subsituting improvisation for plot, has caught its mad comedy and bizarre effects on people in a book just as charming, in its own way, as Paper Lion
Life
With his gentle, ironic tone, and unwillingness to take himself too seriously, along with Roger Angell, John Updike and Norman Mailer he made writing about sports something that mattered
Guardian
What drives these books, and has made them so popular, is Plimpton's continuous bond-making with the reader and the comedy inherent in his predicament. He is the Everyman, earnests and frail, wandering in a world of supermen, beset by fears of catastrophic violence and public humiliation, yet gamely facing it all in order to survive and tell the tale... A prodigious linguistic ability is on display throughout, with a defining image often appended at the end of a sentence like a surprise dessert.
Timothy O'Grady
Times Literary Supplement