Final Rounds

In Final Rounds, James Dodson offers a touching, heartfelt, often humorous tribute to his father and the game they both loved as he tells the poignant story of his father's last days and how they set out to celebrate them with the golf tour of a lifetime.

To James Dodson, an editor of Golf magazine and a premier authority on the sport, his closest moments with his father were on the links. With his father approaching eighty, Dodson planned a dream golf trip through England and France, where the elder Dodson had first discovered his love for the game as an airman during World War II. But when he learned his father was suffering from an advanced form of cancer, the trip took on an added urgency. For Braxton Dodson had been given only a month or two to live.

Final Rounds takes us to Royal Lutham, where Bobby Jones captured his first Open championship in 1926; to the Royal Birkdale, where the same rains that swirled around Arnold Palmer in '61 fall upon the Dodsons; to Carnoustie, where Hogan played peerlessly in '53; and finally to the legendary St. Andrews, where the younger Dodson discovers something of the secret of the game's mysterious allure over pros and hackers alike.

But like golf itself, Final Rounds is about much more than just a game: it is about a journey of discovery between a father and a son, about long-held secrets shared, and about the valuable lessons a middle-aged man could still learn from his father on the importance of life, love, and family.