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Distinct among golf writers for having been born in Pinehurst, arguably America’s golf capital, Bill Fields brings to life growing up during the 1960s and ’70s in the Sandhills of North Carolina, where his early ties to the game were a springboard for a long, award-winning career chronicling it. A Quick Nine Before Dark: A Life in Golf is a richly detailed memoir: poignant sketches of a lost small-town world; introducing his blue-collar dad to golf; the culture shock and awe of a new arrival in 1980s New York City; an insider’s vantage of an evolving golf media world, including Golf World, the magazine founded in Pinehurst, where he worked for nearly a quarter century. Fields interviewed a 15-year-old Tiger Woods, played eighteen holes with Sam Snead when he was 84, and has written in depth about many of golf’s legendary players and compelling characters. Having walked Pinehurst’s fairways as a tour-event standard bearer when he was a teen, Fields went on to photograph forty major championships and has reported from twice that many as a fixture on the golf scene for four decades. A Quick Nine Before Dark is a vivid account of that journey and the charms and challenges along the way, on and off the course.

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Excerpts

  • The two cups were about thirty feet apart, and the uneven terrain made two-putting a challenge. I tied a yellow dish rag to the end of a small branch for an improvised flagstick. My form was as malleable as Silly Putty. Depending on which pros I had most recently seen on a golf telecast, I would take a knock-kneed or crouched stance, put my feet close together or far apart, use more wrists or more shoulders during the stroke.

    —From Chapter 2, “First Swings”

  • Life for a boy in those days was a perpetual series of games, powered by Kool-Aid and grilled cheese, governed by our imaginations, halted only at darkness by the summoning shouts of mothers or fathers from first one house and then another, a chorus of parental calls.
    Dreaming didn’t cost a penny.

    —From Chapter 3, “Under the Shadow of Ghost Winds”

  • During my visits [to Jackson Springs], a handful of old farmers could be found not far from Ma-Ma’s at Kimes Blake’s filling station messing around with their jack-knives and nibbling on hoop cheese and saltines. In winter, they gathered with chaws in their jaws around a heater so toasty it seemed their overalls might ignite. Their drawls were even lazier than their sabbath, the accents much stronger than what I heard in Southern Pines.

    —From Chapter 5, “Roots, Known and Unknown”

  • Johnny’s had a drive-through, a small window on the building’s south side. “Six, Gene?” Bruce would ask my father, before crisply shaking a paper bag open with one hand and nesting the beers with the other with the grace of an illusionist, before collecting the two-dollar payment.

    —From Chapter 9, “Knollwood and the Iron Man”

  • Miller gave us some tips and took sequences of our swings. My Graph-Check still smelled of Polaroid that evening when I pondered the positions it revealed. It was sure a lot easier to notice something with those still images than pausing a Super 8 movie to the groan of an overheating projector. Those eight frames proved one thing: My swing had potential but needed lots of work. It was clear I was the kid carrying the scores instead of shooting them.

    —From Chapter 12, “Polyester Plaid Pinehurst”

About Bill Fields

I’ve been immersed in golf most of my life, from trying my hardest to become a good player when I was in my teens growing up around Pinehurst to chronicling the game in various publications for more than four decades. A Quick Nine Before Dark reveals that journey from being a small-town kid dreaming about playing the tour to my many years covering golf on its biggest stages.

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ADVANCE PRAISE

  • “Bill Fields fell for golf early, and the Fields-Golf marriage has been a long and beautiful one. Bill’s book is a celebration of it. His writing here is out of a dream state. Like a ball on a fairway waiting to be struck, it starts on the ground—and then soars.”

    —Michael Bamberger, Golf.com writer and author of The Playing Lesson

  • “Bill Fields has written a beautiful and entertaining memoir about golf, sports, writing and childhood dreams coming true. Bill is one of the nation’s great experts on golf, so it’s no surprise that he paints a rich portrait of the game and some of its biggest stars. A Quick Nine Before Dark takes us to another place and time in sports, and in our culture. It’s a delightful journey.” 

    — Christine Brennan, USA Today national sports columnist and author of the New York Times bestseller On Her Game

  • “The roots run deep for Bill Fields in his moving memoir A Quick Nine Before Dark. Home is love’s first universe, and Bill shares his with us, from his father’s mysterious birth to the bond he forged with golf—the game he spent his life traveling the world to chronicle. He writes with wit and soul of the place that gave him not only roots but wings.”

    —Jim Moriarty, PineStraw magazine

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