Hometow n By Bill Fields

The Boys of Spring

Tot ing dreams of breaking par

By Bil l Fiel dS We were a mostly scrawny bunch dressed in sharp collars and loud pants, convinced that with a bit more practice and little more luck, we could be the next Tom Watson. This ignored the fact that most of us on the Pinecrest Patriots boys golf team during the mid-1970s considered breaking 80 an excellent day, but there was no point in letting the facts get in the way of our dreams.

By this time of year, the season would have beg un af ter a couple of week s of practice. Cool weather wasn’t a problem. If one of those cheap nylon jackets didn’t do the tr ick, there was a lways orlon or velour on reser ve. My first match dur ing my sophomore year, on March 3, 1975, happened to coincide w ith my parents’ anniversar y. T hat evening Dad splurged on dinner for the three of us at Cecil ’s in the Tow n and Countr y Shopping Center. T he steak was bet ter than my score, 84.

Pinehurst No. 1 was our home course for practice and matches, and I came to k now it well over those years of preparation and competition. I even prepared a r udimentar y yardage book in a First Union pocket ca lendar. T here was the fear of the O.B. fence to the r ight of the opening fair way and the f un of tr y ing to bag an early birdie on the reachable par-5 four th. In those years No. 1 concluded w ith a shor t par-3. Ever yone who had finished would gather around the g reen, a rare ga ller y that made the 8 - or 9-iron shot harder — and the wa lk to the park ing lot longer if you botched it and bogeyed.

Despite my familiar it y w ith the course, the best I shot there — or any where else dur ing prep play — was 72 dur ing a match senior year as the team combined for a four-man tota l of 292, a school record at that point in Pinecrest’s young histor y. A lthough we were proud Patr iots that par ticular Monday af ter noon, more recent generations would scof f at our scores. Pinecrest’s young men and women have won multiple state titles in recent years, becoming the powerhouse you would have thought prep golfers in a golf-r ich area would have been a ll a long.

We made it to the state tour nament once, in 1975, which in those years was played at Finley Golf Course in Chapel Hill. Shooting an opening round 89 was bad enough, but that evening, while we were horsing around outside af ter eating, I got st ung by a wasp over my lef t eye. By mor ning, it was swollen par tly shut, which didn’t help my cause. It is never a good sig n when you don’t have enough fingers to sig na l how many over par you are to a teammate in an adjacent fair way. I played ter r ibly on the f ront nine, shooting 52.

But the eye star ted to get bet ter as I made the t ur n, and I vowed to t ur n things around to avoid complete embar rassment. Somehow, I did, mak ing three birdies, three pars and three bogeys to shoot an even-par 36 and break 90. If that 16 -stroke improvement bet ween f ront and back isn’t a state record, it must be in the neighborhood.

Golf was not a pr ior it y at the school. T he footba ll team got a sit- dow n pre-game mea l of steak and potatoes at Russell ’s before its Fr iday night game. Our golf coach stopped the station wagon or van at McDona ld ’s as we traveled to an away match. A s for stay ing hydrated dur ing a round, we hoped there was a f unctioning water fountain somewhere on the course.

Two of the courses we played in conference matches — A rabia in Hoke Count y and R ichmond Pines in Rock ingham — closed years ago. Others remain, such as Scotch Meadows in L aur inburg and Pinecrest Countr y Club in L umber ton. Quail R idge, in Sanford, home to the sectiona l tour nament my sophomore and junior years, is still around. So is the Sanford Municipa l Golf Course, site of the sectiona l in May 1977 dur ing my senior year.

T he good for m that I’d show n earlier that season was gone by the time we ar r ived in L ee Count y tr y ing to advance to the state tour ney. I was not going to be the next Tom Watson af ter a ll. Our four th-best score that day as the team successf ully advanced was an 85, so I was nor th of that. I believe I shot 89, or it could have been even higher. My high school golf career ended not w ith a whimper but to the sound of constant beeping f rom machiner y at the nearby br ick company. If the tr uck s were in reverse, so was my game, at just the w rong time. PS

South er n P in e s n at ive Bill Fi el d s, wh o w r it e s about golf an d oth er things, m o ve d n or th in 1986 b ut h a sn’t l ost his a ccent.

The Lost Treasure of Home

Jon as Pat e an d his r un away hit O uter Bank s

By Wil e y Ca Sh While there is plenty

of myster y in the breakout Netflix smash hit Outer Banks — ever ything from a father lost at sea to a legendar y treasure — the myster y that director and co-creator Jonas Pate seems most intent on exploring is the age-old myster y of what divides people along class lines. It worked for Shakespeare with his Montagues and Capulets, and 370 or so years later it worked again for Bernstein’s and Sondheim’s Jets and Sharks. Pate’s rival groups are similarly aged, sun-kissed teenagers living and partying along North Carolina’s Outer Banks, where a group of working class kids known as the “Pogues” continually find themselves marginalized and dismissed by the “Kooks,” who are the children of wealthy residents and seasonal tourists. Fists and hearts certainly fly, but despite the show’s use of cliffhangers and action-packed sequences, at its core Outer Banks investigates the emotional and experiential threads that pull some of us together across class lines while invisible barriers push others of us apart.

According to Pate, the divide bet ween the haves and the have nots is “the oldest stor y in the world. It cuts across ever ything,” which he believes explains the show’s broad appeal.

Broad indeed. In the late spring of 2020, just as the people of the

world were settling into the pandemic and the realization that they did not want to see or hear another word about Tiger King and Joe Exotic, Outer Banks debuted in mid-April and quick ly became one of Netflix’s most watched shows of the year. T he following summer, the show’s second season hit No. 1 on the Nielsen repor t. T he success seemed immediate, and the show’s slick production qualit y made it all appear as easy and rela xed as a day on the water, but Jonas Pate and his t win brother, Josh, with whom he created Outer Banks along with Shannon Burke, had spent their whole lives preparing for this moment.

T he Pate brothers grew up in R aeford, Nor th Carolina, where their father ser ved as a judge and their grandfather owned a local pharmacy. “It was amazing,” Jonas says. “It was like Mayberr y. I’d ride my bike to the pharmacy and get a Cherr y Coke and a slaw dog, and then I’d visit my dad at the cour thouse. My stepmom was head of parks and recreation, so I’d go over there and help ref T-ball games.”

We are sitting on the second-stor y porch of the home he shares with his wife, Jennifer, and their t wo teenage children in Wilmington, just across the water f rom Wrightsville Beach. T he Januar y morning is unseasonably warm and sunny, and Jonas is dressed as if he just stepped of f the set of Outer Banks, not as its director but as one of its stars. (How handsome is Jonas Pate? A few days later, our 5 -year-old daughter will walk past Mallor y’s computer while she is editing photos of Jonas. She will stop in her tracks and ask, “W ho is that?”)

Jonas’ surfer appeal is not surprising considering that while he primarily grew up in R aeford and attended high school there, he spent his summers with his mother along the barrier islands near Charleston. “Outer Banks is an amalgam of dif ferent high school environments and things that we went through,” he says. “It helped create the mythical environment of Outer Banks where we k ind of knew what it was like to live feral in a small town with haves and have-nots. K iawah and James Island were like that. It was poor k ids and rich k ids, and they would get into fights. And R aeford is still ver y r ural.”

Rural, yes, but Jonas and Josh still found plent y to keep them busy. If they were not exploring the marshes and water ways of f the coast of Charleston, then they were shooting homemade movies back in R aeford, where they made films of Robin Hood and Hercules and edited them by using two V HS machines. He laughs at the memor y of it. “The cuts were terrible and f uzzy,” he says, “and all the special ef fects and sound were awf ul.” But he admits that something felt and still feels magical about it. He had always loved film, especially those by Steven Spielberg and Frank Capra, saying that he has “always been drawn to filmmakers who are a little sweeter and have a little more heart.”

Af ter college, the brothers found that they still had the desire to make films, but they did not know how to break into the industr y. “We didn’t know anyone in the film business,” he says. “We didn’t know anything.”

T he brothers moved to New York and worked to immerse themselves in the cit y’s film culture. W hile interning at the Angelika Film Center, Josh met Peter Glatzer, who was a f undraiser for the Independent Feature Project. T hey talked about screenwriting, and the Pate brothers soon had a script that Glatzer was interested in producing. T heir first film, The Grave, was shot in eastern Nor th Carolina, and while it did not receive a theatrical release and went straight to video af ter premiering on HBO, the Pate brothers had their collective foot in the door. In 1997, they made another Nor th Carolina-shot film with Glatzer, The Deceiver, that starred Tim Roth and Renée Zellweger, and it found a larger audience af ter debuting at the Venice Film Festival and being distributed by MGM. T he brothers headed for L os Angeles.

O nc e t here, Jona s found h imself “t a k ing jobs just to pay t he

bi l ls” a nd “get t ing f ur t her a nd f ur t her away f rom what I ac t ua l ly wa nte d to do.” O ne br ig ht sp ot of h is t ime in L A wa s me et ing h is w ife, Jenn ifer, who a lso worke d in t he indust r y a s a c a st ing agent. Not long a f ter t hey met , Jenn ifer st ar te d her ow n agenc y, a nd Jona s went to her for a ssist a nc e in c a st ing h is first telev ision show, Go o d vs. Ev il, in 1999. From t here he went on to d ire c t a nd pro duc e a numb er of telev ision shows, includ ing t he N BC shows Decept ion a nd Pr im e Su spect a nd A BC ’s Bl o o d an d O il. In 20 05, t he Pate brot hers par t nere d aga in a nd ret ur ne d to Nor t h Carol ina, where t hey fi lme d a single se a son of t he telev ision show Sur fa ce, wh ich t hey c o - cre ate d. A f ter hav ing k ids, Jona s a nd Jenn ifer de cide d to move back to Nor t h Carol ina in t ime for t heir son a nd daug hter to at tend h ig h scho ol. Jona s sudden ly found h imself on t he ot her side of t he c ount r y f rom t he indust r y he had de vote d h is l ife to for t he pa st 20 ye ars.

But then something mag ica l hap pened. Jonas understood t wo things: First, he needed to create something that could be shot on the coast so he could stay close to home. Second, he would draw f rom his ow n exper iences to make it rea l. “W hen I pulled f rom my ow n life instead of the mov ies I’d seen, it a ll came together,” he says. “You get to the universa l by being super specific.”

One big cha llenge that Jonas and his team encountered was casting the show’s young stars. “We auditioned maybe 50 0 or 60 0 k ids, and we rea lly had to tr y to find k ids who’d been outside and lived in the outdoors.” Not sur pr isingly, g iven the Pate brothers’ persona l ties to the show’s geog raphy, nearly ever y star they cast was f rom the South, except for one who hailed f rom A lask a. “Grow ing up outside, being around boats,” Jonas says, “it’s hard to fake that st uf f, and it’s hard to make it look rea l if it’s not.”

I turn of f the recorder and Mallor y packs up her photography gear, and we say our goodbyes to Jonas. He is leaving soon for another production set. We share a number of mutual f riends in Wilmington with him and Jennifer, and we talk about getting together for dinner once he returns.

Mallor y and I are alone in the driveway when I realize that I have locked the keys in our car. To say that I was embarrassed — and, let’s be honest, panicked — would be an understatement. Mallor y pulled out her phone and began searching for a locksmith. I have a flip phone, so I just stood there, weighing the t wo most logical options: break ing the window with one of Jonas’ landscaping rocks or just leaving the car and walk ing home, denying it was ever ours.

I cannot help think ing that if I were John B., the star of Outer Banks and leader of the Pog ues, played by Chase Stokes, I would sneak into a neighbor’s garage and hot wire their car, drive home, procure a backup set of keys, and return for Mallor y while passing under the investigating deput y’s nose. Or, if I were Topper, the leader of the Kooks, played by Austin Nor th, I would bang on Jonas’ door and use his phone to call my father’s car ser vice. But I am neither of these characters. I’m just me, so I apologize again to Mallor y, and we wait for the locksmith together. PS Wil e y Ca sh is th e Alumni Auth or-in -Re si d en ce at th e Universit y of Nor th Carolin a A sh ev ill e. His n ew n o vel, W hen Ghost s C ome Home, is avail abl e wh erever bo ok s are sol d.