It was "scary," Jack Nicklaus said of Pebble Beach, which 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-bythe- 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, 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, Jack traces the colorful, capricious, and comical world of golf on the Monterey Peninsula as never before via interviews with, among others, legends of the game Johnny Miller, Gary Player, and Tom Watson; with today's brightest starsoPadraig Harrington, Phil Mickelson, and Bubba Watson; and with some of its most famous celebrity linkstersoactor Bill Murray, Olympic soccer star Brandi Chastain, and billionaire entrepreneur Charles Schwab.
By turns hilarious, haunting, and historic, Let There Be Pebble reveals the utter uniquenessothe people, the rich history, the unforgettable setting and sporting cultureoof this one-of-a-kind golfing cathedral.
