Playing from the Rough

A Personal Journey through America's 100 Greatest Golf Courses

Jimmie James

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2024
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781668005996
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

A “wonderful story of passion, commitment, resilience, and determination,” (Paul Gasol, former NBA All-Star) about one man’s quest to become the first person to play each of America’s 100 greatest golf courses in a single year, an odyssey that brings him face to face with the gulf between his impoverished childhood in the Jim Crow South and the successful executive he became.

When he set out to play each of Golf Digest’s America’s100 greatest golf courses in one year, Jimmie James knew he was attempting the impossible. But then again, he’d spent his entire life defying the odds.

James was born invisible. His birth certificate, long since filed away in some clerk’s office in East Texas, recorded facts about him that were deemed most relevant in the late 1950s: “colored” and “illegitimate.” His great-great-grandmother was enslaved, and his early life was confided by the privation and segregation of the late Jim Crow-era South.

Four decades later—having put himself through an HBCU and determinedly risen through the executive ranks at ExxonMobil—he embarked on his journey to play the 100 greatest golf courses in the United States. In a single year. From the first tee at Augusta National, the distance between the world he grew up in and the world of extreme privilege to which he’d now managed to gain access was impossible to ignore.

Playing from the Rough is a “delightful” (Kirkus Reviews), “beautiful story” (Andrew Campion, former COO of Nike) about race, class, family, and the power of perseverance, as James braids his love of golf with reflections on the path that took him from childhood poverty to the most exclusive and opulent golf courses in America.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Augusta National
• Chapter Two: East Potomac
• Chapter Three: Valhalla
• Chapter Four: Whistling Straits
• Chapter Five: Dallas National
• Chapter Six: Merion
• Chapter Seven: Bandon
• Chapter Eight: Oak Tree National
• Chapter Nine: Oakmont
• Chapter Ten: Canyata
• Chapter Eleven: Plainfield
• Chapter Twelve: Pikewood
• Chapter Thirteen: Oakland Hills
• Chapter Fourteen: Pebble Beach
• Chapter Fifteen: Congressional
• Chapter Sixteen: Whispering Pines
• Chapter Seventeen: Los Angeles Country Club
• Chapter Eighteen: Seminole
• Chapter Nineteen: Riviera
• Chapter Twenty: Quaker Ridge
• Chapter Twenty-One: Shinnecock Hills
• Chapter Twenty-Two: The Ocean Course at Kiawah
• Chapter Twenty-Three: Wade Hampton
• List of Courses
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright