OMNIVOROUS READER

The best writers, those gifted beyond the ordinary, harbor obsessions, and when producing their finest work, they transform those obsessions into prose that they share communally with readers. That’s the case with Bill Fields’ A Quick Nine Before Dark. His obsession is golf — and anyone who’s been caught up in the intricacies of the game will want to read Fields’ memoir, front to back.

Fields is a North Carolina boy. Born in Pinehurst in 1959, he attended public schools in Moore County and graduated from the University of North Carolina. For 20 years, he was a senior editor for Golf World and is the recipient of the PGA Lifetime Achievement Award.

A Quick Nine Before Dark is for golfers of all skill levels. Even if you’ve never whacked a golf ball and you surf past reruns of Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf like it’s a Progressive commercial, you’ll likely find yourself swept up by Fields’ beautifully crafted prose, and the personal twists and turns of his life as a golf writer. He comes across as a gentle, earnest and thoughtful human being who has nevertheless tackled life head-on. You’ll find no scandals, no shocking moral shortcomings, no dark musing, no vilifications of former friends — just straight-ahead storytelling at its best.

Writers have tics and twitches of style that identify them as surely as their DNA, but Fields’ flaws are few, if any, and there’s nothing about his writing more rewarding than his efficient use of descriptive prose. When he feels the need to shine, he does precisely that, as with this excerpted Golf World description of Davis Love III as he captured a major title: “The conclusion to the ninety-seventh PGA Championship was soggy and sweet, like strawberries and sponge cake. As quickly as the late afternoon rain had come on Sunday to Winged Foot Golf Club in Mamaroneck, New York, it stopped, and the sun peeked through an angry sky. Two rainbows arched over the course at just the right moment, as if scripted by Frank Capra himself, and for Davis Love III, there wasn’t a burden in sight.”

Fields blends the elation of honest achievement with the whimsy of happenstance. In three carefully crafted sentences, he transports the reader to a significant moment in professional golf, evoking the sweetness of strawberries and sponge cake, and framing the moment of triumph with an allusion to a great filmmaker. Then he concludes with a pithy understatement: “. . . there wasn’t a burden in sight.” Could there be a more endearing description of earned exhilaration?

When the occasional somber moment intrudes, it’s handled with grace and thoughtful solemnity, as when Fields learned that his former wife, Marianne, had died. He was hundreds of miles away, talking with his mother by phone, when he heard the news: “It’s Marianne, Bill. She died. . . . Nothing in divorce-recovery books, the radio talk show advice, or the support of friends in the wake of a failed marriage had prepared me for those words.” The deaths of his mother and father are likewise handled unsentimentally but with a necessary touch of sentiment. “Life is ragged,” he writes. “Voids linger. Loose ends are everywhere.”

Fields’ obsession with sports began when he was a child, gravitating toward any game that involved a ball. When he failed to become a basketball star, he turned to golf after receiving a Spalding starter kit for Christmas in 1969. His focus on the game waxed and waned until he was a student at UNC, where he wrote for the Daily Tar Heel. After graduation, he knocked around the golf world, promoting the game, until he accepted a position with the Athens Banner-Herald, which would evolve into an associate editorship at Golf World. What followed was a series of positions that eventually led back to Golf World, the magazine that started in the same town where he was born.

Fields covered tournaments in the United States and overseas, which brought him into contact with the greatest golfers of our time. How many golfers can boast that they’ve played the game with Sam Snead and Tiger Woods?

But A Quick Nine Before Dark is more than another golf book — it’s also about becoming a writer and what it takes to remain ascendant in a field where technology advances at breakneck speed. From the moment Fields, an elementary school kid, put pencil to paper and wrote “I like to write,” his life had been about arranging the right words in the best possible order.

Fields’ work may require him to live in Connecticut, but he is as much a Southern writer as Faulkner and as romantic about his hometown as Thomas Wolfe was about Asheville.

At 13, Fields worked as a busboy at Russell’s Fish House in Carthage, which recently closed. Describing the restaurant in its heyday, he treats us to magical paragraphs that touch all the senses: “. . . Russell’s was the most clamorous place in creation — more deafening than any argument my sisters ever had, more ear-piercing than the hocking sounds made by my fifth-grade teacher, more thunderous than a Seaboard freight train when it trundled through town . . . Wooden chairs scraping angrily on cement floors. Customers’ animated conversations and guffaws reverberating off cinderblock walls . . . Flatware and platters clanging into busboys’ bins as they and the wait staff dashed about like running backs seeking holes in a defense.”

And like any good Southerner, Fields brings us home, mystified, as most of us are, by the relationship of the past to the present: “Stretches of U.S. 1 and U.S. 15-501 are now blighted by a sprawl of commercial establishments, stores and restaurants. Attempting a left turn without an illuminated green arrow can be risky business. Traffic planners debate solutions. Meanwhile, at certain times of day, dozens of cars idle, waiting to pass the busiest intersections.”

Fields’ writing is unfailingly lucid, exact, and engaging. What’s not obvious is that he’s worked over his prose until that “worked on” feeling is gone. His many readers will be the beneficiaries of that labor.