Let There Be Pebble: A Middle-Handicapper's Year in America's Garden of Golf

by Zachary Michael Jack

Overview

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. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780803233577
Publisher:	Nebraska
Publication date:	06/01/2011
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	986,419
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d)

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.

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

Editorial Reviews

"Like the author himself, the reader of Let There Be Pebble won't play golf one bit better at the end of the book. But there are enough laughs, and even a few poignant moments in between, to satisfy any golfer."—Jack Shakely, Foreword

Foreword - Jack Shakely

"A combination of history, celebrity-chasing and a few fleeting glimpses behind the "out of bounds" tapes strung around the iconic golf course, this book will not only provide a few laughs but also offer some revealing looks at the folks who make events like the U.S. Open and the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am tournaments function smoothly."Robert Walch, Salinas Californian

Salinas Californian - Robert Walch

"Few courses have spawned as many published words as Pebble Beach. It's unlikely that any writer will ever tackle this subject with the skill displayed by Jack."—Martin Kaufmann, Golf Week

Golf Week - Martin Kaufmann

"There's plenty to satisfy, entertain and prod most golfers to want to read this one on Pebble. . . . An absolute winner!"—Bob Koczor, Golf Today

Golf Today - Bob Koczor

"Every golfer goes through some variation of the mid-life crisis. Not everyone gets to do it on the Monterrey Peninsula. Once the obvious envy is removed from the equation, what's left is an inviting escapade into discovering—through a diverse cast from Michael Murphy and Clint Eastwood to the caddie corps and the author himself—why Pebble and its high-rent environs are always so absorbing, especially in an Open season."—Golf.com

Golf.com

A combination of history, celebrity-chasing and a few fleeting glimpses behind the "out of bounds" tapes strung around the iconic golf course, this book will not only provide a few laughs but also offer some revealing looks at the folks who make events like the U.S. Open and the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am tournaments function smoothly."Robert Walch, Salinas Californian

— Robert Walch

Salinas Californian

Like the author himself, the reader of Let There Be Pebble won't play golf one bit better at the end of the book. But there are enough laughs, and even a few poignant moments in between, to satisfy any golfer.—Jack Shakely, Foreword

— Jack Shakely

Foreword

Few courses have spawned as many published words as Pebble Beach. It's unlikely that any writer will ever tackle this subject with the skill displayed by Jack.—Martin Kaufmann, Golf Week

— Martin Kaufmann

Golf Week

There's plenty to satisfy, entertain and prod most golfers to want to read this one on Pebble. . . . An absolute winner!—Bob Koczor, Golf Today

— Bob Koczor

Golf Today

"Let There Be Pebble immerses the reader in the history, myths and legends of Pebble Beach. Jack lets us hear firsthand from golfers, local historians, employees and former local reporters—even those with contrarian views—while blending in the written history."—Tim Gebhart, Blogcritics

— Tim Gebhart

Blogcritics

“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

Steve Friedman

“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

Rus Bradburd

A golfer's unabashed love letter to one of the world's most spectacular courses.

With the possible exception of Augusta National, home of The Masters, no American golf course is as respected and beloved as Pebble Beach. Located near Carmel-on-the-Sea on California's breathtaking Monterey Peninsula, Pebble's ingenious layout and glorious vistas have permeated the consciousness even of the non-golfing public thanks to TV coverage stretching back to the old Bing Crosby National Pro-Am, which featured the then-novel spectacle of professionals teeing it up alongside celebrities like Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Jack Lemmon and Sean Connery. Confessing to at least a mild case of midlife angst and taking a sabbatical from his professorship, Jack (English/North Central Coll.;What Cheer: A Love Story, 2010, etc.) resolved to spend a year immersed in the honeyed, moneyed milieu of Carmel covering four tournaments: the Wal-Mart First Tee Open, the Calloway Golf Pebble Beach Invitational, the AT&T Pro-Am and the 2010 U.S. Open, hosted by Pebble for a record fifth time. The author dutifully reports the progress and outcomes of each of these tournaments, but his real subjects are the history and idiosyncrasies of Carmel and the course itself, whose fabled difficulty and mystical charm have made it a golfing mecca. On pilgrimage, Jack played the course—for a whopping $500, Pebble is the rare U.S. Open course accessible to the public—and interviewed a wide variety of pros, golf teachers, writers, celebrities, business titans and longtime Carmel residents. He charts his frequently amusing efforts to negotiate on the cheap one of the world's most expensive environments. Too often he affects an annoying, hipsterish tone, but he can turn a memorable phrase—he defines a caddy as "the quintessential wingman"—and occasionally supply arresting insight. After interviewing the course superintendent, he notes that "taking care of a masterpiece would be the most perfect kind of hell." In the end, any sins are forgiven because of Jack's refusal to take himself too seriously and because of the allowances we customarily make for someone who's so obviously in love.

A real-life golf fantasy year, boldly lived and exuberantly told.

Kirkus Reviews