Out on March 26, A Quick Nine Before Dark is a sweetly crafted tale of an obsession with the game from an accomplished North Carolina golf writer
by Stephen Smith

In longtime North Carolina-native golf writer Bill Fields’ A Quick Nine Before Dark, there are no scandals, no shocking moral shortcomings, no vilifications of former friends — just storytelling at its best, with efficient use of descriptive prose. 

Born in Pinehurst in 1959, 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, though his focus on the game waxed and waned until he was a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 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, as 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’ writing is unfailingly lucid, exact and engaging. 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.”

When the occasional somber moment intrudes, it’s handled with grace and thoughtful solemnity, as when Fields learns by phone that his former wife, Marianne, has 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 directly, but with a necessary touch of sentiment: “Life is ragged. Voids linger. Loose ends are everywhere.”

Today, Fields’ work requires him to live in Connecticut, but local readers will recognize familiar places like Knollwood, Foxfire Golf Club and Mid Pines. But even if you’ve never whacked a golf ball, it’s easy to be swept up by Fields’ beautifully crafted prose and the twists and turns of his life as a golf writer.

This article originally appeared in the March 2026 issue of WALTER magazine.