Paper Tiger Quotes

“There is safety in sitting around and wondering, imagining your successes and blaming cruel circumstance—I always win that game, with nothing put to risk. But the idea that I had committed every penny and minute of my life to one goal—such a clear focus felt slightly unnatural. When you take away all your excuses, funny how lonely your ego can become.”
― Tom Coyne, Paper Tiger: An Obsessed Golfer's Quest to Play with the Pros

“That is the dream - that someday we really will know our game, that golf won't always be lurking a few hundred more yards down the fairway.
It isn't just a dream for the helpless golfhead. Everyone who has made contact with a golf ball understands a piece of the game's spirit. It's there as your hands fall towards the ball, just before your club tears the turf, when anything might happen and you can still wonder....what if?
We confess it every time we tee it up, we speak it in our sleep, we feel it as we watch our ball go jumping off the screws - we love this game. What if we could give it everything just for a little while? How much would it love us back?”
― Tom Coyne, Paper Tiger: An Obsessed Golfer's Quest to Play with the Pros

“This is a great learning experience. It builds character.”
― Tom Coyne, Paper Tiger: An Obsessed Golfer's Quest to Play with the Pros

“The writer overthinks by necessity, collecting and complicating small details, while the tournament golfer needs to be simple, myopic, fixated on one detail at a time.”
― Tom Coyne, Paper Tiger: An Obsessed Golfer's Quest to Play with the Pros

“They share the same ballbusting sense of humor, both of them from a generation that seemed to know how to do two things far better than my contemporaries: work and laugh.”
― Tom Coyne, Paper Tiger: An Obsessed Golfer's Quest to Play with the Pros

“It’s not so much that I am a cynic, I just might take a bit too much pleasure in demonstrating why things aren’t as rosy as they seem.”
― Tom Coyne, Paper Tiger: An Obsessed Golfer's Quest to Play with the Pros