To ‘Hell and Back’ in golf…and getting forced into a second career

Book Review: Ian Baker-Finch: To Hell and Back. Hardie Grant Books, 2025.

As we get ready for The Masters golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia, a tale of one golfer to remember.

If the name that emblazons this book, Ian Baker-Finch, is new to you, the subtitle, To Hell and Back, will be of little help in identifying the thrust of this book. A person coming across this title who does not typically spend their weekends listening to whispered insights over green meadows may have expected a harrowing tale of adventure, where peril and danger are encountered, but ultimately overcome. In that, the title, perhaps overpromises. That Mr. Baker-Finch, age 64, merely made his living playing and commentating on professional golf does not necessarily mean that his story is not worthy of telling, possibly just that a tamping down of the title’s enthusiasm is in order

Ian Baker-Finch was an Australian professional golfer of distinction in the 1980’s and early 1990’s. Until Adam Scott and Jason Day came on the scene in the 2000’s, he was arguably Australia’s second most famous golfer (behind Greg Norman) winning his only major, The Open Championship (referred to as The British Open outside of the UK) in 1991 at Royal Birkdale.

To Hell and Back Book cover — Book cover of “Ian Baker-Finch: To Hell and Back

Encountering an authorized biography of a man who won one of golf’s majors 34 years ago, and who had a second career as a successful, but not overly celebrated golf commentator seemed a touch odd. If those were the necessary credentials for biographies, books like this would be a cottage industry. In a way this incongruity made me more curious, there had to be something intriguing there to inspire Geoff Saunders, the author, to devote an entire book to.

While I knew that Baker-Finch’s golf career had fallen off a cliff in the late 1990’s, I did not remember the specific circumstances. As Saunders recounts, six years after winning the Open Championship Mr. Baker-Finch withdrew from the 1997 Open Championship after shooting a 92 in the second round at Troon. A healthy professional golfer in their prime doesn’t worry about not breaking 80 unless they are playing in a hurricane, let alone breaking 90. This ended up being the last straw of a steady decline of Baker-Finch’s game, where he mysteriously lost the ability to play the game that he had once mastered. The state of his game was summed up thusly:

“A cruel joke circulated among the caddies: ‘Whose is the best bag to have on tour?’

‘Finch’s because you get every weekend off.”

When Saunders discussed the reasons for writing this book about Mr. Baker-Finch, Baker-Finch offered this thought: ‘I think golfers will want to know what the hell happened to me.’ After a pause he added, ‘I want to know what the hell happened to me!” While the tale of how this collapse happened, what led up to it, and how Mr. Baker-Finch ultimately righted himself as a successful golf commentator is the main premise of the book, it is ultimately not the most interesting reason to read the book. And from reading the final product, I think the author may agree.

It is not until page 199 (in a book of 268), in the chapter, The Nightmare Begins . . . and Ends, that the book depicts the acute inexplicable decline of Baker-Finch’s golf game, reflecting the proverbial “To Hell” of the subtitle. While the decline is heartbreaking, it almost feels like an afterthought to the book, rather than the reason for its existence. I am confident it is the reason the book was commissioned, it just happens that Saunders found his muse elsewhere.

The golf swing is a complex athletic maneuver that requires precise coordination and timing that usually only rewards perfection, while punishing all that fails to live up to that standard. For a professional golfer, that swing must hold up under intense pressure and scrutiny, the slightest doubts can throw the whole machine off. Mr. Baker-Finch always felt like he needed a little more distance to really compete with the arriving generation (i.e. Tiger Woods). That search for distance led his swing awry. He never really lost the ability to play well, he lost the ability to play well under pressure, to perform the act that earned him a living. He had always been an accurate driver of the ball. Near the end of his professional playing days, he didn’t know whether his drives would dart left or right. The dreaded double miss will sap your confidence every time. And if you can’t get off the tee effectively, it’s either coaching or broadcasting for you, because playing at that level is no longer an option.

It is the forging of Mr. Baker-Finch’s golf career that provides the spine of the book. His rise, out of the “sunshine state” of Queensland, Australia is depicted in detail. The book provides a description of how Queensland became renowned for its collection of golfing talent, producing 14 of 19 of Australia’s major championships over the last forty years. An inexplicable level of success, given that these players largely lacked a “country club” background. As with Baker-Finch, they educated themselves in golf while working as assistant pros, caddies, apprentices, working on their own games in their free time, and playing for money on their days off.

In a way, the relative roughness of Queensland’s golf courses played into this group’s success. The late Australian golfer and commentator Jack Newton put it this way, “they are so good because they grew up playing such crap courses.” And the author sums it up as, “It is hard to argue with Queensland’s successful three-part formula when it comes to success at the top level: blue skies, no money and rugged golf courses.”

It is the depiction of Baker-Finch’s journey and rise through the mini-tours of Australia and Asia that piqued my engagement. The barnstormer quality of the satellite golf tours often required the young golfers to band together as they flew on sketchy airplanes to unheard of destinations, playing on unkempt courses for limited paychecks. It was survival of the fittest, outback style.

As Baker-Finch begins to achieve more success in the book, there is almost a triumphal quality to the writing, where the book builds to Mr. Baker-Finch’s victory at Royal Birkdale in 1991. Saunders definitely wants to convey how important the difficulty of the journey was for Baker-Finch’s ultimate success. You can feel his enthusiasm for the subject matter, and when you read the Acknowledgements and realize that Saunders played the same mini-tours in the late ‘70’s and 80’s for about a decade with limited success, you understand his fascination and are grateful for it. It is understandable why the book is titled as it is, and why it was marketed as such. The hook is the fall from grace story, and while that is what I expected, I am happy to have been led in another direction.

Other books you may be interested in:

For a similar story about losing one’s ability – Roger Angell, “Gone for Good“, in The New Yorker, “tells the haunting story (or, at least it’s haunting in Angell’s hands) of Pirates pitcher Steve Blass who one day, seemingly from out of a clear blue sky, stopped being able to pitch.”
For story on the mini-tours of Asia – Ewan Porter, Tour Confidential: Triumph & Torment A Golfer’s Life on the Global State

This article is part of the “Tales from a Second Career” series to provide helpful tips for changing careers and also providing examples of those that have made the move.