A Quick Nine Before Dark
Grade: A: if you’re interested in golf and golf media. B: if you’re interested in one, but not the other
Teacher’s Comments: An interesting memoir of a life spent in golf media by an award-winning print journalist and editor.
A Quick Nine Before Dark is the memoir of noted golf journalist Bill Fields. Fields, who received the 2020 PGA Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism from the PGA of America for contributions to golf, was a longtime senior editor at Golf World magazine and a senior editor at Golf Illustrated after stints as a newspaper sportswriter. He currently writes The Albatross, a golf newsletter.
Reading A Quick Nine Before Dark gave me the same sort of feeling I had reading The Long Golden Afternoon, by Stephen Proctor. I read through Afternoon with a sense of foreboding, knowing that the Great War was coming, ending the idyllic golf world of the Long 19th Century (note that I wrote “idyllic golf world,” not “idyllic world.”)
While nothing nearly as apocalyptic as The Great War was waiting at the end of A Quick Nine, I knew (we all know) what was waiting for the world of print newspapers and magazines that constituted most of Fields’ career. They died, and world died with them.
I for one, think we are worse off.
Fields is a native of Pinehurst, North Carolina, which gives him a perhaps unique perspective among American golf writers. As with his later chapters on his newspaper and magazine careers, there is a degree of wistfulness in his descriptions of a small town youth where he was able to play courses that now are overrun with big money tourists (of which, I confess, I was one. Read my golf trip to Pinehurst articles)
To his vast credit, Fields avoids the trap of nostalgia and sappiness. His recollections and observations are more slice-of-life and filled with crisp detail. It’s the kind of small-town childhood that I wished for as a kid in suburbia while reading books like Encyclopedia Brown, Alvin Ferdinald, the Three Investigators and others.
Fields found golf at an early age, saving pennies for balls and clubs. He played high school golf, and volunteered at pro tournaments held in Pinehurst. More importantly, he found in golf a way to connect to his father.
The later chapters trace his rise from small town all-purpose sports writer to PR flak to Golf World and Golf Illustrated. He interviewed a 15-year-old Tiger Woods, played golf with an aged Sam Snead and covered a hundred-plus majors.
As in his early chapters, Fields avoids the obvious traps: in this case, name- and event-dropping. Instead, he focuses on the everyday: frustrations with early telecommunications equipment; details about cameras; deadlines; finding housing in a new city; press room dynamics; love found and lost.
I felt another wistfulness in these chapters. I got a degree in journalism at West Virginia in the heady days of post-Watergate newspapers and magazines. I thought I’d lead the life that Fields described: busy newsrooms, tight deadlines, clattering Selectric typewriters, and the periodic thrill of daily or weekly bylines.
Even then, though, I saw what was coming. I detoured into public relations, then public policy analysis and finally a safe long-term job as a public school teacher. I am, in the end, quite risk averse. Writing this blog has satisfied my compulsion to write without the instability I saw coming in the print media world.
Fields writes about the painful, but ultimately matter-of-fact end of the golf print media world. The big corporation that ended up with Golf World and Golf Illustrated simply decided they weren’t making as much money as investors demanded. And that was it.
Fields went on to broadcasting, freelance writing and now writes a Substack.
In the final analysis, A Quick Nine Before Dark is less a book, and more the memoir of a man who happens to be a golf writer. It is crisp, warm, detailed, often funny and occasionally sad.
I am really glad I read it.
Related
Discover more from GolfBlogger Golf Blog
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.