Private First Class Henry 'Hank' Cobb is nineteen the morning he loops his last bag at Augusta National before shipping out. The bag belongs to Bobby Jones. The Masters has been suspended. The fairways will run cattle by autumn. Before they part, the great amateur slips Hank a small leather-bound notebook and tells him to write everything down.
Hank carries that notebook through basic training at Fort Benning, through the cold mud of England, across the hedgerows of Normandy, and into a German POW camp where the prisoners scratch out a three-hole course inside the wire and putt with sock-stuffed balls. The letters he sends home — to his sister, to the pro shop boys, to Bobby Jones himself — become a quiet record of the American game when no one was sure it would survive.
As Hank moves closer and closer to the end of the war and a homecoming he can scarcely believe in, neither he nor the men reading his letters back home can see the part each will play in what comes next — the post-war boom that will remake American golf, and whether Hank will be there to see his first tee shot land on a fairway again.
