Rich Poggi - Fairways and Greens - Part 1

In this engaging interview, Rich Poggi shares his journey from a reluctant reader and sports enthusiast to a published author and golf aficionado. Discover how his diverse experiences in writing, sales, and golf shaped his debut novel 'Fairways and Greens.'

"Once destined for PGA Tour stardom, Doug Parker's career was cut short by injury and his own self-destruction. He retreated to Windsor Hills, the New Jersey golf club where he grew up, and quietly rebuilt his life — teaching the game with discipline, purpose, and the wisdom passed down from his father.

Decades later, Doug is fighting to keep the prestigious, golf-only club alive in the rapidly changing world. But a phone call from his past delivers shocking news — forcing Doug to confront choices from a life he thought he'd left behind and face a future he never imagined.

What follows is a story of family, rediscovery, and the strong women who push Doug to confront who he was, who he is, and who he can still become—all set against a game that has a way of revealing the truth about people when it matters most."

For more info - including how to get a discounted, signed copy of Fairways and Greens: a Novel - please visit www.richpoggi.com

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:07

All right, we're here on another episode of That's Good Pick It Up, a podcast mostly about golf books. And today we're here with Rich Poggy to talk about his book, Fairways and Greens. Rich, thanks for joining me. Nate, I really appreciate you having me. How are you doing? I'm doing good. It's been a long weekend and I got a long week, like you said, ahead of you. But uh we're gonna have some fun for the next hour or so. Awesome. Look forward to it. So let's start uh let's start. I like to do this uh unless I forget. Let's start um by telling you a little bit about your background in reading. Were you an avid reader as a kid, or did you hate it like I did?

SPEAKER_01 0:46

So um I I was I hated it like you did, but thankfully um I did find some of the classics. Like I was, you know, I read you know, Catcher in a Rye a thousand times. There was certain things, all the Greek and Roman mythology stuff I loved. And then um, you know, getting through high school, I was a jock, you know, I was a baseball football guy. And then when I would watch something on television or see a movie that was, you know, uh a biography or something like that, I would I'd read the book. But I was not necessarily a long-form novel reader. I I became one in college uh through a mentor when I wanted to write more seriously. But I was huge, Nate, uh, back in the day on Sports Illustrated and all those uh periodicals.

SPEAKER_02 1:45

Yeah, we have a very, very similar story. I had went through the same exact thing. I couldn't even, you know, read books for pleasure, let alone for school. But I remember, you know, sitting on the couch watching TV after school and my dad coming home from work and throwing the newspaper on my lap and just reading every box score, you know, every news item in the sports section. I didn't read any of the rest of the newspaper, but the sports section was fascinating. And then I was a big, you know, mythology fan too. Um and I'm actually rereading Catcher in the Rye now, um, which has been fun too.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

So we got a lot of it's it's it's it holds up over time.

SPEAKER_02 2:22

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:22

And you know, I always, you know, it's funny because um I didn't get to you through a buddy of mine, Hank Gola, but Hank wrote for the Daily News and the New York Post for 30, 40 years, and he wrote all the giant pieces, and we've been just catching up on giant stuff because I read all of his columns, and I know all the columnists. I I used to read a lot of like Lupica and I read I read the the um the the daily news every Sunday, every Monday. I've been a giant season ticket holder, so you know you could thank me for Saquon at some point.

SPEAKER_02 2:56

That was a big one. That was a big one. You'll have to tell Hankel the story of uh that I'm I'm gonna tell you. So we played golf together. We've played a couple times, but we played golf together once uh down the shore for a media thing, and he knows my uncle Neil. Okay. And after, you know, a couple holes, he started calling me Neil, which a lot of people do. You know, me and Neil are similar. And I it got to the point where I couldn't correct him any longer because it'd been going on for so long. And then at the like the award ceremony or whatever they had at night after golf, they announced like the the winners and I won like a closest to the pin or something, and they announced Nate Oxen, and then he was sitting next, and then he turned and gave me like the dirtiest look ever. He's like, You let me go on the whole round with by calling you Neil, and I was like, oops.

SPEAKER_01 3:44

That's a funny that's a funny story, Neil.

SPEAKER_04 3:47

It was funny.

SPEAKER_01 3:49

Yeah, we're up we're playing in like two weeks, so I'll I'll mention it. He's the best. So that was that was kind of really my my my reading background, but then in college, I just found like other writers, uh, namely Richard Price. And I just thought everything that he wrote was just unbelievable. Um, you know, even before he did the wire and all other stuff, just like ladies' men, some of his first stuff, it just really connected with me. And that's kind of the voice that I started to try and put into my writing, which took a lot of different courses. Uh, the main one being that I decided not to become a sports writer. Because if you look in my uh my my eighth grade middle school yearbook, it says ambition is to be a sports writer, and I never did that.

SPEAKER_02 4:37

Well, you wouldn't have made much money, and probably.

SPEAKER_01 4:40

I I would have made a lot more money than they do now, but that's a story for another day. I feel bad for them with all the you know the social media and then you know everything. It is what it is. It's a dying art, but those guys were great writers.

SPEAKER_02 4:52

Yeah, yep. They sure were. I loved like just reading, you know, so many of the Philadelphia columnists are so good.

SPEAKER_01 5:00

Well, Bill Condon was down there, right?

SPEAKER_02 5:02

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:03

Yeah, he's great.

SPEAKER_02 5:04

Yeah, and I was a huge sports illustrated fan like you, and uh, it's just so sad that those things are going away. Um, how about writing? Did you enjoy writing when you were a kid?

SPEAKER_01 5:14

You know, I've I've always been somewhat of a storyteller. Um, you know, growing up, maybe I'd embellish stories or stuff like that. Um, but I really did start writing in like high school and you know, was nothing because I was, you know, the quarterback and the shortstop and you know, caddied. But in college, I started to really, really write a lot. So I enjoyed more of the creative writing stuff and um in college, but you know, like anything else, I'm 60 now, Nate. So I graduated college in the late 80s. And, you know, it was business, business, business, business, business. So I had an accounting degree uh at a Pace University, and I took some liberal arts courses. Thankfully, I took the same teacher, um, my first editor, who actually was the football announcer. I played ball up there. And um, so I took every course he possibly could teach because it was an easy A, but I learned and I learned how to, I learned how to write. And, you know, everything that I did, he championed and got me, you know, opened some doors for me, which were really cool.

SPEAKER_02 6:21

Yeah. Do you ever think about like if if you would have, you know, gone on to have done so much writing if it hadn't been for him, if you hadn't had that, you know, connection?

SPEAKER_01 6:31

Yeah, if I hadn't, if it hadn't been for Nick, Dr. Nicholas Catalano, he's like the emeritus guy now. He retired at pace. He was the the head of the liberal arts, you know, did all the plays, all that stuff. Yeah, he was such a big influence in my life. Then there was another guy, a guy I played football with, uh, Tony Lucci. His father, Bob Lucy, was really important to me. Bob was, I don't know if you remember the the Treat Williams story, uh, Prince of the City.

SPEAKER_04 7:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:00

So that was based on Bob's life. He was uh an ex-New York City detective who started writing books. And he wrote that book and he wrote a bunch of other crime books. And I hadn't written a bunch of things that I was trying to get submitted, and he would just edit it. We talk on the phone, and you know, now we're going back to like 90, 91. So, you know, we did have email, but it was all on, you know, you know, first gen computers. So I just wish, you know, Bob unfortunately passed away about five years ago, and I just wish he was around to see this. But between Nick and Bob, they were certainly like the guys who told me to keep doing this because you're good at it. But the challenge, Nate, was uh there was no money in it, especially on a freelance. I mean, I would write a story or try and submit something to the New Yorker, or I wrote a you know, a 600-page manuscript, first person kind of coming of age thing. Got some great feedback from Bob's editor, but she's like, no, you gotta do this, you gotta do this, you gotta do this. I'm like, uh, I'm working. How am I gonna do this? Then I start then I started having kids and you get away from it, then you come back. And then, you know, it just seg it just segued into something else. Like Nick hooked me up with the uh one of the head writers at Letterman. That's how I got to start submitting jokes to Letterman, and that really became my my entry into all of my professional writing, which paralleled my sales career. I was not an accountant after, you know, a couple of weeks uh internship at PepsiCo up there in Westchester. I realized I wasn't an accountant. I got into sales, and then once, you know, green screens went away, I got into Windows computing and applications and data, and I stayed there for uh 30 years with writing as like kind of a side hustle.

SPEAKER_02 8:47

Um when did golf enter your life?

SPEAKER_01 8:50

So golf entered my life when I was 13, and you know, my parents were divorced. My mother sold our house in one of these affluent North Jersey communities, and we moved to more of a middle class community. And um she said, um, I'm not giving you money. So I was raking fields, um, hustling down at the uh the memorial park in a town called Dumont, New Jersey. And um, you know, I was there at crack of dawn, raking the fields for the games, then the game would end. I'd rake the field again. This was Babe Ruth, so it was a big field. There was no tractor, it was me and another guy raking the field.

SPEAKER_04 9:31

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 9:32

You know, you make like five bucks a day plus lunch, whatever it was. And I used to see my friends on bikes and they'd be going somewhere, and then they'd be coming back. And I asked them one day, where the hell are you guys going? And they'll go, we're going to White Beaches in Haworth, New Jersey. We're caddying. And that was it. I became a caddy. So that's how I gotten introduced to golf. It was probably 1981 or 82. Um, it was real cool because the caddy master, and I know that you know that space pretty well and your uh your role, the caddy master's brother was the senior quarterback at the high school, and I was the freshman quarterback at the high school. So when I was 14 and got to ninth grade, I had like some really good hooks and I got some really good loops, and then I was there up until I was like 16. So I worked there for three years, um, like every summer, um vacations. We cut school when they had open qual local open qualifiers, all that stuff. And now instead of getting five bucks a day, I was getting like twenty-five or thirty. That's where I got the gallp kind of itch.

SPEAKER_02 10:44

And where after all you've done, um where does caddying rank as a job? You know, was it one of your favorites?

SPEAKER_01 10:53

That's a great question. So when I was in college, um when I wasn't playing football or not studying, I was um a bartender. And I bartended at a local bar. It was like kind of like a gin mill kind of a place. It was a college bar when, you know, Pace was kind of like a suitcase school, Nate.

SPEAKER_03 11:12

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 11:12

But um people did stay up on weekends, but I stayed up because I was playing football. We could only take a certain amount of credit, so I stayed up for the interterms and over the summer. So it was more of a towny bar. The kids, the local kids would come back from their colleges, so on and so forth. That was probably uh one of the funnest jobs I've had, but I don't think I would have been able to be a bartender if I wasn't a caddy, because you know, when I was caddying at White Beaches, I knew a couple of the members. One was actually my little league baseball coach from that affluent town that my parents moved from. So if I didn't get him, I'd get another loop. And then every once in a while I'd carry putters in the afternoon to make some more money, and then you don't know who you're gonna get. But that really taught me how to kind of like talk to different people, meet different people, have conversations, and I was always kind of an extrovert. So I always had conversations with them, and and that was it. So I would say that caddying definitely helped me become a bartender, and then the bartender helped me become a sales guy.

SPEAKER_02 12:15

For sure. Yeah. Um, how about playing golf? Did that come after your you know, college athletics career end?

SPEAKER_01 12:23

So, you know, there's like regret one of my life. So um to net it out, I would play a game with clubs, but it wasn't golf. I would hang out with the other caddies because we were able to play on Mondays because that was caddy day. And they kind of limited us to the back nine there because there was a lot going on by the first four holes with the pool and the tennis courts and everything else. So they would just say, you know, guys, don't start on one, start on four, start on five, right?

SPEAKER_03 12:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:54

And no one's gonna throw you off because you guys are all caddy here, so it's good. So I had an old set of clubs. Actually, my father in the book, um, I dedicated the book to my father, and he actually went to play golf once and literally came home and said, You take these. So I had clubs. Um, they survived you know, the uh the garage sale somehow that my mother had when she sold the house. And I I had clubs, but I had no swing. I was a baseball guy, so I could hit the ball, but I I couldn't tell you where it went. But when I, as I talk about regrets, um, I was a baseball football guy, and obviously spring baseball went up against golf. But um, my senior year of of high school, I had a high ankle sprain in the last game before our Thanksgiving Day game. And it never really healed properly. So when I got to baseball senior year, when now you had to go in the gym and hit balls and stuff because you couldn't go outside yet. I had been in like a soft cast for like two and a half, three months, because you know, this is like 1983. And at the end of the day, the medicine was, you know, not what it is now. And they just put, you know, a soft cast. I couldn't push off my back foot. I wasn't hitting the ball well. The team was gonna stink. The the the coach was a football coach, and he's like, you know, Rich, listen, we're gonna suck. You really want to do this? So I went to the prom and then I came back and I wasn't playing. And I just basically called my other coach, who was the D-back coach in football. He was the golf coach, and he only had like four guys. I'm like, can I go play golf? He's like, sure. And then I just started playing on the golf team. I was the fifth guy, sometimes I was the fourth guy, you know, shooting like 48 or 50. It was the same nine holes every time, relied solely on short game. But getting back to the regret was that there was a pro white beaches, uh, Dougie Meeks, greatest guy ever. He's in every character I write that's outgoing in golf. He's a piece of Doug Parker, who's the main protagonist in my book. And Doug always offered us lessons. He'd say, guys, you know, come to the back anytime you want, I'll give you a lesson. I never took them. That's a huge regret because I really didn't start taking golf seriously because in college I bulked up. I went from like 185 to like 220. I really didn't start taking golf seriously until I graduated. And then how often did I play when I had kids? So it was kind of like an up and down thing. So golf was introduced to me at 13. I played it one year in high school. I wasn't very good at it. Got very serious, you know, in my 30s.

SPEAKER_02 15:31

And um where does it rank, you know, in what you do today? Is it a big it's probably a bigger part now, right?

SPEAKER_01 15:38

Golf is like a a part of my life, without question. It's been a part of my life for like the last you know, you gotta realize since I played the game, I coached. I coached my kids and I I played golf. I was I was like a 14, 15 handicap until about three years ago, and I got down to an eight and now I'm a nine. Nice. Um, but I had opportunities with my career to join clubs, but I was always traveling and um I didn't want to take time away from my family on weekends. And if you're not playing golf on weekends, then you shouldn't really join a club.

SPEAKER_03 16:15

Right.

SPEAKER_01 16:16

So, you know, it just became more of a priority to me and more of a uh it's always been a passion. I mean, I'm I've been a golf nerd since, you know, like the early 80s. I was watching golf on CBS. Um, even when I was caddying, I was a golf nerd. I loved caddying in the open qualifiers. I loved all that caddy stuff. I just never really played because I had other interests and then, you know, coaching. I was coaching uh seventh and eighth grade youth football, working a full-time job, traveling across country. When I was gonna when was I gonna have time to play golf?

SPEAKER_04 16:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:51

Well But now it's now it's like part of my it's it's it I listen to podcasts all day. I listen to Sirius XM, Taylor, Zarzer, Michael Breed, those are guys I know. They're great guys, they're mentors, they're friends. I am a golf, I just you know, watch Cam, I just watch Cam Young, I'm that section guy win again. So I'm a golf guy.

SPEAKER_02 17:12

Yeah, you and you can tell from the novel. I mean, your your golf know knowledge is super strong and it comes through uh in the novel. And um, I guess before before we go into it in depth, why don't you just give the listeners you know a brief summary of the the story?

SPEAKER_01 17:28

So um, you know, the the book Fairways and Greens a novel, it came from a screenplay that I wrote. And um, as I mentioned, there was a writer's strike, and um, you know, right after uh that like anti-mob lampoon mob script kind of died on a vine, I was uh out to lunch with uh a friend who was a client. He had he had asked me to help him gather his his thoughts and his notes because he wanted to put together a memoir. He was a very successful restauranteur in New York City, had a lot of cool stories about famous people that he had met and interacted with, but he wanted to anonymize them so he could still have restaurants, right? So I was working with him on that, and he had said that, you know, Michael Douglas uh was a friend of his wife's uh Catherine J. Jones was a friend of his wife's, and they was spending a lot of time with Michael, and all Michael talked about was golf. And I said, that's interesting because you know, Michael Douglas was on Letterman, and Letterman asked him a question, simple question. If you weren't an actor, who would you be? And Michael Douglas, without even batting an eyelash, said, a golf pro. And so Letterman says, um, like Tiger Woods, because Tiger Woods, this is like, you know, oh nine-ish.

SPEAKER_03 18:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:47

Tiger Woods was, you know, around and had the great run, or like Jack Nicholas. And he's like, no, no, like my pro, my golf pro. He's like a teacher. He's like, yeah. He goes, why? He goes, because it would be a great life. I've come to the game late in life after a skiing accident, and I just think it'll be a great career. That's awesome. I never thought of that. We'll be right back. So now they come back from a commercial and he goes, How's your dad? And at the time, Kirk Douglas was still alive. He was in his late 80s, early 90s. And Michael says something like, You know, Dave, my dad is doing great. He still works out, and we're looking for a uh uh a project to do as kind of like a swan song. So now I'm sitting with my guy, Richie, his name was, at this table in New York City, and I've got those two things in my head. So being the sales guy I am, being, you know, the enterprising person, I say, you know, Richie, I got a golf script about father and sons. And um if I, you know, give it to you, would you show it to Michael? And he's like, sure. And that was great. So after that lunch, I went to a client and um Bloomberg was there for like two or three hours, took the subway down to the path, jumped on the path. It was the first time, took the path back up to North Jersey. It was the first time I thought about my lunch with Richie. I looked up at the top of the train and I said, All right, I guess I got to write a script for Michael Douglas. So to net it out, I came up with a story that I wanted to be non-derivative, meaning that I didn't want it to be anything like the golf stuff I'd seen before. Tin Cup was already out, you know, there was other stuff that was, you know, whatever. Uh, you know, Happy Gilmore wasn't out yet, but I didn't want it to be whimsical. I didn't want it to be like anything you're gonna see. You know, it's not the magical three-wood that hits a tree, bounces off some lady's pocketbook, and goes in. And it's not about some, you know, it's somewhat of a redemption story, which I'll get to in a second. But, you know, in those stories, as you know, Nate, and and the listeners know, it's some down and out ex-jock or business guy or rock and roll guy or girl that's you know, drinking at a bar and they find, you know, they have to go back and fix something in their past or help somebody in their past. They go back, they become great again, and whoever they help the Redeeme like wins the US Open or wins a Grammy or you know, starts, you know, Facebook. Yes. How many Frances we met are there? There's one and he was real. So let him die in a vine, right? Yes, 1913 is a long time ago. So, in effect, all um, so I had those two themes, and then I I wanted it to be you know a little twisty into it. So I basically wrote a story about a New Jersey golf pro who is long past his pro career. So he's already kind of gone through that. And um, he's at a, you know, on the back nine of his life, he's at this golf course in New Jersey that's um, you know, a golf club. There's no uh tennis courts, there's no pickleball, there's no catering, there's no pool. It's a golf club for golfers, middle class, upper class. He uh his father was the head pro for years, and um he starts getting hit with life's challenges. Challenges. Um, first is a real estate company that wants to buy out his equity members and make it a nine-hole development with houses. Then his um handpicked uh pro, a gal, uh wants to go out and try the LPGA tour again. And then out of nowhere, he gets a call and he has to go back and you know address something in his past, not as the redeemer, but as someone that has to kind of, you know, deal with an issue that is open from his past. And then how he deals with that, those issues. Um, and then there's a parallel story in there that I love to kind of, you know, get into, which is about, you know, like my thoughts about, you know, professional golfers who are on the tour playing in their father's shadows. Yeah. That's kind of like a subplot in the story that all brings it together at the end. And that's Fairways and Green. So it's a it's about real life issues that you see every day in life, or you see in the movies or in limited series that have are never about golf pros. But, you know, golf pros always go home, right? You know, Tiger has his issues, Brooks had his issue with his wife that he was public about with the miscarriage. Golf pros and clubs and golf pros on tour have issues, and how they deal with those issues became the reason I wrote this book.

SPEAKER_02 23:24

And you had, you know, uh a decent number of writing credits prior to this, right? Can you can you talk about you you mentioned briefly about you know contributing some things to Letterman and shows? Can you talk about that?

SPEAKER_01 23:37

Yeah, so you know, again, um a lot of it's uncredited, but I'm not lying. Um so I wrote uh on and off for Letterman for you know eight to ten years. I I had uh some nice work with uh Craig Kilborne on the uh the Late Late Show, then with Craig Ferguson. But through those relationships, I started doing a bunch of stuff for some national comedians, and I started working over at CBS Sports on the NFL Today. And, you know, pardon me, they uh my my thing fell out of my ear. They had a show called uh First and Long, which was a cartoon that they wrote that was kind of like um, you know, just kind of lampooned certain things that happened um during the week in football. Um, and it was it was a uh a cartoon. And I I wrote that for three years. I was a head writer on that. That that was really cool. And then they do side gags, you know, on the set. Like, I don't know if you remember um like Dan Marino. Um, and again, this was all stuff that I did mainly to hang around. I did get paid for some of the stuff, but for CBS, like there was a time when Dan Marino was the president of the Dolphins.

SPEAKER_04 24:52

Oh, wow, I don't remember.

SPEAKER_01 24:53

And that was on a Wednesday, but by Sunday he he resigned. He resigned. So um, but he he resigned and showed up to the show. So he had like a little book on the set that said, you know, my my my 48 hours is an NFL executive by Dan Marino. So little stuff like that. There was hundreds of those. But then I started punching up stuff, you know, the upfronts. You know what the upfronts are?

SPEAKER_02 25:14

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:15

I did all the work for the upfronts uh for all the sports stuff, not golf, just mainly for mainly football. I helped uh the executive producer punch some of that stuff up, gave them some throwaway lines and stuff like that. And then I started with the freelance stuff, um, like helping people get their thoughts together and stuff like that. I had three or four clients like Richie. And then I worked with a couple of national comedians that were really, really big directly and through services. And um then it just kind of morphed into the screenplays and then a bunch of stuff in new media that you know is too difficult to kind of go into. But I was doing memes and all that stuff until I really put my head down and started writing this book like two and a half years ago.

SPEAKER_02 25:58

Is there um a bit or a joke or um a contribution that you made that you're you know you're proud of more than the rest that you want to share? Or is it all just, you know, as it comes from?

SPEAKER_01 26:10

No, I mean, listen, I I I'm not gonna do a good job at all, but you know, the first joke I landed on Letterman that was made him laugh, uh, you know, was the one that I always do. It's you know, it's the old uh you know, last night in California, Arnold Schwarzenegger gave his first state of the state speech. And then earlier today it was a rebroadcast in English. So and he laughed for like a minute on that joke. So that was like the one I always remember. I have the I actually have the audio of it, but there were so many throwaways and so many other things. Um, I did I did a bit for uh a gentleman, uh unfortunately, who passed away, who did a Bush impression, uh Bush, uh G.W. Bush. And he was at the correspondence dinner with Bush, and he was using my material. So a Bush impersonator is making the president laugh with my stuff.

SPEAKER_02 27:04

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 27:05

That was pretty cool. Steve Bridges, great guy. I died much too young.

SPEAKER_02 27:09

Oh, that's cool. Um, I mean, that just just that clip probably and knowing that or and seeing your reaction to um or or being able to watch Letterman, you know, laugh at your joke had been unbelievable. I mean, you hear like Seinfeld and other comedians like that, you know, go on Letterman or Carson and you know, all they wanted to do was make those guys laugh even just for a second. So you must have been just like unbelievably thrilled when you saw that, right?

SPEAKER_01 27:37

It was great. Yeah, that was good. And you know, it's funny because there's a there's a uh a that was great. And I and I yeah, again, you have to realize this is like the 90s, right? And then uh into the early 2000s. So DVRs weren't really big yet, but we did have VHS. Remember what that is?

SPEAKER_04 27:56

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:57

So and uh it literally because you didn't know what he was gonna use, right? And and you some of the best stuff he never used because you know, he had writers that were doing it. He had um Mahal and Barry who were uh Carson's writers doing it for him, and you were competing, you know, you would have you were one of a hundred jokes. He'd pick two because he picked every joke. But you know, that was great. And you know, my wife and I used to get a kick out of it because you know, and then sometimes it was funny because I think I had a really good joke, and I'd watched a show and it wasn't on, and then like I'd be watching it like a week later or two weeks later, and he'd use a joke from two weeks ago. I said, I like that joke. And we're like my wife would be like, You did? I go, Yeah, I'm pretty sure I did. So it's kind of funny.

SPEAKER_02 28:40

That's awesome.

SPEAKER_01 28:41

It was good stuff. How much made like no money? So, but I got I got it, it meant a lot to me.

SPEAKER_02 28:47

And you know, you got that experience that you know, you I'm sure you leaned on when doing that screenplay in this novel, right? How much did that experience help you when writing this novel?

SPEAKER_01 28:58

Well, the thing with um the Letterman stuff was you have to in anything you do in life. So, you know, I am I was 30 years uh in tech sales, business development, and tech sales management. And I work for some of the biggest software companies in the world. I work for some of the smallest, some that you've never heard of. Um, and I did that straight through until like 2022, where my wife and I and my family, we had a little personal matter, a personal event in our life that made me refocus my life. And one of the things was I wanted to get out of that space. Uh AI was starting. I knew where it was going, and I knew that companies were gonna stop spending until they figured out what AI was. So I wanted to do something. So I took a different career path. I focused on my golf game, and I said, I'm gonna write this book. So those are the three things that I said at 58 years old I was gonna do. So once you do that, and whatever you do, whether you're gonna do a book, you're gonna build a house, you're gonna fix your golf swing, Nate, you have to. And I know you had to do this too when you wrote your book. You have to plan the work and you have to work the plan and you have to stick to it. And so the main thing that Letterman taught me um was rejection, because I would send 10 jokes five times a week and I would land one every two months. So reject and the other thing was I know I was making the the guy who was passing the jokes laugh, but that doesn't mean anything. So the rejection was huge. Um that helped me with dealing with my editor, because you have to be humble. Yeah. Um, but you know, what really the Letterman thing did and some of the other things did for me was help me understand that, you know, you have to plan the work, work the plan, and you have to stick to it. And you just have to keep writing. The practice of Nick Catalano, Pace University, the practice of writing is rewriting. So all of the writing I did, while it wasn't novel uh for a novel, um, it was just working over and over again and sticking that plan into a calendar and knowing, listen, Tuesday night, no matter what, at eight o'clock, I'm gonna be at that desk and I'm gonna write, you know, six pages. And if I don't write anything, I'm not feeling creative, I'm gonna research golf swings so that when I write the golf stuff, it's gonna sound like it was a PGA of America professional teaching the lesson because Doug is a is a master teaching professional, so it's gotta sound right. And all those kinds of things. So it's just about optimizing your time, dealing with rejection, and having a plan.

SPEAKER_02 31:40

Interesting. And um one of the things that I think you did uh an unbelievable job with was creating the characters, and you know, in my book, that was by far the most enjoyable part was crafting and developing these characters, and you did such a good job of making each one unique and making each one, I think, relatable to people who know golf, number one, and number two, you know, helping us really understand what this character was like. And they were all, you know, round characters as opposed to you know flat characters who only have, you know, one or two traits. I thought they were you did a great job again of developing them. So I just want to know how much time you spent on you know making them, you know, the best they could possibly be.

SPEAKER_01 32:25

So um, yeah, so you know, I obviously, you know, when you plan the work and you and you work the plan, keep in mind that it started as a screenplay, so it was adapted into a novel. And what in my first pass I had like 70 double space pages. So you know that you know that's not enough. And um, you know, screenplay is much more dialogue than narrative, so I had to do the narrative. And uh I felt like you know, I I had the conceit, right? I knew that this was gonna be about fathers and sons and legacies and you know living in shadows and pressure and rediscovery. So once I had that, um, it really became an exercise in all right, who is Doug? And Doug is like a composite of every golf pro I've ever either gotten a lesson from or know. There's a bunch of different people in them, and some of me now at an older age. Kyle is like my, you know, my son Matt. He's 27, and he's, you know, uh all over the place. And um, but he's got a heart, maybe, and stuff like that. So, you know, I have I have kids in my, you know, my son Matt is 27, my son Nick is gonna turn 30. So I I know that era. Plus, I was like that too. I was a drunken jock in the 70s and 80s. Um and then Parker Sr., Douglas, you know, I I name my characters Douglas because of Michael Douglas, but um Parker Sr. is just a you know the curm. He's the older guy who is the funny guy and he's gonna do it his way. He's, you know, he's just an old school guy. And then, you know, there's some other people that come in, um, but mainly it's female characters because what I've really appreciated is that women golfers and women non-golfers like this book because, you know, someone told me, uh, a good friend of mine's son, who's a showrunner out in Hollywood, when he read the script, and I told him I was gonna make it a novel, he said that's a great idea because you would own the IP and all other stuff. But he goes, 'You gotta make these characters, women' characters, you gotta make them more stronger. You have to make them stronger. Because when I'm not uh they can't, you know, this isn't, and he was totally right. So I made Annie, I made Rose, I made Mary, you know, she's a main character. I made them strong women. And I think that's why the women like it. So that's how I kind of came up with the characters. Um, and then the peripheral characters, I would just, and you know this, um, you have to write what you know. So that's why it's set in New Jersey. Yeah. All the restaurants, all the places are places, the bars, they're places I go to or composites of those. And all the peripheral characters that come in and out are people that I know and hang out with.

SPEAKER_02 35:12

And that was probably fun to do, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_01 35:14

It was the biggest, and I don't know how you dealt with this. Uh maybe I'll ask you the question. Nate, as an author yourself, how did you come up with the names of your characters?

SPEAKER_02 35:24

Oh, they're 99% of them were based on people I know.

SPEAKER_01 35:29

So I started doing that, but then like people were pissed. So I hadn't changed names. So I started putting names together, and then the funniest part is had three beta readers. And my first beta reader was my goddaughter, Ashley. And she reads the book and she's like, I'd love this. She goes, I don't know shit about golf, but I love this. She goes, but I'm pissed. I'm like, why? She goes, My sister's in the book. Like, what do you mean? She's like, My sister's one of the servers at the on the patio is named Amanda. I said, That's not your sister. She goes, Well, that's her name. I want to be in the book. So I'm like, all right, you could be in the book. So now I gotta figure out where I'm gonna put her. She goes, I want to be the girl that he he hooks up with. I'm like, no, you're not gonna be that girl. So that was kind of funny. And then I started putting names together. So I take first names of one person with the last name of another person.

SPEAKER_00 36:25

Well, that's it for this week's edition of That's Good Pick It Up. Podcast mostly about golf books. You've heard the first part of Nate's conversation with Rich Pogy about his book Fairway and Greens. Be sure to come back next week as we conclude Nate's conversation with Rich on That's Good Pick It Up. Be sure to check out the other podcasts at bestball.com. Until next week, have a good time. And thank you for listening to That's Good Pick It Up.