Hometown

Home Again

The World Golf Hall of Fame returns

By Bill Fields

As a 15-year-old, on a Sept. 11 when that date was just another day, I watched the World Golf Hall of Fame get off to a rousing start in Pinehurst. They let us out of school early so we could see President Gerald R. Ford, who had committed to the appearance before his very recent promotion, and a dais full of golf legends as the facility was dedicated and the inaugural class of 13 individuals was inducted. In a subdued dark suit, Ben Hogan looked as if he had stepped out of 1953, but Jack Nicklaus’ red sport coat and wide tie made sure everyone knew it was 1974.

Like the Golden Bear’s attire, the World Golf Hall of Fame would go out of fashion quickly. Exhibits were thin. Honoree bronzes were unattractive. Attendance was sparse. As I knew from working there in 1981-82 and having put out buckets between writing press releases, the roof leaked badly. There were plenty of good intentions and no lack of effort among those involved with the WGHOF over the decades — both in Pinehurst and in St. Augustine, Florida, where it has been situated off Interstate 95 since 1998 — but in both locales it has been the institutional equivalent of a golfer with potential who can’t shoot a number.

The third time just might be the charm.

As announced this summer, the World Golf Hall of Fame is returning to its roots in 2024, when it will become part of the USGA’s Golf House Pinehurst, a 6-acre campus being developed not far from the Pinehurst Resort and Country Club main clubhouse. Fifty years after the hall’s first honorees were inducted a pitch shot away from the fifth tee of the Pinehurst No. 2 course, induction ceremonies will coincide with the 2024 U.S. Open on No. 2. In 2029, when the U.S. Open and U.S. Women’s Open are held in consecutive weeks as they were in 2014, another group of Hall of Famers will get their due.

If things go as planned in the handful of years between those U.S. Opens, the relocated and reimagined World Golf Hall of Fame will have become what many hoped for a long time ago: a secure, vital part of the golf landscape where the past is treasured and shown off in a thorough and distinctive way that makes visitors want to come.

“We look forward to celebrating the greatest moments and golf’s greatest athletes by including the World Golf Hall of Fame as an important part of our Pinehurst home,” said Mike Whan, CEO of the USGA. “Simply put, it just makes sense.”

The Hall of Fame will continue to be an independent organization, part of the World Golf Foundation, and will still administer the induction process. (Who votes, who does or doesn’t get in, and how honorees are categorized remain legitimate, longstanding questions that aren’t answered by the move.)

But the USGA, whose Golf Museum and Library in Liberty Corner, New Jersey, are first-class, will be in charge of day-to-day operations in the new location and will be able to draw upon its huge collection of golf artifacts — some of which never get seen by the public — to beef up what is on display in Pinehurst. The USGA and Hall of Fame will collaborate on digital and interactive content about WGHOF members.

There will never be one, see-everything-important repository in golf, just as there is no single art museum housing all the great works. The USGA’s counterpart across the Atlantic, the R&A World Golf Museum in St. Andrews, possesses many items. Some valuable collectibles are in private hands around the globe. For fans of the guy who wore the garish jacket in ’74, the Jack Nicklaus Museum in Columbus, Ohio, is the place to go. But as someone who occasionally played major championship highlight films on a 16 mm projector to a mostly empty theater in the old Pinehurst facility, the prospect of a fantastic visitor experience in the forthcoming home is enticing.

In an ideal world, the Hall of Fame wouldn’t have begun as a commercial venture, would have been housed in a suitable building instead of a white elephant, and never would have left Pinehurst. In the real world, it’s wonderful to see it coming home.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

Hometown

Blast from the Past

Keeping it cool when the heat is on

By Bill Fields

When I spent my last night in my childhood home — grown, gray and practically groaning from the aches of helping empty its considerable contents over several days — I went to bed upstairs comforted by a familiar sound I knew soon would be only a memory.

It was a hot summer evening, and the noise came from a window air conditioner that had been in the family for nearly 45 years, since I was a teenager. In old age the unit still cooled, even when set to the lowest of its three speeds, a limit mandated by my mother that I usually obeyed even after she was no longer living in the house.

Cranking up the temperature control to 6 or 7 (on a 1 to 10 dial) ensured a chilly output. The aging wonder wasn’t quiet by any means, and when it went through its cooling cycle it was as if the appliance was having a coughing fit before easing back into its customary sound.

Back in 1974 — I recall it arrived on East New Jersey Avenue in the days not long before Richard Nixon departed the White House — and in the following decade before central air was installed, the Sears purchase was situated in the living room and was powerful enough to cool most of the first floor.

That truly was a miracle summer of 20th century innovation. We had acquired cable television not long before, which meant the Atlanta Braves were on almost every night. The local access channel showed an endless loop of National Golf Foundation instructional films. And we could watch the Wilmington, Raleigh or Greensboro stations without having to adjust a finicky antenna.

During several months a year, though, the addition of AC seemed a bigger deal than acquiring cable TV, even to a very sports-minded boy. Shade trees, cold showers or electric fans could only do so much when the temperature soared in August.

I camped out on the carpet not far from the brand-new air conditioner for a couple of nights. Whether asleep or awake, it felt like our family had hit the jackpot because we now had the comfort of a motel room or restaurant at home when it was sweltering. After 18 holes in the heat or a steamy hour mowing the grass, nothing felt better than standing in front of the window unit for a quick, cold blast. Even my father, who liked to park himself shirtless on the back porch with a cold beer on toasty evenings pre-AC, got very used to the manufactured cooling.

A few years later, when I went off to college and a room without air conditioning — my dormitory’s location trumped its creature comforts by a long shot at the start of one semester and the end of the next if it was hot — I missed our AC dearly. My first summer in New York City, a decade later, out of stubbornness and thrift, I didn’t purchase a small window unit during a persistent heat wave and struggled to sleep despite a fan positioned as close to my bed as I could get it.

On trips home, I never had to worry about being too hot. The old reliable window unit was relocated upstairs after the house was equipped with central air. But the new system never seemed adequate for the second floor, making the original AC an important feature on my visits.

As the years went by, I kept expecting the window unit to fail each time I returned during hot weather, but it never did. Perhaps Mom’s speed restrictions had extended its life, or maybe they don’t make ’em like they used to. Like a baseball player closer to the end than the beginning who can still paint the black, it happily and capably pitched a few innings each summer in the week or so I would be in town. That last night home, I woke up with a blanket up to my chin.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

Hometown

Beach Dreams

Catching a wave and a sno-cone

By Bill Fields

The town where I have lived for a long time has lovely public beaches on Long Island Sound. I’m grateful to get a sticker for my car each spring and have access to them. There have been plenty of peaceful, breezy afternoons by the water, and notwithstanding the $75 ticket for parking in a fire lane — the signage wasn’t clear — it is an upside of residing in Connecticut.

That said, these beaches are not “the beach” that I and many of my contemporaries knew growing up. For our family it meant a week away if money wasn’t tight, a long weekend if it was. Our destination for vacation was usually Ocean Drive, with a Cherry Grove or a Windy Hill thrown in every couple of years, all the rental cottages or motels being in the same flip-flop shop region known for a long time now as North Myrtle Beach.

The anticipation of these summer trips can’t be overstated, for they were Christmas without the presents, the journey itself being the gift. If I could relive those days, I wouldn’t change much except sparing my father the annual request to drive all the way to the Gay Dolphin in Myrtle Beach one night during our stay so I could empty my change purse on a plastic shark or rubber gator.

Looking back, Dad had the right idea in floating on his back just beyond the breakers, oblivious to my mother’s worries that he was out too far. We kept closer to shore, always wondering if the wave-riding would be superior with one of the rental rafts than our flimsy dime-store model.

Overall, though, there was about as much envy as sand-free sheets. I got to eat corn dogs and sno-cones and drink all the soft drinks that I wanted. For a year or two I was obsessed with a brand that wasn’t sold in the Sandhills, Topp Cola, and urged Mom and Dad to pick up a supply when they went shopping at the Red & White upon arriving in Ocean Drive.

The culinary highlight every year was dinner — we called it supper — at Hoskins, the seafood restaurant in Ocean Drive that had opened in the late-1940s. The flounder, shrimp and oysters fried there were light and tasty. The hushpuppies were sublime, not as dense as the ones I cranked out on my weekend shifts in the kitchen at Russell’s Fish House. The air conditioning felt great after a day in the sun.

Hoskins was just two blocks from the best place we stayed at the beach, a house owned by Leland and Marquita Daniels. It had a large screened-in area in the middle with bedrooms on one side, and a kitchen and living room on the other. If, after eating at Hoskins, we didn’t go back there for cards or board games, it meant that I had gotten my way and our gang was going to play miniature golf. (I still have a wooden nickel from Jungle Golf on Highway 17 that I sometimes use for a ball marker.)

Most days I would already have gotten in plenty of practice at the Putt-Putt in Ocean Drive, then located right on the oceanfront. For a couple of bucks, you could putt all you wanted until 5 p.m., nirvana for someone whose town didn’t have miniature golf. Years later, I discovered that one of the kids who was spending hours at that same Putt-Putt location around that time was Rick Baird, who in 2011 became one of the rare few to ever ace all 18 holes in a round of Putt-Putt. Our family beach mini-golf games amid the faux tigers and lions were for bragging rights and, for this budding golf nerd, a highlight of the trip, even if I didn’t develop into a world-class putter.

When the car was packed and we were heading away from the ocean, another beach trip over, it felt like watching one of those colored golf balls disappearing down the chute on the 18th hole. For a year, I’d have to put a shell to my ear and listen. PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

Hometown

Golf’s Front Porch

The little magazine that could

By Bill Fields

 

Seventy-five years ago this month, Pinehurst resident Robert Harlow gave golf something, a present that provided pleasure for decades. His creation was Golf World, a weekly publication that would become an important square in the quilt of the game.

Remembering Golf World is personal for me because the magazine was my professional home for nearly a quarter-century.

I wasn’t around for the debut edition — June 18, 1947, which covered Lew Worsham’s U.S. Open victory over Sam Snead — but in two stints I worked in various capacities on more than 800 Golf World issues and was a senior editor when subscribers received their last print copy eight years ago. Current PineStraw editor Jim Moriarty, who like me had a long history with Golf World, wrote the final cover story on Rory McIlroy winning the Open Championship at Royal Liverpool (where, coincidentally, Fred Daly took the Claret Jug during Golf World’s first year).

A couple of days after we put that print edition to bed on a Monday night, positions were eliminated and so was a meaningful chapter of golf history. Those of us who worked there lamented the loss. So did thousands of Golf World readers, many of them avid players or part of the industry, for whom the publication was a pillar in their golf lives.

Harlow called his creation a newspaper when it launched, but soon enough it was seen as a magazine. By any name the publication was golf’s front porch and party line, where people found out what was going on in the game they loved. E. Harvie Ward Jr. of Tarboro was a subscriber. So was a young bank teller and budding golfer in New Zealand, Bob Charles, who discovered the world he one day would join despite the news being weeks late when he received his copy.

You could find Pete Dye in the results of elite amateur events and in tiny advertisements for his services as a golf architect. Philadelphia restaurateur Helen Sigel plugged her establishment and clubmaker Bert Dargie his 7-woods in the one-inch ads. Golf World also got local businesses to advertise, with The Dunes Club promoting “floor shows, excellent cuisine and dancing.” (It couldn’t come out and say it was a little Las Vegas in the longleaf.)

Golf World started small — Harlow, instrumental in the nascent days of the professional circuit in the United States, and his wife, Lillian, formed the early core — and never got very large. Over its first four decades, when it was located in Pinehurst and later Southern Pines, a skeleton staff put out the stories and the scores with help from a network of correspondents around the globe, scribes who made less for their contributions than the pros who tied for 37th in the tournaments they were covering.

Reporters doubled as photographers, and a few of us got competent with a camera. But our skills weren’t always evident, sabotaged as they were by limitations in color separations and printing that could make images appear as murky as Drowning Creek.

Before Golf World got big-time owners — The New York Times Company and later Condé Nast — it didn’t do much live photography. This meant that when someone won in Dallas in the spring, the shot of the victor on the cover was most likely taken a couple of months earlier on a tee with good light and a clean background in Los Angeles. The use of stock pictures was largely harmless, with one notable exception. When T.C. Chen won at Riviera Country Club in 1987, the photograph used on Golf World’s cover was of his older brother, T.M., taken the previous year at the Masters’ par-3 contest.

Given that I took that Kodachrome of T.M. Chen — correctly identified on the slide mount, by the way — I thought of the publishing blunder when the curtain was closed on Golf World in 2014. It made me laugh when I felt like crying. I also considered how much the magazine got right over nearly seven decades and how many readers renewed their subscriptions year after year, grateful that Bob Harlow’s idea was in the mail, with news of the game, of their game. PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

Hometown

Passing of a Friend

When news doesn’t travel as fast as it should

By Bill Fields

To be engrossed in all things golf when I was a teenager during the 1970s meant having your own category of “golf cool.”

Johnny Miller was cool. A Wilson 8802 putter was cool. The opening music for ABC’s U.S. Open television broadcasts was cool. And in my book, so was Jim Boros.

It is a familiar golf name, of course, made famous by Julius Boros, Jim’s uncle, who had three major titles among his 18 PGA Tour victories. Julius represented the Mid Pines Club, as it was then known, for a long time as its touring professional, and his brother, Ernie, was the head pro during the 1960s.

When Ernie needed some help, Jim, who had gotten out of the Air Force, came south from his native Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1966. After several years as a Mid Pines assistant, Jim took a job in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. In 1973, after Quality Inns purchased the resort from the Cosgrove family, Jim returned as head professional.

Jim hired me to park golf carts and clean clubs on weekends and in the summer. I made some money, had access to the wonderful course and got to buy stuff in the shop — All-Star gloves, DiFini slacks — at cost. We played games on the practice green, Jim often wearing the white loafers and white golf shirt he favored most of the year. The preferred competition was putting two balls at each of the green’s 18 holes trying to make the most aces. I had 14 once, but it was never easy to get the better of Jim. He advertised and sold by mail for a couple of bucks a little pamphlet that he called the secret to putting: Apply the most grip pressure with the pinkie and ring fingers of the top hand and the index and middle fingers of the bottom hand.

He was a good player. As a 17-year-old he won the 1960 Connecticut State Junior, defeating an opponent named Bob Palmer in the final. That victory earned him a trophy and a “Boros Beats Palmer” headline over a small story in Golf World magazine that made Jim smile years later.

Savvy about the game, Jim knew that I wasn’t going to develop into a top-level golfer despite my enthusiasm and effort. But he was kind — unless you hit a shank in his presence, which he couldn’t abide — and helpful. He appreciated that I tried to do a good job and sensed I might have a promising future. My dad once passed along a flattering comment that Jim had made to him about me.

It was a little, but confidence-inspiring thing, an assessment that meant more than a golf tip, not that Jim wasn’t good at those too. He was head pro at Mid Pines for a decade prior to taking a similar post at Whispering Pines.

Jim loved a cold beer and a ripe tomato, the latter all the better if it came from his garden, which was a passion. He was low-key, smart, smooth.

Until recently I hadn’t known Jim died at age 77 in May 2020 of cancer that had been diagnosed five months earlier. He was survived by wife Juanita, daughter Lancey, son Scott and four grandchildren.

Jim and Juanita, an Aberdeen native, were married for 55 years, having met at the Capri in Southern Pines, not long after he had moved south to work for Uncle Ernie. Juanita, visiting from Greensboro, and her brother Wilson had come in for a pizza after going to the movies. Jim came over to pay off a basketball bet to Wilson, who had become a friend. It was the best five dollars Jim ever lost, for it was only seven months from their chance meeting to marriage.

Theirs was an enduring love story. After his wife was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1990, Jim retired to support her. I had seen Jim about a decade ago when we played golf at Whispering Pines with his good friends and weekly golf partners Bob Drum and Barry Matey, Barry having worked as an assistant pro under Jim for years.

“We had the best times,” Barry said of his long friendship with Jim when I called him after finding out that Jim had passed away. “He was a classy guy.”

Yes, we did. Yes, he was.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

Hometown

The Spice
of Time

When you see more salt than pepper

By Bill Fields

I got a much-needed haircut recently not long after eye surgery. My vision was limited to the other eye, but that was plenty to notice the clippings on the black cape when the stylist had finished. There was enough white on the cover-up to make it seem as if a polar bear had been in the chair.

Forty years after finding my first gray hair, on my 22nd birthday, there is much more salt than pepper to be swept up after getting a trim. It’s been headed in that direction for two decades, an inexorable journey that, like achy joints after a taxing day, is just part of the landscape when you’re north of 60. As P.G. Wodehouse said, “There is only one cure for gray hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.”

Don’t think for a minute I’m not grateful to have a head mostly full of hair at my age, regardless of its hue. I thank my maternal grandfather, B.L. Henderson, for whom a pocket comb remained a useful stocking stuffer as he made his way into his 90s, if one’s hair prospects are indeed rooted in that part of the family tree.

Plenty of men are dealt a different hand, losing their hair, or most of it, at a relatively young age. The combover can be a comical reaction — see images of former Purdue basketball coach Gene Keady for confirmation. This is the ultimate losing battle, and the willingness of more folks to go the shaved-head route when faced with a bare minimum is a victory not only for style but common sense.

I’m glad I haven’t had to make that decision. A couple of years ago while getting a haircut down South, as I sat down in the chair, I asked the barber if he could do anything about all the gray I could see in the mirror.

“Better to go gray than go gone,” he said.

Those seven words of barber philosophy have become my mantra.

If my father had heard them as he started getting lots of gray as he approached his 50th birthday, he might have avoided his brief hair dye experiment. Something looked different about his appearance as he sat down to supper one evening, but the real evidence was in the bathroom sink — black stains from the hair dye he had applied. We teased him so much that he never altered his appearance again. For the last decade of his life, he let his short flat-top go increasingly toward white, and set against his blue-green eyes it was a very handsome look.

“No play for Mr. Gray” has been a catchy line for Walt Frazier to say in the “Just for Men” television commercials, but I’m not sure how accurate it is.

If someone wants to dye his or her hair to maintain a look that has been theirs for years, more power to them. It’s none of my business. But tell me that singer Emmylou Harris doesn’t look gorgeous these days with that silvery hair of hers, and I’ll wonder what you’re smoking.

When it comes to hair color, I’m leaning toward letting time tell its story.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

Hometown

The Boys of Spring

Toting dreams of breaking par

By Bill Fields

We were a mostly scrawny bunch dressed in sharp collars and loud pants, convinced that with a bit more practice and little more luck, we could be the next Tom Watson. This ignored the fact that most of us on the Pinecrest Patriots boys golf team during the mid-1970s considered breaking 80 an excellent day, but there was no point in letting the facts get in the way of our dreams.

By this time of year, the season would have begun after a couple of weeks of practice. Cool weather wasn’t a problem. If one of those cheap nylon jackets didn’t do the trick, there was always orlon or velour on reserve. My first match during my sophomore year, on March 3, 1975, happened to coincide with my parents’ anniversary. That evening Dad splurged on dinner for the three of us at Cecil’s in the Town and Country Shopping Center. The steak was better than my score, 84.

Pinehurst No. 1 was our home course for practice and matches, and I came to know it well over those years of preparation and competition. I even prepared a rudimentary yardage book in a First Union pocket calendar. There was the fear of the O.B. fence to the right of the opening fairway and the fun of trying to bag an early birdie on the reachable par-5 fourth. In those years No. 1 concluded with a short par-3. Everyone who had finished would gather around the green, a rare gallery that made the 8- or 9-iron shot harder — and the walk to the parking lot longer if you botched it and bogeyed.

Despite my familiarity with the course, the best I shot there — or anywhere else during prep play — was 72 during a match senior year as the team combined for a four-man total of 292, a school record at that point in Pinecrest’s young history. Although we were proud Patriots that particular Monday afternoon, more recent generations would scoff at our scores. Pinecrest’s young men and women have won multiple state titles in recent years, becoming the powerhouse you would have thought prep golfers in a golf-rich area would have been all along.

We made it to the state tournament once, in 1975, which in those years was played at Finley Golf Course in Chapel Hill. Shooting an opening round 89 was bad enough, but that evening, while we were horsing around outside after eating, I got stung by a wasp over my left eye. By morning, it was swollen partly shut, which didn’t help my cause. It is never a good sign when you don’t have enough fingers to signal how many over par you are to a teammate in an adjacent fairway. I played terribly on the front nine, shooting 52.

But the eye started to get better as I made the turn, and I vowed to turn things around to avoid complete embarrassment. Somehow, I did, making three birdies, three pars and three bogeys to shoot an even-par 36 and break 90. If that 16-stroke improvement between front and back isn’t a state record, it must be in the neighborhood.

Golf was not a priority at the school. The football team got a sit-down pre-game meal of steak and potatoes at Russell’s before its Friday night game. Our golf coach stopped the station wagon or van at McDonald’s as we traveled to an away match. As for staying hydrated during a round, we hoped there was a functioning water fountain somewhere on the course.

Two of the courses we played in conference matches — Arabia in Hoke County and Richmond Pines in Rockingham — closed years ago. Others remain, such as Scotch Meadows in Laurinburg and Pinecrest Country Club in Lumberton. Quail Ridge, in Sanford, home to the sectional tournament my sophomore and junior years, is still around. So is the Sanford Municipal Golf Course, site of the sectional in May 1977 during my senior year.

The good form that I’d shown earlier that season was gone by the time we arrived in Lee County trying to advance to the state tourney. I was not going to be the next Tom Watson after all. Our fourth-best score that day as the team successfully advanced was an 85, so I was north of that. I believe I shot 89, or it could have been even higher. My high school golf career ended not with a whimper but to the sound of constant beeping from machinery at the nearby brick company. If the trucks were in reverse, so was my game, at just the wrong time.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

Hometown

One Degree of Separation

And other brushes with greatness

By Bill Fields

The first celebrities I saw in the flesh weighed about 2,000 pounds apiece.

They were the Budweiser Clydesdales, parading down Broad Street in Southern Pines in the 1960s, and they didn’t yield to the left if they didn’t want to. To a 60-pound kid, a one-ton horse seemed as big as a brontosaurus.

My celebrity encounters veered from the equine over the years, but star sightings outside the golf world — on which I’ve reported for four decades — have been few and far between.

Sadly, Meryl Streep never looked forward to commuting on a train to Grand Central Terminal with me as she did as Molly to Robert De Niro’s Frank in Falling in Love. I did get a hello from Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate Michael Dukakis on a 1988 flight to Boston. Friendly, lots of hair, not a lot of height. In a long check-in line at LaGuardia Airport, Chris Farley, in sunglasses and a hoodie, nodded in my direction when we made eye contact. On a flight to London, Robin Givens, sans Mike Tyson, sat a few rows away.

It wasn’t unusual for folks to see Paul Newman out and about in Connecticut. I walked past him once on a sidewalk in Westport, and his eyes were as blue as you thought they were.

Covering a PGA Tour Champions event at Pebble Beach, I needed a few minutes from Bernhard Langer for an interview after his round, which concluded on the ninth hole a long way from the Lodge. Langer asked me to join him in the shuttle van so we could talk during the short ride back to civilization. Clint Eastwood, who had played in Langer’s group, was in the front passenger seat, and seeing an interloper clamber into the vehicle didn’t make his day.

“You can take the next one,” Eastwood said to me.

“Bernhard told me to come with him,” I replied.

“It’s OK, Clint,” Langer interjected.

Eastwood still seemed peeved when we reached the clubhouse. His demeanor to a stranger was much different from that of another Hollywood A-lister, Jack Lemmon, with whom I had crossed paths at a golf tournament at Pebble Beach years earlier. Lemmon was walking his standard poodle across a parking lot and offered a smile and a friendly hello.

Lemmon was a fixture each winter on the Monterey Peninsula, where he tried in vain to make the amateur cut and play on Sunday in the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, the old Bing Crosby Pro-Am. I didn’t expect to see Glenn Frey of the Eagles under the big live oak at Augusta National Golf Club on Masters Wednesday in 1997. But Frey loved golf and was there, in a white caddie jumpsuit, to loop for pal Brad Faxon in the Par-3 Contest. I lament having not seen the Eagles in concert during the band’s heyday, but I got to meet Frey and shake his hand that day.

Two iconic figures in sports and entertainment, John Madden and Betty White, passed away within a couple of days of each other near the end of 2021. Tributes focused not only on how much they accomplished during their respective careers but how well they treated people throughout their long lives. I never met either icon — saw Madden dining in a California restaurant once — but the coverage made me think of the time I met one of my childhood baseball heroes, Brooks Robinson.

Back in the late 1980s, I knew the former Baltimore Orioles third baseman was going to be playing in a celebrity golf event in Florida that I was covering. Once on-site, a lot of people were paying attention to the former New York Jets receiver Don Maynard, a Texan who was teeing it up in shorts and spiked cowboy boots. I prioritized finding the baseball Hall of Famer who had worn No. 5 and won 16 Gold Glove Awards.

If Robinson had grown tired of grown men asking him to sign a baseball while hearing about how he inspired them to play the hot corner in Little League, he sure didn’t show it. He was gracious and genuine, and as he signed the brand-new Rawlings baseball I’d brought along, I was 29 going on 12.   PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

Hometown

The Suds Chronicles

When a cold one comes in downright handy

By Bill Fields

Some people abstain from alcohol during January, but I don’t think I will be one of them this year.

After getting a COVID-19 breakthrough infection in November and isolating at home for 10 days, one of my first stops upon recovering was for a beer in the tap room of my local — and excellent — craft brewery, Aspetuck Brew Lab. Along with the comfort of seeing familiar faces was the welcome taste of my favorite, Turbidity Lucidity, an American IPA.

The brewery says of TuLu that “this citrusy smooth, crushable IPA is capped off with a double dose of dry-hops and Simcoe and Mosaic lupulin power. Citrus-forward and crisp.” I just know that I like it.

The pleasure of that pint, the first I’d had in two weeks or so because I got sick, started me thinking about my beer life. It started with a sly (or so I thought) sampling of my father’s stash. I was 12, and Dad was in the hospital for a few days. While Mom visited him one evening, I built up the nerve to open one of the Budweisers on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. So bitter and unappealing was the taste, I doubt if I consumed 2 ounces of the lager. I poured out the rest and put the empty in the outside trash can. I figured Dad wouldn’t notice there were now four cans in the fridge instead of five.

“I see you’ve been into my beer,” he said upon coming home.

“Didn’t like it,” I replied.

That would change in the ensuing years. I wasn’t much of an underage drinker — Dad being a police officer probably had something to do with that — but sure wouldn’t refuse an occasional beer from a friend when we left the Castle of Dreams disco on Tuesday teen night.

Upon turning 18 in 1977, a couple of friends and I were happy-hour regulars on Fridays at 21 Club on West New Hampshire Avenue in downtown Southern Pines. A cool, dimly lit place on a hot summer evening with $1.50 pitchers of Bud to pour into frosted mugs just about defined high living at that point in our lives.

Quantity trumped quality when it came to beer consumption during college in Chapel Hill, whether at Troll’s, Harrison’s or He’s Not Here. Only the place with the great name has survived the decades, but I’ll always remember a Friday afternoon journalism “class” at Harrison’s with the visiting journalist Tom Wicker. The North Carolina native, UNC graduate and New York Timesman held court for three Heinekens and lots of stories before excusing himself to attend another engagement.

I painfully had (way) more than three beers on a Saturday evening in 1985 in Cincinnati, prior to photographing the final round of the LPGA Championship the next day. Nancy Lopez won the tournament by a whopping eight strokes. My victory was making it through the hot afternoon despite a lethal hangover. It was a valuable lesson for the rest of my years on the golf tournament photography trail: all things in moderation, particularly on Saturday night.

I’ve had beers in the den of Curtis Strange, the first person I knew to have a keg in his home (being on the Michelob staff had its advantages, and there was no doubt he believed in the product). I drank a Rolling Rock on Arnold Palmer’s jet and went to a chicken-and-beer place (it’s a thing) with my South Korean hosts on a business trip there. Working at the Tokyo Olympics last year, our activities were restricted because of the pandemic. Fortunately, there was a 7-Eleven in our hotel complex that wasn’t off limits. A 7-Eleven in Japan is stocked with many items, including different kinds of beer, which wasn’t a bad thing to have on hand while watching Olympic rowing or table tennis at night on the Japanese channels.

That Yebisu tasted much better than the Budweiser I had 50 years earlier.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

 

Photograph by Bill Fields

Hometown

Two Thousand Miles I Roam

Just to make this dock my home

By Bill Fields

I have a modest stash of record albums, LPs that spark memories of people, places and parties. The number of scratches pretty much tells where each ranked on my personal charts, but no visual cues are required to identify the vinyl that meant the most to me.

Glen Campbell’s Wichita Lineman was the first album I owned, and I thought it was 29 minutes of gold. It was released in November 1968, when I was 9 years old. Given that pop culture took the slow train to Southern Pines in those days, I obtained it a bit later.

The love of my first album coincided with my loathing of fourth-grade music and having to learn how to play the recorder. I didn’t like the teacher and couldn’t get the hang of the instrument. The combination caused me to loathe that class to a degree unmatched until calculus came along.

Amid the unpleasantness created by a one-dollar piece of plastic with holes in it, putting Wichita Lineman on the record player was bliss even though there was a lot of melancholy within the lyrics of those 11 songs. Campbell had a beautiful, pure voice and was, as I would learn, a world-class guitarist.

As I listened over and over to the album, Campbell became an obsession, my first outside of sports. If, in the summer of ’69, you’d told me I could meet either Brooks Robinson or Glen Campbell, I might well have chosen the famous Arkansan who didn’t play third base.

My mother and sisters could sing, and the Campbell record convinced me to see if I could, too, although there wasn’t a boys’ choir in America that would have signed me. I made up for the talent deficit with enthusiasm. Santa Claus brought me a TrueTone reel-to-reel tape recorder, affording me a make-believe opportunity to be a sports announcer or, after Campbell’s music became part of my life, recording artist.

I sang the title track plenty of times, but the second song on side one, “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” became my favorite. It was written by soul singer Otis Redding with Steve Cropper and recorded not long before Redding died in a plane crash in December 1967, when he was only 26 years old.

I must have heard Redding’s song played on the radio after it was released in early ’68, but Campbell’s cover was what I tried to mimic. I recorded it on the TrueTone and forced my parents to listen to me perform it live in the living room. I was far from being a lonely child, but Redding’s song of loneliness, sung by Campbell, fascinated me.

When Campbell came to town to play golf in the pro-am preceding the U.S. Professional Match Play Championship at the Country Club of North Carolina in 1971, he was the celebrity I was most eager to see, even though Mickey Mantle and astronaut Gene Cernan also were in the field. Campbell was dressed in yellow and offered a wide smile when I called out from behind a gallery rope before snapping a picture with my Instamatic camera. After the round, he signed my program. I collected many golfers’ autographs that day — Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Julius Boros and Ray Floyd among them — but at home that evening I lingered over the signature of the man whose music had meant so much.

About 20 years or so later, when karaoke had become a thing, I was in an airport hotel in Orlando, having arrived to photograph a story with well-known golf instructor David Leadbetter the next morning. I hadn’t sung outside the shower or alone in my car in years. But it was karaoke night at the Marriott, I knew no one in the crowded bar, and I wanted to sing. There was no doubt about the song.

I was waiting for my turn when I heard a familiar voice. It was my colleague John Huggan, a Scot with standards and opinions. Suddenly, I did know someone in the crowded bar. My plan for off-key anonymity was gone. Huggan and I chatted over a beer as a handful of karaoke performers grabbed the microphone. My name was called. The lyrics scrolled on a monitor but having sung “The Dock of the Bay” over and over as a kid, I could have done it without assistance.

I sang the song. A few people clapped. I warily returned to my barstool.

“You weren’t the worst,” Huggan said.

I considered it high praise  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.