Read the beginning of Chapter 1 from Let There Be Pebble: A Middle-Handicapper's Year in America's Garden of Golf by Zachary Michael Jack:

"When I announced to my coworkers I would be taking a “professional leave” from teaching to spend a U.S. Open year on the storied fairways of Pebble Beach, they looked at me as if I’d taken leave of something else: my senses. They’re intellectuals, teachers all, and not one of them an avid golfer.

I am going to Pebble for a year, and not just any year, but a year culminating in its hosting of the U.S. Open on the tenth anniversary of Tiger Woods’s unprecedented 15-shot drubbing of the field in 2000, a year in which Pebble will host bigger, better professional men’s golf events than at anytime in its celebrated history. I am going to live by, and tee it up on, the beautiful beast Dan Jenkins once dubbed “Double Bogey-by-the-Sea,” the track about which Jim Murray once wrote, “It’s not a golf course, it’s a hellship.” I, a former failed walk-on for my state university’s golf team, will roll in the hay with the layout that eventual winner Jack Nicklaus described in 1972 as “scary”—and that gave him nightmares so acute he confessed to waking up his wife for consolation.

I am going to Pebble, I suspect, as part and parcel of an early middle-age crisis. Not the Porsche-buying, romp-with-your-intern kind, though Pebble is the Porsche of golf—a brand ranked by the Robb Report as one of the top thirty of all-time, alongside Ferrari, Rolls Royce, Mercedes Benz, Sotheby’s, and Louis Vuitton. No, my middle-age crisis, if that’s what beast this be, is something far quieter and hinges on a simple, inarguable fact: I’ve reached the precise age of my father when his son, yours truly, first swung a pitching wedge."