THE BALL IN THE AIR

There are a number of themes that are already old hat where sports journalism is concerned. Maybe the piece is the biography of a prominent athlete. Or the rivalry between teams and players, if not their outright dominance in a given era. Or even straightforward reportage fro a noteworthy contest or tournament. Pick up a book about sports, and it one can almost expect that it will be about one or more of these things.

Against that yardstick, Michael Bamberger's The Ball in the Air: A Golfing Adventure defies expectations. It's a book about golf that doesn't chronicle the career of a preternatural talent, or a hotly contested tournament, or changing mores in a generation of new players (which, come to think of it, would make for an interesting subject). Rather, it tells four stories about golf that are much more quiet in comparison: how the sport found a unique place in the lives of four people—one of them being Bamberger himself—and how their lives, much like a game of golf, might be said to be at the mercy of circumstance.

The Ball in the Air is a love letter to golf from someone who has covered the sport extensively. The four stories in the book—one about a Nepalese amateur who would find an opportunity to pursue the sport as a college student in America, another chronicling a golf aficionado's second act in both life and work (the latter as a sports journalist), a third about a high achieving executive whose love for the sport never faded, and the last being Bamberger's recollections of how the sport captivated him at a young age—provide much variety and sufficient contrast, though they do impose upon the reader the burden of keeping straight what is almost immediately a large cast of personalities. Doing so can be confuring at times especially since the stories are presented as sections interspersed with one another even if they do not occur contemporaneously; yet the persistent reader will be well rewarded for their patience in the end.

There is no denying that The Ball in the Air is an engagingly written book, and one wonders how friendly it is to readers not especially versed in the sport. It would seem Bamberger assumes his audience to have some functional familiarity with the sport, as there are some technical details about golf—in terms of how it's played, or scored, or even bet upon—that are given the bare minimum of explanation. Then again, it is perhaps a reasonable assumption to make: after all, the kind of reader that would get the most out of a book like this would be someone already smitten by the sport, in much the same way that Bamberger has been for most of his life.

"The Ball in the Air" is so, so much more than a golf book. Michael Bamberger is an engaging writer. He weaves three stories with his own passion for golf and interconnects three disconnected people to craft an engaging narrative. The three principal characters, all hailing from different parts of the world and having far different backgrounds, come together in a beautifully written book.

You don't have to be a golfer to love this book. You need be only a reader who loves good writing to enjoy this five star book.