Ian Baker-Finch is known and admired across the golfing world. He is universally regarded as one of the nice guys of Australian golf.
For the current generation, he is recognised as a wise voice analysing and broadcasting golf on TV, especially from The Masters and the game’s other majors. Yet his own golf history is a powerful story about a sportsman with the eyes of the world on him, after taming Royal Birkdale’s front nine in just 29 strokes, he spiraled into a dramatic loss of form within two short years
Written by Geoff Saunders, with Ian’s full co-operation, Ian Baker-Finch: To Hell and Back is the first and only biography of one of the best-known names in golf. The book charts Ian’s story from his early golfing career and rise to the top echelons of golf, all the highs and lows and through to his later success in media.
Ian has said, ‘I think golfers will want to know what the hell happened to me. I want to know what the hell happened to me! Working on my biography with Geoff over the last two years has been very rewarding. The book has helped me to put both my career in golf, and my life, into perspective. I am looking forward to my story being told.’
Ian began his professional golfing career on the Australian Tour in 1979 and spent more than a decade successfully competing around the world. From 1983–93, Ian won 17 titles worldwide including tournaments on all four major Tours. He represented Australia in the 1985 World Cup, The World Four Tours Championship from 1985-91and the Dunhill Cup in 1989 and 1992, but it was winning the 1991 Open Championship at Royal Birkdale that made him a household name and was the catalyst for a dramatic and inexplicable loss of form a few years later.
Ian Baker-Finch: To Hell and Back explores for the first time the tragic circumstances behind Ian’s sudden loss of form, and looks to answer the question the golfing world has asked for 30 years, ‘What caused Ian Baker-Finch’s crash?’
‘Ian’s golf fascinated me when I first saw him make his mark as a player in the early1980’s. His rise in the game was meteoric and his loss of form was a golfing tragedy,’ said author Geoff Saunders. ‘I believe Ian and I have distilled the reasons for his decline as a player down to a few key factors, which golfers of all levels can learn from. After the fall, Ian’s stellar golf broadcasting career shows the true measure of the man and adds to the story.’
Faced with the tragically premature end of his playing career, Ian not only recovered but went from strength to strength: he has been a world-class sports commentator and analyst for CBS and other networks for over 25 years.
This is a fascinating story with two powerful messages: how the fame of winning big can lead to the kind of self-doubts that will undermine even the greatest talent – and importantly don’t ever lose faith in yourself and you can still win big again!
