FAIRFIELD, CONNECTICUT | Bill Fields has told some good stories in a professional writing career that began more than four decades ago as a sports reporter for the Athens Banner-Herald in Georgia and included distinguished stints as a senior editor first at Golf Illustrated magazine and then Golf World.
Such as the lengthy profile he produced on a 15-year-old Tiger Woods shortly after the teenager had won his first U.S. Junior Amateur, spending the better part of two days with the lad and his father, Earl, at their Cypress, California, home and the nearby Navy Golf Course – and receiving what today seems like almost inconceivable access to the future golf star.
And the one Fields later wrote on Sam Snead after playing 18 holes with the then 84-year-old Hall of Famer – and losing a $20 bet to the Slammer in the process.
As for the journalist’s personal favorite, that was an article on Arnold Palmer that entailed flying around the country with the King on his Citation jet, Arnie himself at the controls.
“The story was fine,” recalled Fields, who was born in Pinehurst, North Carolina, in 1959, the youngest of three children, and raised in the nearby town of Southern Pines. “But the experience was so much better.”
Then, there were all those articles he wrote off the hundreds of golf tournaments he covered through the years – and many of the photographs he took along the way. Performing those tasks on the same assignments was akin to being a one-man band, and few people ever did that as deftly as Fields. The fact that he won prestigious prizes as both a writer and a photographer speaks to that. So does his receiving the PGA of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism in 2020.
“To be able to write about the game I love for so many years has been an absolute joy,” said Fields, whose voice retains something of a Southern lilt to it even though he has lived in Connecticut for several decades. “And I’d like to think I did it at a high level.”
A couple of years ago, he decided to write about an altogether different subject – himself. And that has led to the publication of a memoir that is part coming-of-age story and part homage to golf, highlighting his experiences around the game as a journalist while mixing in some affecting personal reveals, among them the author’s account of learning how his late father, Gene, was abandoned as a baby, left in a box in the middle of a road outside Pinehurst and found in December 1920 by a local man who considered raising the child but later gave up on that idea. The local couple who ended up adopting the boy and raising him were named William and Chattie Fields.
“I knew my father had been adopted,” said the now 67-year-old Fields of the man who would go on to become a police officer as well as a cherished golf buddy before dying of throat cancer in 1980 at just 59 years old. “But I had no idea of the circumstances behind that. And he never knew who his biological parents were.”
It’s a wonderful read and arguably the best story he has ever told.
Titled “A Quick Nine Before Dark,” the book tells the tale of Fields the younger growing up in what he calls the “RC Cola South” and how he fell in love first with writing and soon after golf, eventually combining those passions to tell people in the most interesting ways about the game and the people who were a part of it.
It’s a wonderful read and arguably the best story he has ever told.
Now a contributing researcher for NBC Sports who works a dozen or so golf tournaments for the network each year, Fields started thinking about a memoir a couple of decades ago.
“I drafted a couple of chapters in a writing workshop but didn’t really do much beyond that,” he said.
But Fields started to give the idea more thought after finding out about his father’s origins – and after his bank-teller mother, Juanita, passed away in 2019 at the age of 95. After connecting with Chris Sulavik, the publisher of Tatra Press in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, and signing a contract in the fall of 2024 to write the book, Fields went at it whole hog.
“I finished the manuscript, all 75,000 words, in August 2025,” he said. “It was a very busy 10 months, but I was motivated and wanted to see it happen.”
The stories of his youth brought me happily back to my own even though we grew up in very different places. The days playing outside with your friends. The times playing different sports.
“Life for a boy in those days was a perpetual series of games, powered by Kool-Aid and grilled cheese and governed by our imaginations, halted only at darkness by the summoning shouts of mothers or fathers from first one house and then another, a chorus of parental calls,” he wrote. “Dreaming didn’t cost a penny.”
One of the dreams Fields often had back then was becoming a good golfer.
“I absolutely loved golf,” he recalled. “I played a lot of baseball and basketball as a kid. Football, too. But I really gravitated to golf. I got my set of clubs when I was 10 years old and grew up playing the nine-hole Knollwood Fairways course in Southern Pines and at the Mid Pines Inn & Golf Club, where I worked as a golf cart attendant on weekends and during the summer. I tried to become a good player and put a lot of time into it as a teenager. But something kept me from getting better than shooting 72 or 73 on occasion. I only broke 70 once, when I was 19.”
He has [written] with great skill and verve, entertaining and enlightening those of us who love the game along the way.
“Still, I had a lot of fun with golf, especially after I introduced my father to the game,” Fields added. “I played with him a lot in my teens.”
Fields also had a lot of fun writing about it and other games as the sports editor of the University of North Carolina’s student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel. And he continued doing that once he graduated from UNC in 1981 with a B.A. in journalism. There was that job at the Banner-Herald in Athens from 1982-1983 and then a gig of a similar duration at the Asheville Citizen in North Carolina. From there, Fields worked as an associate editor at Golf World for a couple of years and then as a senior editor and staff photographer for Golf Illustrated from 1986-1991. He freelanced as both a writer and photographer for a spell after that publication closed in 1991 before rejoining Golf World in 1993, remaining there as its senior editor through July 2014, when it, too, stopped publishing.
As had been the case at other times in his career, Fields once again found ways to make ends meet once Golf World went away as he also kept telling stories about the game. For NBC Sports, to be sure, and also The New York Times, the Met Golfer, Golf Digest and both Masters.com and The Masters Journal. And he has done so with great skill and verve, entertaining and enlightening those of us who love the game along the way.
“A Quick Nine Before Dark” is just the latest example of that creative compulsion.