Golf is a favorite sport of loners, too, but Beem resisted. "It was the one thing I could do by myself," he says. In two and a half years Rich never made any friends in Panama, but he did join the track team, running everything from the eight hundred meters to the ten kilometers. When Beem was eleven the family had moved to Panama, part of a string of far-flung jobs that Larry took running the golf courses at various military installations. Come to think of it, Beem had been running for most of his life. Beem was running away - from his frustrations on the golf course, from his father, Larry, a brooding presence whose legend had lorded over his life, and from too many drunken nights spent pissing away a life's potential. Beem loved her tragically, but his move to Seattle was about a lot more than Thie. Thie was a firecracker, a knockout brunette with a sharp tongue and salty sense of humor, her excess of spunk owing to having grown up with nine brothers. "I always told Tanya I would follow her anywhere," says Beem, and so he did. "I walked into my interview and said, 'Hey, I can barely dial a phone let alone explain one, but I promise you I can sell anything to anyone.'"īeem had drifted into Seattle along with his fiancée, Tanya Thie, who had transferred to Western Washington University to finish her undergraduate studies. "That was the most money I'd ever heard of," he says. He had wandered into Magnolia one day on a lark, seduced by the promise that he could make up to $25,000 a year, at seven dollars an hour plus commission. Not that Beem knew that much about selling phones. Tucked into the plush Seattle burb of Bellevue, in the shadow of the Microsoft campus, Magnolia is a high-end playground for wired stock-option millionaires and overprivileged teenagers, and though these weren't exactly Beem's people, he made a clear connection with them. This was where, beginning in September of 1995, he did eight months of hard time in the straight world, a prisoner to a time clock and the whims of the buying public. There were no bars on the windows at Magnolia Hi-Fi, though it certainly felt that way to Rich Beem. Sometimes bawdy, often hilarious, and always unpredictable, Bud, Sweat, & Tees stands as the finest insider sports book since Ball Four. Beem and Duplantis invite us deep into the world of the PGA Tour, exposing the rowdy, randy reality of the most interesting subculture in sports, which has always been a well-protected secret-until now. The result is an intimate portrait of two exceedingly colorful characters. Beem and his hard-living caddie, Steve Duplantis, would find sudden fame and fortune, and Shipnuck enjoyed unparalleled access in chronicling their wild ride-sharing endless drives across the desert and eventful nights at strip clubs, cutthroat golf matches and late-night confessionals at assorted watering holes. Shipnuck began tracking Beem during his rookie year in 1999, when he was a logo-free rube only a couple of years removed from a seven-dollar-an-hour job hawking cell phones. That question is answered in Bud, Sweat, & Tees, Alan Shipnuck's no-holds-barred look at modern professional golf. By the time Beem had stared down Tiger Woods in an epic back nine and then danced a goofy jig on the final green, the sports world was clamoring to know, “Who is this guy, anyway?” Rich Beem became an overnight folk hero with his victory at the 2002 PGA Championship, where he dazzled fans with fearless shotmaking and glib one-liners.
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