Fort Worth, Texas,where I grew up, is a semifamous golf town. Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson both grew up there, rival caddies and players from the east side. The Colonial National tournament in Fort Worth is the oldest PGA Tour event held continuously at the same site. Dan Jenkins, the funniest golf writer of all time, hails from Fort Worth and went to the same high school I did, R. L. Paschal (although much before my time). Back in the sixties, Jenkins wrote a funny, much-anthologized article in Sports Illustrated called "Glory Days at Goat Hills" about gambling at the bone-dry Worth Hills municipal course, which was a block from my house and where I hit my first golf ball.

Even so, growing up, I hardly gave golf a second thought. I was of the opinion, like most of my peers in Texas at the time, that only two sports mattered: football and spring football. All my athletic dreams as a boy, which is to say all my dreams period, revolved around playing quarterback at Baylor University and then leading the Dallas Cowboys to an NFL championship. I devoted myself to football. For a period of two or three years in my early teens, I disciplined myself to throw a hundred passes a day -- rain or shine, cold or heat -- mostly through tires and hoops set up in my backyard. As a result, I actually did get pretty good at throwing the old pigskin and was quarterback of my high school team. But I couldn't get an athletic scholarship to Baylor and so ended up at Harvard. I played football there for a year but hurt my knee and lost interest, in no small part because football players ranked absolutely lowest in the status sweepstakes among early-seventies Radcliffe girls. I might as well have been a Nixon Republican. And so all my years of athletic toil came to nothing.

But then, in my early thirties, I discovered golf. And to my delight and surprise, I had a knack for the game.

It wasn't as if I'd never played golf before. Back when I was ten or eleven, I had spent many desultory afternoons whacking shag balls on the aforementioned Worth Hills golf course, which the city of Fort Worth had recently sold to Texas Christian University for an eventual expansion of its campus. It was the perfect way to learn how to hit a golf ball: no pressure, an open field, and the opportunity to do the one thing you really care about doing at age ten: hit the snot out of the ball. For a couple of summers during junior high school, some buddies and I played a couple of times a week at the old Benbrook muni on the edge of town, though I never recall any of us breaking 90 without serious cheating.

And that was it, with maybe a half dozen isolated golf experiences in the interim, until one splendid autumn afternoon in Vail, Colorado, in 1985.

At the time I was a writer for Fortune magazine and had somehow been picked to help represent the editorial side at an ad sales conference at the Snowmass resort. One of the main qualifications for being an ad salesperson for Fortune back then was a low golf handicap; a lavish golf outing with customers was the primary sales technique, and the publisher himself was a single-digit member of Pine Valley. Naturally one of the primary orders of business at the conference was daily golf. In the first afternoon's round I played in a fivesome with the publisher, and on the fifth hole -- I will never forget it -- I accidentally caught a drive dead on the screws. It was an exhilarating feeling I had never had before. All my various limbs and body parts happened to fire in precisely the right sequence, the clubface hit the ball smack in the middle, and the thing took off like a rocket.

"Holy shit!" the publisher said. Those glorious words are seared in my mind.

He was so excited by my drive that he paced it off: 340 yards. Granted, at over a mile of altitude golf balls travel at least 10 percent farther than they do at sea level, plus the wind was with us, and the drive had cleared a crest and landed on the downhill fairway. But still -- it was certainly the best shot I had ever hit in my life. For the rest of the round the publisher kept looking at me funny, as if waiting for another miracle. It never came, though I did pull off a handful of other decent shots with my long irons. After we putted out on the final hole, he took me aside, clamped both hands on my shoulders, looked me full in the face, and said, "You simply must take up golf."

I must admit, I was flattered. And obviously, I took his advice. Within a week of returning to Manhattan, I purchased my first set of clubs. Unfortunately, the publisher was fired before I could get good enough at golf to rate an invitation to play Pine Valley.

OVER THE NEXT few years I became a card-carrying golf addict. This wasn't easy, living in Manhattan. In the summers I rented a beach house with friends in the Hamptons and spent many miserable predawn hours waiting in line to get onto the only decent public course in the area, Montauk Downs. Whenever I traveled for business I took along my sticks, if only to hit balls at a decent driving range somewhere.

My infatuation with the sport was baffling, even to me. Almost none of my friends in New York played golf. Most, in fact, viewed the game as a shameful, bourgeoisie absurdity (this was before the "golf boom" certified the game as acceptable to yuppies). But I was forever dreaming about the next fix.

Part of golf's appeal must have had to do with the divorce I was going through. It was a refuge. In my personal life I hardly knew which end was up, but on the golf course the rules were clear and order prevailed. Plus, you had the tweeting birds and the gentle breezes and the bright green grass -- the same elements that make sanitariums such pleasant places to spend time.

And I was continually getting better, which was good for my battered ego. In only my second summer of adult golf I broke 80 by holing out a wedge shot on the eighteenth hole. "Seventy-nine! Seventy-nine! Seventy-nine!" I shouted like an idiot from the fairway. In the rush to high-five my playing buddy, I forgot about the club in my hand and almost fractured his nose.

Then, shockingly, the following year I shot a 69. I say shockingly because until that fateful midsummer afternoon I still hadn't broken 80 more than a few times. My best score ever was 76, and on off-days I easily ballooned into the upper eighties and low nineties. How was a 69 possible?

Even now I can't totally explain it. The weather was splendid -- upper seventies, nearly windless -- and I was playing at a comfortable, familiar course, Island's End, on the North Fork of Long Island where I now spent my summers. I was, perhaps, a wee-bit hung-over, which produced a pleasant fatigue which was augmented by some basketball that morning, I looked forward to the round primarily as an opportunity to spend time with a friend I was just getting to know, Ed Tivnan. My scoring expectations were minimal.

We had the course almost to ourselves, and from the first tee to the final green I felt absolutely relaxed and totally in control. My pre-shot routine, which usually involved a lot of neurotic pacing and throwing of grass and practice swinging and second thoughts, was minimal: I simply waggled the club a few times, looked down the fairway at where I wanted the ball to go, and then, most of the time, hit it there. On the greens, I saw the line of each putt as if a highway crew had painted a yellow stripe to the hole -- all I had to do was set the ball in motion and watch it tumble into the jar. Between shots Ed and I chatted and strolled. I was not unaware of my accumulating score, but for some reason -- and this may be the strangest aspect of the round -- I didn't focus on it. If I had, I surely would have chunked shot after shot and finished with a string of double-bogeys. Instead, I birdied the par-five seventeenth hole with a wedge to five feet and a firm putt into the back of the cup, and parred the long, par-four eighteenth with a good drive, a six-iron to the green and two routine putts.

Presto! Sixty-nine. Nothing ever seemed easier.

Only after I said good-bye to Tivnan, returned to the house my friends and I were renting for the summer, and took my seat on the terrace did I begin to think about the round. I was pleased, of course, but nowhere near as idiotically exhilarated as I had been after my first 79. In this case the score seemed oddly secondary. I was mainly struck by my mental state: throughout the round I had felt calm, focused, preternaturally at peace with the world. As a sometime athlete, I had experienced being "in the zone" before, but those episodes were usually brief and were dependent on adrenaline rushes and an intensity of will. This state, which lasted for more than four hours, seemed altogether more mature and under my control. I had slipped back and forth between hitting fine shots and chatting with Ed without losing a beat. I felt powerful yet serene, totally in charge. Even now, sitting on the terrace with a cocktail in hand, I was luxuriating in the afterglow of this mood or dimension or whatever you want to call it, and I wanted to experience it again and again.

I passed around the scorecard for my housemates to see: three birdies, one eagle, and two bogeys. "You ought to turn pro," Jane Clark said offhandedly.

"Right," I responded.

It was an ignorant suggestion. Jane knew as much about golf as I knew about quantum physics. Still, the remark got me to thinking (strictly from an intellectual point of view, you understand): Why couldn't I turn pro? If I could shoot 69 once, why couldn't I learn to shoot 69 frequently? For that matter, why couldn't I learn to shoot 69 all the time? I assumed there were many sound reasons why I couldn't, I was simply curious to know what those reasons were, exactly. Shooting 69 the first time had seemed so very, very easy.

And this, I blush to admit, was the big bang origin of the book you hold in your hand.

NOT LONG AFTERWARD I quit my job at Fortune to go freelance. I never intended to become a "golf writer" per se, but right off the bat I pursued a couple of assignments about golf to indulge my new curiosity, and before long I was nearly as obsessed with writing and learning about the sport as I was with playing. I justified this by coming up with a nifty, self-serving definition of my duty to society as a freelancer: to go places, do things, and ask questions that people stuck in more responsible, traditional jobs would want to do if they only had the time.

One of the first assignments I snared, for Details magazine, was a piece about Q School -- the annual nightmare where more than a thousand of the world's best professional golfers try to earn one of forty available "cards" to play on the PGA Tour the following year. Some guys I met there had clearly gone over the edge. They slept with subliminal suggestion tapes running beneath their pillows, sang Christmas carols in the shower as part of strange pre-round rituals, and talked incoherently of things like "true gravity" and "cosmic consciousness." They had been driven batty by an advanced version of the same question I had posed: Why, when they were demonstrably capable of shooting rounds in the mid-sixties or better on a regular basis, did they invariably regress for a hole or two per tournament and finish out of the big money?

The next golf story I took on was about the Space Coast Tour, a so-called mini-tour in central Florida. Here were guys -- some former Tour players but mostly aspiring cadets in their twenties -- who could knock the cover off the ball, but who obviously lacked some intangible something that their betters on the Big Tour possessed. What was it? Mental discipline? The perfect temperament? An extra iota of hand-eye coordination? They had no idea and I didn't either.

I was also lucky enough during this period to write a few stories about big-name Tour players like Greg Norman and Tom Lehman. But frankly their struggles didn't intrigue me as much as those of the guys on the fringe. One day, while idly thumbing through the PGA Tour media guide for 1993, I came across two statistics which crystallized the questions that had been bouncing around in my head.

The first statistic was Nick Price's scoring average. Price was Player of the Year. He won six tournaments and $1.4 million and his average score was 69.63. The second statistic was Ed Fiori's scoring average. Fiori, a journeyman pro, won $107,000 and finished 127th on the money list, which was not high enough for him to retain his playing privileges the following year. His average score was 70.95--a difference compared to Price of only 1.32 strokes per round. How could this be? Was all that stood between Nick Price, the best player in the world in 1994, and an obscure pro I'd never heard of really just one-stroke-and-a-third per round -- one drive that just misses the fairway and perhaps a lipped-out putt?

Over the next few months I began to think of the difference between Price and Fiori as the Fine Green Line, and became convinced that all of golf's secrets would be revealed if I could just understand the phenomenon. Not just secrets that pertain to golf at the high-end professional level, but the secrets of golf at every level. The primary cause of golf's maddening addiction, it seemed to me, was the certainty every golfer feels that they are actually a whole lot better than their scores would indicate. Golfers are sure of this because they've proved it to themselves over and over. Every golfer in every round hits a few sensational shots of the kind that only golfers with significantly lower handicaps ought to be able to hit. Every so often everything comes together and the golfer posts an extraordinary score. Forever after, in the golfer's mind, this score becomes the norm, the standard by which subsequently, every higher score is judged inadequate. Ed Fiori must have experienced this frustration every time he missed a cut in 1994, or made the cut but went home with a paltry, last-place paycheck of $2,666. It's enough to drive a sane person crazy.

CERTAINLY IT WAS enough to drive me crazy. Two summers after shooting the 69, I still had not repeated the miracle, though I had reduced my handicap to around three and shot par or better a half dozen times. By hack amateur standards I was fairly accomplished, but I was also stuck. No matter how hard I worked at my game, I couldn't push my handicap any lower and I couldn't narrow the gap between my good rounds and bad rounds; I might shoot 75 one day and 85 the next. I had bumped into the Fine Green Line for myself, up close and personal. And I was miserable.

The low point came on a New York City subway. Unable to afford a summer rental that year, I spent more time than I would like to admit commuting via public transportation from my Manhattan apartment to the nearest driving range, a bare-dirt affair at the city-run Mosholu course in the Bronx. There I would squander entire afternoons whacking balls, usually getting worse and angrier by the hour, until daylight expired and I hiked to the subway for the seventy-minute trip home.

On one such return trip I noticed two teenage girls giggling at me from across the aisle. When I saw my reflection in the window, I couldn't blame them. What a pathetic spectacle. There I was, thirty-seven, fully grown and formally educated, attired in a brown moth-eaten sweater and a backward golf hat, slumping dejectedly over my golf bag in the corner of a graffiti-covered subway car, cursing savagely, and making odd sledgehammer motions with an interlocking grip.

At that moment I decided the time had come either to give up golf entirely or pursue my obsession to the logical extreme.

I chose the latter.

IT WASN'T EASY arranging the Year of Golf that followed. For one thing, I had no money. For another, just as I was about to set forth, I met a woman too fabulous not to marry. Since neither of us were exactly spring chickens (Polly was already in her forties), we had a baby right away. But this only delayed the adventure. I explained to Polly that getting to the bottom of golf's dark hold was essential to my happiness and she, perhaps unduly distracted by the glorious bouncing baby girl on her knee, agreed. Meanwhile, I had secured a contract to write a book about my experiences. This gave us the confidence to push ahead despite the money problem.

I organized the Year around two objectives. The first was to see how much better I could get at golf in twelve months' time. I would enlist the aid of a top golf instructor and various golf psychologists and mental game gurus, scam as much top quality equipment as I could from manufacturers, and compete in tournaments around the country. Other than a three-month stint on the mini-tours in Florida at the start of the year -- Florida seemed like a fine place to spend the winter, especially since Polly and our daughter could be there with me -- I didn't know where I would compete. That was part of the adventure. At some point, I knew, I would have to turn pro.

The second objective was to test myself at the end of the Year by entering the PGA Tour's Q School. Only in my wildest fantasies did I entertain the hope of actually making it onto the Tour, but I did feel it might just be possible, if I made spectacular progress, to advance from the first stage of Q School into the second stage (out of three stages total). That became my specific, ultimate goal. Making it to the second stage was something worthy to shoot for, and had the added benefit of making my goal for the Year the same as that of virtually every other aspiring pro in the country. In golf's bush leagues, the Tour's Q School each October is the glittering prize that counts.

And so, my heart surging, the Year began.