True Boo Book Review

True Boo: Gator Catchin’, Orangutan Boxin’, and My Wild Ride to the PGA Tour

Grade: B
Teachers’ Comments: This is the story of perhaps the most unusual star on today’s PGA Tour.

It is too much of a stretch to call Boo Weekley a latter day Sam Snead. Snead is one of the three or four best players ever on Tour, while Boo has struggled throughout his career. There is, however, an undeniable similarity in their backwoods, country-boy approach.

True Boo recounts Boo’s journey from backwoods Florida (for those of you who have ever only been to Orlando, yes, there is a backwoods Florida). Weekley was a good high school player, but somewhat unmotivated. He flunked out of college, worked at various industrial facilities, tried the mini tours, played high stakes gambler’s golf, made the PGA Tour, fell out again, played on the Nationwide, then went back to the bigs. It’s quite a journey, actually.

Much of the narrative is concerns ways in which Boo has found himself in trouble. There’s nothing criminal, and really not much that could even be considered major, but trouble of the sort of which only a good ‘ol boy could find. A good deal of the book is humorous, but the chapter on his mishaps with his bowel movements was too much for me.

Still, bodily functions aside, it’s a pretty good read. Co-author Paul Brown has done a marvelous job capturing Weekley’s inflections, dialect and “Boo-isms.” In fact, I’m not sure he’s as much co-author as transcriber. I get the impression that Boo just started talking into a recorder from which Brown typed a manuscript.

The most interesting part of the book for me was Boo’s account of the days in which he made a living playing high stakes golf. Serious money men would paid him thousands to play in games on which they bet tens of thousands. Boo claims that there are more than a few out there making such a living. I’d love to know more about them.

True Boo was first published in 2011, capitalizing in a fashion on Weekley’s 2008 Ryder Cup performance in which he went 2-0-1 in three matches, and caught the nation’s imagination with his (arguably) over the top antics. This review is of the newly released paperback edition.