Book excerpt: "A Course Called Home" by Tom Coyne

Avid Reader Press We may receive an affiliate commission from anything you buy from this article. Tom Coyne, the editor of The Golfer's Journal, teed up for a challenge: taking over operations of a failing nine-hole community golf course in New York's Catskill Mountains. He writes of his experience, and the tribulations that were par for the course, in "A Course Called Home: Adventures of an Accidental Golf Course Owner" (to be published May 5 by Avid Reader Press). Read an excerpt below, and don't miss Lee Cowan's interview with Tom Coyne on "CBS Sunday Morning" May 3! "A Course Called Home" by Tom Coyne Prefer to listen? Audible has a 30-day free trial available right now. Hands caked with mud, fingertips diced by a thousand tiny cuts, and my wheels were spinning again. It had been the wettest Catskills summer in memory, and Shaun had warned me to throttle down as I drew closer to the green. I killed the engine and slid out of the seat, got back down on my knees, and ripped clumps of soggy grass from the reels—right, middle, left, then the rear units beneath the chassis that I struggled to reach. If we had the money or time to sharpen our bed knives, I'd have lost a digit by now; instead, I shaved away my fingerprints as I felt for jams and tore chunks of wet earth, pulling hair from a clogged drain, until I could turn each cylinder by hand. …