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What: “The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist”

Author: Dan Jenkins

Price: $24.95

No one writes golf like Dan Jenkins. If you want to read what really happens on the PGA Tour, read “A Good Walk Spoiled” or “The Majors” by John Feinstein. But if you want to read about what might happen on tour and laugh your Titleists off, read this latest novel by Jenkins.

It’s a very fast read, not much longer than the title, at 261 pages.

Jenkins has been down this road before, with “Dead Solid Perfect’ in 1974, but that was in the pre-Tiger, pre-Ryder Cup hysteria days. Now Jenkins regales the reader with a year in the life of Bobby Joe Grooves, a solid player with a great sense of golf history. Grooves is a cut above the “lurkers” of the tour, who rarely win, but not quite up there with Knut Thorssun (“friend of the stars . . . and Sweden’s gift to morons in the galleries”) or the young hotheaded sensation, Cheetah Farmer.

Those players are fictional, but Jenkins mixes in a lot of reality as well, particularly when Bobby Joe wins the Nissan Open and we get a feel for some of the best holes at Riviera.

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Grooves/Jenkins tells us which courses he likes and doesn’t like, why tour players hate playing with amateurs, and what it’s like to spend a week at the Masters.

It’s Dan Jenkins, so don’t look for political correctness. Bobby Joe, like Kenny Puckett in “Dead Solid Perfect” has a lot of dealings with his ex-wives, and there are plenty of references to college football in Texas.

The Ryder Cup is the climax, and it comes down to an outcome even more outrageous than the Americans’ celebration in 1999. In short, a golf finish that could come only from the semi-tough mind of Dan Jenkins.

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