GROWING UP
IN A GOLF HOTBED
Born in Pinehurst, North Carolina, long one of the important centers of American golf, I grew up five miles away in Southern Pines. Other sports came first—basketball and baseball were my early obsessions—because I didn’t come from a golf family. One of the twists in my background, which I write about in this memoir, is that I introduced my father to golf instead of the usual pattern. Dad’s life wasn’t always smooth sailing, and he didn’t have the gift of years. Golf, though, gave him much pleasure once he followed my lead and got hooked on the game starting at about age fifty. His story—from an unusual start to life to difficult war experiences—is a big part of my story. Losing him when I was twenty, as I describe in Chapter 15, was hard.
In the early chapters of A Quick Nine Before Dark, I take readers to those days during the 1970s when I couldn’t get enough golf, when there was nothing better than cramming in as many holes as possible before the sun went down. “… during quick nines illuminated by slanting golden rays and lengthening shadows, whether alone or with friends, golf seemed its best and most beautiful self,” I write in Chapter 13.
WORDS, PICTURES
AND THE (GOLF) WORLD
The collection of media credentials in the above image hints at how I’ve spent the last four decades or so—and that picture depicts just a small fraction of the hundreds of golf tournaments for which I’ve been credentialed as a reporter, photographer, or television researcher. (Press badges had more character in the old days!) Interviewing Davis Love III in 1988 at the B.C. Open (right) and photographing the Old Course at St. Andrews in 1999 (below right) are two of my many experiences on the road.
I was fortunate to spend much of my career at Golf World magazine, which was a much-loved institution in the game from its founding in Pinehurst in 1947 until 2014, when my colleagues and I in Wilton, Connecticut, produced its final edition. My history at Golf World—and of the magazine itself—is a key part of this book.
Since 2017, I’ve had the pleasure of being part of the production team working on the golf broadcasts of NBC Sports. That’s me pictured with Dan Hicks, Johnny Miller, and the rest of the 18th -tower crew at the close of the 2018 Open Championship at Carnoustie. Five years later, during The Open at Royal Liverpool, I briefly had a shiny desk decoration at my NBC tower desk.
I don’t know if I’m a five-tool player, but I sure have played a lot of positions over the decades while covering golf, and my career has taken me to forty-eight states and a dozen countries many miles from the weekly newspaper and nine-hole course in the small town where my journey began.
