About the Book
It was "scary," Jack Nicklaus said of Pebble Beach, and gave him nightmares so acute he famously woke his wife on the eve of his 1972 U.S. Open victory totally spooked. "It's not a golf course," sportswriter Jim Murray wrote, "it's a hellship." Golf writer Dan Jenkins once joked that the famed venue of the Bing Crosby National Pro-Am should be dubbed "Double Bogey-by-the-Sea."
A one-time failed Division One golf walk-on, Zachary Michael Jack opts to stare down an early midlife crisis by chronicling a U.S. Open year spent at Pebble Beach, object of his ailing father's fantasies and site of the nation's number one public course and its fairy-tale host town, Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. There, along the blue Pacific, he traces the colorful, capricious, and comical world of golf on the Monterey Peninsula as never before via interviews with legends of the game Johnny Miller, Gary Player, and Tom Watson; with today's brightest stars—Padraig Harrington, Phil Mickelson, and Bubba Watson; and with some of its most famous celebrity linksters—actor Bill Murray, Olympic soccer star Brandi Chastain, and billionaire entrepreneur Charles Schwab.
Conducting more than one hundred interviews, Jack ranges far and wide to get the scoop, talking golfing haunts with bestselling golf novelist Michael Murphy; teeing up with members of a Carmel-based worldwide golfing society devoted to mystical play; learning to play Pebble at the knee of one of the Top 50 Golf Teachers in America and with a Carmel-based journeyman pro described as "a golf savant"; and raising a cup with a lifelong Pebble Beach resident and caddy who, unbeknownst to the hackers he shepherds, is a Hall of Fame golfer. By turns hilarious, haunting, and historic, Let There Be Pebble reveals the utter uniqueness—the people, the rich history, the unforgettable setting and sporting culture—of this one-of-a-kind golfing cathedral.
Table of Contents:
1. Then God Created the Heavens and Earth, and Carmel-by-the-Sea, and God Said, "Let There Be Pebble" 000
2. Dark Knights, Great Whites, Dear Young Watsons, Fuzzy Memories, and Felonious Meetings of Land and Sea 000
3. Bill Murray's Cinderella Story Meets Slu-Dog Millionaire's 000
4. Shivas Irons, the Great White Whale, and Golf in the Kingdom of Pebble 000
5. Hitting the Books at Pebble's School of Hard Rocks 000
6. How to Lose Your Pebble Virginity in Eighteen So-Not-Easy Holes 000
7. The Ballad of Bobby Clampett and Casey Boyns 000
8. Where the Bodies Are Buried: Touching Up the Mona Lisa, The Myth of the Fifth, and Other Chilling Tales from Stillwater Cove 000
9. Links, Love, and Lust in the Garden of Eastwood 000
10. Bubba Watson Tweets Cheats; Rickie Fowler Ducks Haircut; Mark Brooks Smokes Field, Fags; and All the Other News That's Fit to Print from Pebble's Other Pro-Am 000
11. Mayors, Millionaires, (Life) Mulligans, and (Re)Morse East of Eastwood 000
12. Swinging in the New Year: High Balls, Catcalls, and Last Calls at Ye Olde Crosby Clambake 000
13. All Shook Up at the at&t National Pro-Am: Son of Iowa Meets Tiger's "Big Brother" Meets Asian King of Rock-and-Roll Meets Hungry Godzillas 000
14. We Are the Major Champions, My Friends: Pebble and Spyglass Hill on AT&T Moving Day 000
15. D. J. Does Valentine's Day: Clint, Climax, and Eye Candy Sunday at the Clambake 000
16. The Boy Wonder, the Bündchen-Brady, the Bathetic Mex, the Bra-Bearer, and the Boomer: Celebrity Rounds at Carmel-by-the-Sea-and-Be-Seen 000
17. Hard, Brown, and Out of Control: U.S. Open Performance Anxiety and Premature Tony Jacklination 000
18. May U.S. Open Winds Be Always at Your Back, May 17-Mile Drive Lay at Your Feet, May Pebble Rise to Meet You 000
Acknowledgments 000
About the Author :
A golf writer and former newspaper sports editor, Zachary Michael Jack has authored or edited more than a dozen books, including the anthology Inside the Ropes: Sportswriters Get Their Game On, available in a Bison Books edition. He teaches literary sportswriting and seminars in sports studies as an associate professor of English at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois.
Review :
"If David Sedaris, Studs Terkel, and George Plimpton got together to write a book about golf they might come up with something as enticing and magical as Let There Be Pebble." - Rus Bradburd, author of Forty Minutes of Hell: the Extraordinary Life of Nolan Richardson "Let There Be Pebble is a book for sports fans and lovers of great writing. Faraway fairways and magical greens, history and thrills, hilarity and woe... Zachary Michael Jack's year next to California's fabled Pebble Beach offers not just a reading of the greens, but a rediscovery of the self." - Steve Friedman, author of The Agony of Victory
