I always enjoy Rick's writing style and have followed him since he was a columnist for Sports Illustrated. In So Help Me Golf, he delivers again and taps into that connection golfers of all ages and abilities have to the sport. I identified with the stories of the humbling nature of the game. No one is safe from the frustrating whims of the little white ball and its ability to break or make your round.

SO HELP ME GOLF by Rick Reilly is subtitled Why We Love the Game; Reilly, bestselling author and former National Sportswriter of the Year, provides plenty of reasons. In this collection, he shares anecdotes about his own family, particularly his alcoholic golfing father, as well as insights from professional golfers. One of those describes Lucas Glover's battles with the yips, causing him to putt short ones with his eyes closed: "I haven't hit a short putt on tour with my eyes open in four or five years. Nobody ever seems to notice." Reilly later describes Phil Mickelson as "always as open as a brand-new Safeway" and "easily the most fascinating athlete I've ever covered" and then praises Mickelson's natural curiosity and breadth of knowledge, including how to make pavlovas for dessert. There's another section filled with factoids about "the Greatest Player Who Ever Lived," JackNicklaus, ("One word with a capital N in it. Like there was only one way to say the name of somebody this cool."). SO HELP ME GOLF will make an entertaining read for the golfers and sports enthusiasts in your life. Booklist describes Reilly's latest as a "delightful recap of a life spent on and around golf courses" and gives it a starred review. Enjoy!!

This book, For the Love of Golf, is Reilly’s love letter to everything golfers love (and hate) about the game—from the most famous moments, the most difficult courses, drama between players, and the inexplicable things we all do because we think it will make the ball go further, straighter, higher, or just get closer to the 4 and a quarter inch hole placed a couple hundred yards away. Reilly covers the storied past of the game beautifully. And somehow manages to address hundreds of years of history, the good bad and ugly, in a succinct 270 pages. There’s something for everyone in this book—for those who just spent time riding in a cart with their parent, to the weekend warrior, to the local club champion—everyone will enjoy Reilly’s candid take on one of the world’s most wonderfully frustrating games

“That’s when I got hooked on this game. There is no feeling like launching one of those little white rockets so far and high you could stop and watch it fall against the blue of the sky”

Brief synopsis: Golf, golf and more golf!

My thoughts:
- I don’t normally read books on sports but as a new golfer I thought it would be fun to read and learn more about game
-The writing is so clever, witty and fun!
-All the facts and stories about golfers and the game were so interesting. I had to reread some stories to my husband who is an avid golfer
-Overall if you love golf or even just love witty writing and sports you need to check out this book!

Thank you NetGalley and Hachette Books for this eARC in exchange for my honest review

Rick Reilly has covered golf for several years. Reilly has written several books about golf all replete with his tales of playing with interesting friends both real and fictional. So Help Me Golf is a collection of stories from Reilly's golfing life as well as brief descriptions of a challenging adolescence and the subsequent impact on his adult life.
The book is funny, informative, and an easy read. Golfers will especially enjoy this book, yet it can also appeal to readers who enjoy a well told story.

Seldom does one get to read a “sports” book and experience a full range of emotions during the short time it takes to complete a devouring of the text. But, in Rick Reilly’s “So Help Me Golf—Why I Love the Game,” the read was an emotional smorgasbord—and that is a good thing. Given the fact that I am a passionate golfer, any golf book starts out with a presumption that it will be an enjoyable read. From there it only can get better. And that is what Reilly’s tour through his golf experiences does.
Dr. David Cook in his masterpiece “Golf’s Sacred Journey—Seven Days at the Links of Utopia,” asks the question: “How can a game have such an effect on a man’s soul?” Reilly asks a similar question as he revisits his youth and his early golf experiences and continues to the present with an examination of the “hold” that golf has on many of us. He takes us from” Kid” to “Teen” to “Addict” and ends up with “Grandfather.” The predominant emotion that continues to surface is “laughter” ---not laugh aloud or slap your knee laugher—but smiles and chuckles to oneself as I turned from page to page to see what would bring the next humorous event.
But Reilly does not fill his book with just laughter. He has some poignant and “tear in the eyes” stories as well—like Eric Comptom’s heart transplants that allowed him to continue playing golf. Even better, Reilly shares the story of 19-year-old Amy Bockerstette at the 2019 Phoenix Open who is given a chance to play the infamous par three sixteenth hole with Gary Woodland with 5,000 crazed fans going berserk around her. Amy is not just any young female golfer. When she was born, she had Down syndrome. Yet here she is walking down the fairway on the 16th hole after hitting her tee shot into a bunker and when asked if she wanted to hit it out of the bunker she replies “Yes, I do. I got this.” After exploding it out the bunker to fifteen feet, she again tells Woodland “I got this” and drains the putt. That day in Phoenix, either you were standing and cheering, or you were wiping a tear out of your eye—or maybe you were doing both. Reilly captures the moment and the event and leaves us with a keen sense that while golf can crush our souls from time to time and reduce us to muttering fools, it can also touch our souls and see the good in a game that provide immense enjoyment to those willing to remember that “it is just a game.”
With golf season breaking out over the northern regions of the country, take the time to read Reilly’s new book. You will be smiling and chuckling as you pull the clubs out of the basement and dust them off before hitting the links for the first time this new season.

I absolutely loved this book. I read Rick Reilly religiously when he was the back page of Sports Illustrated, but hadn't read anything of his recently - what a way to get back into it. This book will make those who love golf want to play more and those who don't love golf want to play. Everything about this book put a smile on my face.

Nice book about golf that you can pick up and put down and return back to it when you have some free time. Some of the stories are very short, some are long and emotional. I do not play golf, but because of my job, it takes up a large part of my life. If I enjoyed the book, I'm sure avid golfers will love it even more.

I enjoyed the back and forth with Reilly's own stories mixed with stories from other people and places and times. The opening chapter of the book was a bit dark and worried me a bit about the rest of the book, but it quickly became lighthearted again.

So Help Me Golf by Rick Reilly is one of those books you can’t put down.
Rick says in the book “…I started writing this book, my little thank you to the game and its people.” We should thank Rick for writing this book. There are many funny tales, stories we haven’t heard before and ones that only a handful of us have heard before.
This is a must read for for golfers of all ages, the older the better.
I had the story about Arnold’s pen verified, the Ricky Meissner story resurrected and much more. I smiled and laughed a lot while reading this book. I will buying multiple copies to give to friends.
Enjoy it. You will go back and re-read next time a memory triggers something.
I would like to thank the author, the publisher and NetGalley for the advance copy in exchange for a review. I truly came out ahead in this deal.

There's always an argument brewing when the subject of "America's best sportswriter" comes up. There are plenty of names that could be tossed around.

Such a list narrows when the phrase becomes "America's funniest sportswriter." There aren't many people who can make sports funny on a consistent basis. The gold standard was Jim Murray, the Los Angeles Times columnist who was downright beloved by those who read him.

Murray has passed on, so the title has been passed down. Perhaps the person closest to that style and approach is Rick Reilly. He is best known for writing a column on the back page of Sports Illustrated, in the day when SI was a weekly and was much more influential than it is now. Reilly's work usually brought forth a laugh or six, but he could stir other emotions as well. The good ones do that, you know.

Reilly moved over to ESPN to do some work for its magazine and television networks. The broadcast work always seemed a little out of character. He retired from ESPN in 2014. Reilly has written a few books since then, and "So Help Me Golf" is the latest one.

This is essentially a collection of stories about the game of golf as Reilly has seen it over the years. Since he's not been producing content on a regular basis, it would be easy to guess that some of the stories might be reprints of previous work. However, that would be wrong. While there may be some updating going on, it's all fresh material and up to date.

The lengths of the stories vary greatly. The longest is an essay where he describes playing the best 18 holes in the world by number - in other words, the best No. 1, the best No. 2, best No. 3, etc. Reilly has been collecting those stories for more than 30 years, and some of the descriptions sure sound like they could use a accompanying photo. But they give the author to use some funny phrases and analogies, so it still works pretty well.

Mostly, though, these are essays that are more or less column length. What it's like to play golf with Bill Clinton and Dan Quayle. What Phil Mickelson said about Tiger Woods when they were finally on the same team. The man who faced a $600,000 bet. Golf in strange places, like a German POW camp. "The Red Shoe Bandit." The woman with Down syndrome who earned a golf scholarship. America's busiest golfer. And so on.

Golf isn't the only thread that runs through the book. Reilly gets personal in reviewing the relationship with his father, an alcoholic who made life rather miserable for his family over the years. It's a personal story and interesting in a much different way than the rest of the book. There's a semi-happy ending to that thread, which probably is the best that any of us can expect in such situation.

Humor writing is a rather subjective area, and I assume this applies to Reilly. However, most people who read his material come away with at least a smile. The exception probably is his book, "Commander in Cheat," which outlined Donald Trump's shenanigans when it came to the game of golf. That certainly drew some hate mail, probably along the lines of this review on Amazon.com: "I would not use the pages from this book to wipe dog crap off the sidewalk."

Reilly is on safer territory here. "So Help Me Golf" is a quick, easy enough effort that can be read in less than a day. It ought to work as a gift for just about anyone likes golf and who likes to laugh.

There are very few writers who can capture the essence of a sport like Rick Reilly, and that talent is on full display in So Help Me Golf, a series of short articles that will make you smile, laugh and shed a tear or two, sometimes all at the same time. You may learn a little about golf, but you’ll learn a lot about life throughout the book, as Reilly shares his experiences, some of them personally painful, about how a simple game can touch us in so many ways, all told in Reilly’s masterful writing style. The stories here will strike a chord with everyone, not just golf fans, and will not disappoint. Highly recommended. I received an ARC of this book from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

For many years, I subscribed to Sports Illustrated so I could read Rick Reilly column on the last page. He is an outstanding writer who is smart and hilarious. This book provides hundreds of golf stories from his experience as a writer and a player. I laughed out loud several times during this book. As a lifetime golf fan, I felt like I was inside the ropes several teams. Fun and entertaining read. I Guly recommend this book for anyone who follows golf

If you like golf at all you will love this book. It’s a paen to golf but more importantly, its a paen to how the love of golf can shape your life and your relationship to your friends and family. Reilly is always funny , but here he is also serious-about his upbringing, his relationship with his father and his relationship with his kids and grandkid. Please read this book. I guarantee you will like it