To Win and Die in Dixie: The Birth of the Modern Golf Swing and the Mysterious Death of Its Creator

A fascinating biography of a forgotten golf legend, a riveting whodunit of a covered-up killing, a scalding exposé of a closed society—in To Win and Die in Dixie, award-winning writer Steve Eubanks weaves all these elements into a masterly book that resurrects a superb sportsman and reconstructs a startling crime.

J. Douglas Edgar was the British-born golfer who broke every record, invented the modern swing, and coached such winners as Bobby Jones, the greatest amateur in history, and Alexa Stirling, the finest female player of her day. But on August 8, 1921, he was a man dead in the middle of the road, the victim, conventional wisdom said, of a hit-and-run.

Comer Howell thought otherwise. He was an Atlanta Constitution reporter and heir to the paper’s fortune, a man frustrated by his reputation as the pampered boss’s son. To Howell, the physical evidence didn’t add up to a car accident. As he chronicled Edgar’s life, Howell discovered a working-class striver who had risen in the world through a passion to succeed, a quality the newspaperman admired. And as he investigated Edgar’s death, Howell also found a man whose recklessness may have doomed him to a violent demise.

Cutting cinematically between Howell’s present and Edgar’s championship past, To Win and Die in Dixie brilliantly portrays one man’s quest for excellence and another’s search for redemption and the truth. Their stories meet in a Southern society of plush country-club golf courses, vast wealth, and decadent secrets.

Filled with the vivid golf writing for which its author is renowned, To Win and Die in Dixie is a real-life story both shocking and inspiring, a book that propels Steve Eubanks to a new level of literary achievement.