James Dodson - Final Rounds

We found Final Rounds to be a very special tribute to loveof family, of golf, and of life.

Arnold and Winnie Palmer

A glinting, lyrical, heartbreaking, hilarious pilgrimage.

Yankee Magazine

You dont need to be a golfer to enjoy this wonderful book.

The Atlanta Journal and Constitution

This story of intergenerational love will appeal to all readers.

Los Angeles Times

I have never liked golf or understood the people who play it. Now I have an abiding respect for both, just as I understood fly-fishing and fly fishermen after reading A River Runs Through It.

Lee Walburn, Atlanta Magazine

Wise, instructive, funny, and utterly enjoyableFinal Rounds is as carefully organized a book as you will find. It is a combination autobiography, biography, travelogue, and painless history of golf.

Portland Times-Herald

Final Rounds takes readers on a wonderful journey to some of the most famous golf courses in the world.But like each round of golf, Final Rounds is about much more than the game itself. It is a journey of discovery for a father and a son and for their relationship.

USA Today

One cannot help but be moved by the alternately funny and sad, beautifully written elegy to a man and a game.

Kirkus Reviews

Powerful and deeply moving.

Publishers Weekly

There is something here for every reader.

News & Record, Greensboro, NC

A unique and touching piece of writing, Final Rounds brought back memories of all the rounds in England and Scotland that I played with my own two sons. It wont improve your handicap, but it definitely will improve your appreciation of the game.

Mark H. McCormack, founder of IMG and author of What They Dont Teach You at Harvard Business School

Final Rounds is moving proof that golfers dont think only about their swings. It also demonstrates a point Ive been trying to make to my wife for several years: a golfing trip to Scotland can be a transcendent act of love.

David Owen, author of My Usual Game

James Dodsons resonant memoir of life with his extraordinary father is a love story in the highest sense of the phrase; a tender and beautiful book.

Anne Rivers Siddons

Final Rounds is not just another golf book. Shot through with wisdom and humor and truth, Final Rounds is, in the end, a compelling and ineffably moving book. And an original one.

James Finegan, author of Blessed Greens and Blasted Heaths

One does not have to be a golfer to recognize that Final Rounds is a lesson in sheer courage, filial love, determination, and good humor. There is immense drama in an individuals determination to overcome adversity, to attain a goal, and to realize a dream. This represents the learning experience of the book. So read Final Rounds, and come along on the tour with James and his father.

Jack Lemmon

Dodsons skillful renderings of Scotlands charm, golfs many and varied lessons and his love for his admirable father make his memoir well-crafted, engaging and meaningful.

The Plain Dealer, Cleveland

What comes through Dodsons book, besides a touching portrait of an enviable father-son relationship, is the life lesson available from golf for those who pay attention.Dodsons book has captured much of what it is to be a golfer, a son and a father.

Winston-Salem Journal

This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition.

NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

FINAL ROUNDS

A Bantam Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Bantam hardcover edition published in November 1996

Bantam trade paperback edition / November 1997

All rights reserved.

Copyright 1996 by James Dodson

Book design by Donna Sinisgalli, adapted for ebook

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-21916 No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information address: Bantam Books.

ISBN9780553375640

Ebook ISBN9781101969496

Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words Bantam Books and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1745 Broadway, New York, New York.

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Thus is the earth at once a desert and a paradise, rich in secret hidden gardens, gardens inaccessible, but to which the craft leads us ever back, one day or another. Life may scatter us and keep us apart; it may even prevent us from thinking very often of one another; but we know that our comrades are somewhere Out therewhere, one can hardly saysilent, forgotten, but deeply faithful And when our path crosses theirs, they greet us with such manifest joy, shake us so gaily by the shoulders! Indeed we are accustomed to waiting.

A NTOINE DE S AINT -E XUPRY , W IND , S AND AND S TARS

It is nothing new or original to say that golf is played one stroke at a time. But it took me many years to realize it.

B OBBY J ONES

To A. with love.

For our fathers.

Toward the end of the afternoon, Tom Watson sits in his office talking to a golf writer. The golf season has just ended. The golf writer is me. We have been talking for almost two hours. There is a thin skin of ice on the pond in the park across the street. Traffic is a muted sigh in the winter shadows of Kansas City. Christmas presents for his children are stacked neatly in a shopping bag at his feet. Watsons wariness of the press is famous, but he has been relaxed and generous, talking about the Ryder Cup team he will soon lead to Britain, about his life, career, children, heroes, even making self-deprecating jokes about his well-publicized putting woes. This pleases me, confirms my best hopes. Watson is forty-three, five years my senior, the best golfer of my generation, now a lion in winter. In my former life as a political journalist, it would have been deemed grossly unprofessional to admit I am my subjects fan. But golf, unlike politics, as Alister Mackenzie is supposed to have once said, is at least an honest game. I am Watsons fan because he played with such honesty and heart during his golden days, and because of how he conducts himself now that the glory has faded and his game seems almost mortal