Gary Moran on the chronicle of the rookie year on the US Tour of party animal Rich Beem and his wild Canadian caddie

"Totally, utterly, completely, 100 per cent mind-boggling" is how Rich Beem describes his rookie year on the PGA Tour. Up to the middle of 1998, Beem's biggest winning cheque was for $5,000 at a Sun Section PGA event in New Mexico, and he had trouble even discussing with a straight face the idea of trying to qualify for the PGA Tour.

By the middle of 1999 he had bypassed most of the intervening steps to claim the $450,000 top prize for winning the Kemper Open. The transition from clueless rookie to unlikely champion provides much of the material for Alan Shipnuck's Bud, Sweat and Tees, which is as engaging, humorous and informative a look at life on Tour as you will find.

The book achieved huge publicity and a surge in sales when Beem held off a charging Tiger Woods to win last year's PGA Championship at Hazeltine. Anyone who was lucky enough to have read it in advance was surely pulling for Beem, who comes across as a likeable if slightly irresponsible rogue and the perfect antidote to what John Updike termed the "interchangeable, square-jawed young pros who clutter the tournament circuit with their competence."

After an unremarkable college career, in which he never won a tournament, and an unremarkable stint as an assistant pro in South Dakota, Beem famously quit the game for a $7 per hour job selling mobile phones in Seattle. For several months the only shots he hit were from his second floor balcony to the edge of Puget Sound, a carry of a couple of hundred yards over an industrial complex.

At much the same time, a 21-year-old Canadian, Steve Duplantis, who had figured out that he would never make it as a player, was having the time of his life caddying for Jim Furyk and cashing fat percentage cheques. "A serial skirt-chaser with a chronic reputation for tardiness," Duplantis had an even more reckless streak than Beem.

Life as a tour caddy was considerably complicated when he married a stripper from the Philippines 19 days after they met and then won full custody of their daughter when they inevitably separated.

As sure as looping was in Duplantis's blood, playing was in Beem's, and after eight months he quit the phone business for an assistant's job at El Paso Country Club. There he sold sweaters and honed his playing skills in highly competitive money matches in which he sometimes "got inside the pocket" of tour player JP Hayes.

Unlikely as it sounds, Hayes won the 1998 Buick Classic, prompting Beem to reassess his ability, pony up $4,000 to enter Q-school and play his way onto the Tour.

Beem's early tournaments included the AT&T Pro-Am ("Priceless. I couldn't believe that I was playing Pebble. For Free."), the Masters (used a PGA pass to spectate on a practice day), but mostly just missed cuts. Furyk had long since lost patience with Duplantis, and it was two men clinging to the tour who hooked up just in time for the Kemper. There Beem found his game, "smoked" his drives, "nuked" his irons, "poured in" his putts and "nutted up" (showed bottle) to become one of the tour's unlikeliest winners.

The pair celebrated like party animals and stuck together on and off the course for the rest of the season before breaking up. Beem is now a major champion and married with a child, while Duplantis is on the fringes of the tour caddying for the likes of Fred Wadsworth, Garrett Willis and Tommy Armour III.

For a while they had a great thing going, and Shipnuck tells their tale brilliantly in this major winner among golf books.