Driving Myself Crazy

Book excerpt: Adventure writer Jessica Maxwell loves a challenge and decided to tackle golf the way she had tackled skiing and fly-fishing, two demanding sports she took up in her early thirties after a life as a confirmed "non-jockette." Surely golf couldn't be that much more difficult?could it? In this irreverent memoir we have a front-row seat as Jessica struggles to learn golf's etiquette, traditions, and complex rules—from her first comical attempts to coax practice balls out of a golf ball machine, to just hitting the damn ball, to acquiring her own set of Nancy Lopez clubs! Among her coaches are Peter Croker, a revolutionary Australian teaching pro, Cindy Swift Jones, his partner and putting guru, and Al Mundle, the Harvey Penick of the Northwest, as well as seventy-eight-year-old American women's golf legend Peggy Kirk Bell and the queen of golf herself, Nancy Lopez. A willful celebration of what one golf coach called "the atrocious first year," Driving Myself Crazy is an often hilarious, always inspiring tale of one woman's obsession with proving to herself that golf—played right—is a beautiful game ... at least for that moment.