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Title: “Bud, Sweat and Tees”

Author: Alan Shipnuck

Retail Price: $24

Writer follows subject around for a year, leaving few details to the imagination. Sound like another John Feinstein book? No, this saucy, entertaining tale about a PGA rookie and his caddie is the first book by 27-year-old Sports Illustrated senior writer Alan Shipnuck.

Shipnuck takes us backstage at golf’s rock concert--the PGA Tour--where there seems never to be a shortage of strippers, groupies, gambling and drinking, especially for the main characters, up-and-coming golfer Rich Beem and his out-of-control caddie, Steve Duplantis.

The book chronicles Beem’s rise through the Nike Tour, his first full PGA season and his unlikely pairing with Duplantis--who’d spent the previous five years helping Jim Furyk become one of the world’s top golfers before being fired for insubordination.

Beem and Duplantis both savor the fast life while bumping from city to city after an unlikely victory in their first tournament together, the Kemper Open in Potomac, Md. Beem’s life changes overnight. Not even an arrest for drunk driving--which lands him in a Scottish jail overnight--prevents him from living it up the rest of the season.

A self-described “boring” guy, Beem tells reporters after his victory at the Kemper: “I wrote on my PGA Tour bio that I can ski and fish. I don’t think I’ve been skiing in about 15 years and I haven’t picked up a fishing pole in 20. I just had to make something up.” Asked by CBS commentator David Feherty what he was going to do the night before the final day at the Kemper, Beem responds: “Have dinner, drink a few beers, watch a movie or something, fall asleep, and do it all over tomorrow.”

That’s part of Beem’s allure. At times he seems out of place on tour, just a kid from El Paso--he spent his first victory check upgrading the stereo system in his truck--chasing his golfing dreams. Shipnuck doesn’t get bogged down in what happened on the third hole at the Sony Open. The quick page-turning stuff deals with how Beem handles his personal life while trying to live with success on tour.

But for the true golf fan, Shipnuck weighs in. A sampling from one critical moment at the Kemper event: “Golf is a choke game. The ball is completely still, the crowd utterly silent, and nobody is playing defense. There are those who think all of these factors make golf less of a test than other sports, but the thinking fan knows just the opposite is true. Alone, between the ropes, a player’s fate, particularly on Sunday afternoon, is determined by his courage and his will at least as much as by his talent.”