Editor’s note: Bill Fields is a longtime golf journalist, having written for Golf World and freelanced for The New York Times and NBC Sports. “A Quick Nine Before Dark: A Life In Golf,” published by Tatra Press, will be released April 1 and is available for pre-order now. Also, Fields publishes The Albatross on Substack.
No one I knew lived on the grounds of the Country Club of North Carolina, guarded by a gate off Morganton Road and accessible by invitation only, far out of reach of Electrolux salesmen hunting customers and Jehovah’s Witnesses seeking converts. Established in 1963, the private community was an oasis of lush, fertilized turf, flowering shrubs, and sprawling homes belonging to doctors, lawyers, and business executives from across the state who desired an exclusive getaway. There were rumors that the club’s swimming pool was huge and had a high dive. I imagined it being as big as Aberdeen Lake, where we sometimes went swimming, but without an icky bottom.
In 1971, a week before seventh grade began, I had a chance to pass its gates.
The touring pros had come back to town after twenty years, a hiatus begun when Pinehurst pulled the plug on the North and South Open, one of golf’s most important events through the first half of the twentieth century, following the 1951 edition. Their return was prompted by the $200,000 U.S. Professional Match Play Championship on the Dogwood course at CCNC.
Sponsored by the tobacco giant Liggett & Myers, the U.S. Match Play was the brainchild of Joseph C. Dey Jr., commissioner of the PGA Tournament Players Division after many years as executive director of the United States Golf Association. Dey was a tough administrator and a guardian of golf traditions, but he could also think outside the box. During the 1950s, he floated the idea of a U.S. Open contested over two weeks at two locations, one in the East and one in the West, which, not surprisingly, never came to fruition. For professional golf’s homecoming to the Pinehurst area, Dey implemented a novel scheme: sixty-four golfers contesting eighteen-hole matches at medal play. “Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf,” the popular 1960s television exhibition series, had utilized stroke-play matches.
“It is man-to-man golf, one on one,” Dey wrote in advance of the U.S. Match Play. “It is primeval. It is Joe Frazier vs. Muhammad Ali, Marty Liquori vs. Jim Ryun. It is David vs. Goliath, except that the sixty-four players in this field are almost all giants in golf.”
There was a lot of chatter about the pros and cons of the format but having thirsted for the opportunity to see — in person — figures I’d known just through newspapers and television, I was just thrilled the tournament was being held. All the big names were present except for Lee Trevino, the year’s leading money winner, whose banner season had been interrupted by an appendectomy, and Billy Casper, who had gotten sick the previous week.
My mother scored a couple of free tickets for me from someone at the bank where she worked as a teller. I had a pass for Tuesday’s pro-am and Sunday’s championship and consolation matches. Going to the pro-am came with the bonus of getting to see celebrities along with familiar golf names.
Before Mom drove me to CCNC on Tuesday, I scanned the sports pages, where an Associated Press story noted the field “read like a guest list on the old Ed Sullivan television program.” Among the participants were Apollo astronaut Eugene Cernan, former New York Yankee Mickey Mantle, actor Don Knotts, singer Glen Campbell, and jockey Eddie Arcaro.
Being a big fan of “The Andy Griffith Show,” I was delighted that Barney Fife was going to be there. And Campbell — whose “Wichita Lineman” had been the first album I saved up for — was my favorite singer. I played those eleven songs on my phonograph over and over, particularly the title track and Campbell’s cover of “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.” I sang those two songs a lot, sometimes recording myself on my Truetone reel-to-reel, which I also used for my imaginary play-by-play calls of UNC basketball games.
I hopped into the passenger seat of our ’69 Ford Fairlane, my mother at the wheel (and neither of us wearing seatbelts) for the drive to the tournament, where she dropped me off at the spectator gate. With a paper ticket tied with string to a belt loop of my shorts, a blue Bic ballpoint in one pocket for autographs, my Kodak Instamatic in one hand and an orange Thermos of iced tea in the other — a hedge against pricey concessions — I was ready.
I donned my favorite cap — white and sporting a logo. It was my Amana cap, an odd choice for most twelve-year-olds, but not for me. Amana was an Iowa manufacturer of high-end refrigerators and freezers, a brand popular in the kind of homes found at CCNC. Amana’s president, Lou King, figured his brand could get some good exposure by paying professional golfers to display the company’s logo. In the 1960s, when a tour player was shown on television wearing the cap, he got paid twenty-five dollars a shot, the humble origins of athlete as billboard.
For a kid mad about golf, to come into possession of an Amana cap just like those worn by the tour pros was a big deal. I had gotten mine from our next-door neighbor, Dom Scali, who ran the locker room at the Mid Pines Club, a resort Julius Boros first represented in the 1950s. Boros was one of the first players to be paid to sport the Amana shield, and his old club — where his brother, Ernie, and nephew, Jim, later held the head-pro job — was home to one of Amana’s annual corporate outings each spring. When Amana’s customers departed after a week of golf and gin (cocktails and cards), there usually would be goodies left over for Dom’s two children, Donnie and Karen, and me. The gift box included a matchbook-like package of tees and ball marker, a towel with a metal hook and grommet to hang on your bag, a sleeve of balls, and a brochure detailing the company’s appliances. But the highlight was a logoed cap just like the stars wore, with its high crown and metal trimmed eyelet vents, green cloth on the underside of the bill and genuine leather, adjustable closure in back.
Even before the U.S. Match Play, my cap led an adventurous life. After what happened one afternoon earlier that summer while fishing at Badin Lake, I viewed it as a talisman. When my brother-in-law Bill reared back one afternoon to cast his topwater plug off the pier near his cabin, he didn’t see me behind him and the lure’s treble hooks caught my cap and ripped it off my head, sailing it on the end of his monofilament line forty feet into the lake.
After seeing that I wasn’t hurt, Bill reeled in the cap, which fluttered along the lake’s surface like a sick carp, to guffaws all around, even from my mother, who wasn’t one to poke much fun. But this was not something you saw every Sunday afternoon on “The American Sportsman.”
“Look what I caught!” Bill said.
“Yeah, you don’t catch those every day,” I said sarcastically. “We should take a picture for the paper.”
After we pried the lure off, both of us vowing to watch ourselves more carefully, I left my prized possession to dry in the sun by the minnow bucket, convinced it had saved me from at best a couple of stitches and at worst an adulthood of looking like a pirate. Except for a couple of tiny holes where the hook had set, the cap was still fit for the course.
I didn’t wear my Amana cap every day, because I feared wearing it out. I couldn’t wear it to church because my mother wouldn’t let me. But I was convinced I could swing a club better if it were covering my crew cut.
Forget Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus. Because of his North Carolina ties, the slow-poke, honeyed tempo of his swing, and the fact that he had won major championships 16 years apart, Boros was my hero. His golf instruction book was aptly titled Swing Easy, Hit Hard, one of my most revered allowance-eating purchases from The Country Bookshop. The primer was a more highly regarded part of my bookshelf than even my paperback copy of The Nine Bad Shots of Golf and What to Do About Them. And, considering it promised to cure hooking, slicing, pushing, pulling, topping, sclaffing, smothering, shanking, and skying the ball, my preference for Boros’s volume said a great deal.
Boros and Campbell were my primary targets that pro-am day at CCNC, where I joined a few thousand other fans sampling big-time golf in our small town. The pairing sheet provided the starting times for the pros and their amateur partners, a course map, and spectator “tips” that sounded like orders. Stay behind the ropes. Don’t be a litterbug. Do not run. Kneel if you are in front of a large crowd. Don’t attempt to talk to the players on the course.
It didn’t take me long to break the last rule. Campbell, in yellow slacks and a cream shirt, was playing with Bobby Nichols, the 1964 PGA champion and someone I recognized from the CBS Golf Classic. As Campbell walked down the second fairway not far from the gallery rope, I called out his name. He turned toward me, smiling, and I snapped his picture. One mission accomplished.
I had seen club professionals and elite amateurs hit shots before but seeing the tour pros in the flesh for the first time convinced me they were from another planet. The outsized leather golf bags with their embroidered names bespoke fame. Even guys whose careers weren’t much more than agate-type specks in the back of the sports section looked like they knew what they were doing. The insouciant way they reached for a tee or neatly folded their glove into a rear pocket before putting (four fingers, and four fingers only, showing) was fluid, as if they’d been doing it forever.
It was a hot late-summer day, the air thick and clingy. When I felt the urge to cool off, I veered away from the play and deeper into the shade of the pines for a few minutes. Homes with big back yards lined the course. A German shepherd loitered behind a fence at one. There were two swing sets at another, and I saw my first trampoline at a third. CCNC kids were doing just fine.
I gathered a score of autographs from pros and celebrities alike, some of their signatures skipping a letter or two on the slick surface of the tournament-program cover, this being well before the advent of Sharpies. Palmer’s autograph was strong and clear — big “A”, big “P”, totally legible — and for months afterward I would try to duplicate it. Campbell also wrote his name so I could read it.
My day was made whole, though, when, after following Boros for a while, I settled close to the tee of the eighth hole, a par three of 221 yards, I crouched right by the gallery rope for a good look. He whistled a long iron toward the green, with that powerful sound only the pros could produce. While waiting for his amateur partners to tee off, Boros seemed to single me out in the small gaggle of spectators. He walked in my direction. As he neared, I craned my neck to focus on the suntanned face and friendly smile beneath his Amana hat.
“Where’d you get that cap?” he asked me, in a manner as smooth as his swing.
“Mr. Scali over at Mid Pines gave it to me,” I said.
“You know Mid Pines, do you?”
“Sure,” I said. “I even get to play there once in a while.”
“Well, you keep hitting ’em straight.
I made phantom swings walking to the green, convinced our conversation was going to help my tempo.
At some point during the day, I broke my mother’s Thermos, the glass liner rattling around as if it were filled with ice cubes. When Mom pulled up to collect me at the appointed time, she wasn’t happy with the news. But it didn’t take long for me to change the subject. I started telling her about interacting with the man who sang “Wichita Lineman” and showed her the program and its collection of autographs.
“There’s Gene Littler, and there’s Bobby Nichols and there’s Arnold Palmer,” I jabbered, pointing at my treasure.
Then I took off my cap.
“And I saw Julius Boros — he talked to me! He asked me where I got my cap.”
It was a happy evening. I sang off-key to my Glen Campbell record and removed the roll of film, which I would take to the drug store for processing the next day. Before I fell asleep, I read a bit from Swing Easy, Hit Hard and wondered if anybody would ever pay me twenty-five dollars to advertise for Amana. I replayed in my mind the crisp sound of Boros’s iron shot on the eighth hole, the acoustics of a grown-up expert golfer that one day I hoped to produce myself.
Time crawled by between Tuesday night and Sunday morning, when I knew I would be returning to the U.S. Match Play. I listened to tournament updates on our local AM radio station, WEEB, and read about the action in the Greensboro paper. Two superstars, Nicklaus and Gary Player, were upset on Wednesday, during a first round in which only the No. 2-ranked Palmer advanced among the top five seeds.
Nicklaus lost his opening match to Raymond Floyd, who grew up in nearby Fayetteville and enjoyed a lot of gallery support. His fans had much to cheer for, as he was five under through five holes on his way to shooting 67 to Nicklaus’s 69. Player lost to Homero Blancas on the third extra hole after each shot 71.
“This is an all-star cast, and it is not likely to produce the volume of so-called upsets that used to bedevil the PGA of America’s championship when it was at match play,” Dey had predicted, a forecast that had been proven wrong after day one.
By the time I tuned into ABC Sports’ Saturday afternoon coverage of the semifinal matches, the field had mostly been stripped of its marquee names. Floyd, Boros, and Littler were ousted in the Round of 16. Palmer lost in the quarterfinals Saturday morning, shooting 72 to Australian Bruce Crampton’s 69.
The Sunday lineup of DeWitt Weaver vs. Phil Rodgers playing for the title and Crampton against Ken Still for third place wasn’t exactly what I — and the tournament organizers — had hoped for. By the time ABC came on the air for a truncated broadcast (the rule in those days), Weaver led Rodgers by seven, eventually shooting 71 to Rodgers’ 77 to claim his first PGA Tour win.
Despite the journeymen and lack of drama, I enjoyed my second walk around the CCNC course. It was a breakthrough victory for Weaver, a strong, athletic player and one of the game’s longer hitters. When I read afterward that he had been a backup quarterback to Don Meredith in college at SMU, it came as no surprise. I was taken aback, however, to discover in David Lamm’s Greensboro Daily News story that the gray-haired surprise champion was just thirty-one. I knew golf was difficult, but perhaps it was even harder than I thought.
Excerpted from A Quick Nine Before Dark: A Life in Golf with permission from the publisher, Tatra Press. Copyright © 2026 by Bill Fields
