The History of Pinehurst No. 2 (Great Courses 6) - podcast episode cover

The History of Pinehurst No. 2 (Great Courses 6)

May 31, 20241 hr 3 minEp. 554
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Episode description

For the sixth installment of our Great Courses series, historian Lee Pace joins Garrett for a deep dive into the history of the Pinehurst Resort and Donald Ross's Pinehurst No. 2 golf course. Lee and Garrett discuss the origins of James Walker Tufts's retreat in the unpromising environs of the North Carolina Sandhills, how golf was introduced to Pinehurst, and Ross's influence on the development of several excellent courses at the resort. They also detail the evolution of the No. 2 course's architecture, from its earliest iteration in 1907, to the introduction of Bermudagrass greens in the mid-1930s, to Coore & Crenshaw's restoration in the early 2010s. Lee and Garrett finish with descriptions of a few of No. 2's key holes.

Check out Lee Pace's 2012 account The Golden Age of Pinehurst as well as his most recent book Good Walks.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Speaker 1

I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset. When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset. And when I find my ball in a bride egg Friday Egg, the dreaded Frida egg, Frida Egg, fridagggg Frida Egg bride egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the hump course. Welcome to the Friday Egg Golf Podcast. I'm Garrett Morrison, and today we're talking about the history of the Pinehurst Resort and the Pinehurst Number two golf course.

As you probably know, the US Open is going to be held at Pinehurst Number two in a couple of weeks, so I thought now would be a good time to start discussing this extremely fascinating golf course. My guest is Lee Pace. Lee is a prolific author who specializes in the history of golf clubs and golf course architecture. He has written multiple books about Pinehurst, including The Golden Age

of Pinehurst, which was first published in twenty twelve. So if it's the history of Pinehurst that you want to talk about, Lee Pace is your guy. This episode, by the way, is the sixth installment of our Great Courses series. We've also done episodes on Augusta, National Royal Melbourne, the Old Course, National Golf Links and Sunningdale, so I encourage

you to check those out as well. Now, if you're a fan of this kind of deep dive into golf history and golf course design, I can just about guarantee that you would enjoy what we're doing in Club TFE. Club TFE is Frida Egg Golf's membership. It's one hundred and twenty dollars a year and with that you get a lot of benefits, including early access to Fridagg Golf events and an ongoing discount in the pro shop. But we're especially proud of the exclusive content that we're offering

in CLUBTFE on the member site. This includes course profiles, which have in depth analyzes of great golf courses, along with beautiful photo tours and illustrations. We also have regular features like Design Notebook and Tour Guide which keep you up with what's going on in the worlds of golf, architecture and professional golf, respectively. We think this is a unique offering, something that you'd have a hard time finding elsewhere, and the reason we're able to do it is because

of support from our members. As my colleague Brendan poor Ath likes to say, we're not out here buying yachts with CLUBTFE membership fees. We are using this support to fund the kind of content that we believe our core audience really wants. So if you're interested in CLUBTFE and in supporting Frida Egg Golf, go to the Frida Egg dot com slash membership and see what it's all about. All right, let's get to Lee Pace. Lee Pace, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for being here.

Speaker 2

Oh great to be here, Garrett, heard you often and look forward to talking about Pinehurst.

Speaker 1

So I'd like to start by talking about the founding of Pinehurst, just going right to the beginning. I've heard you say before, and I've seen you right before, that the appearance of a resort in this setting in the sand hills of North Carolina was kind of a fluke. What do you mean by that?

Speaker 2

Well, I do quite a number of after dinner talks in and around Pinehurst, and I like to start by saying, you know, this is the accidental resort or the coincidental resort, depending on how you parse accident and coincident. But there is not one good reason for Pinehurst to be here, for it to exist, absolutely none. You can parse it till doomsday and not come up with a good reason for it. It was just a series of coincidences of

happenstance that had made it all occur. Golf was not part of the original equation dating back to the mid eighteen nineties when James Tufts, who was from Boston, wanted to create a wintertime health resort for people like himself who were frail of health, and he was actually conceived as a sanitarium for consumptives, and golf was not a

part of the equation. The truth is that Kiowa has more stake in being Pinehurst than Pinehurst does because Kia was was just down the coast from Charleston, where there is documented proof that golf clubs arrived in the Bay of Charleston in seventeen thirty nine, and there was a golf club in Charleston by seventeen eighty six. Of course they didn't exist, but so something a golf resort along

the sea in the eighteen hundreds. You could understand bob or if it was in an urban area, or if it was alonger River, or if it had happened in Asheville, which was a summertime escape from all the heat in the South. You could understand that. But James Tuff's happened to learn about five thousand acres in this arid area of North Carolina that was not close to anything. And in fact, if you look at some of the photos in the Carolina Hotel of the early days of Pinehurst,

it was but ugly. I mean, there was nothing attractive, nothing, no esthetics at all. But this is where he decided to create a new England style village. Imported the many of the plants, the grass, built the village and it was only two years into it that when some of his guests started bringing their own golf clubs and balls and started hitting balls throughout the dairy fields and the peach orchards that the idea for golf was originally conceived.

So that's just one of the coincidences and one of the pieces of happen stamps. And then of course Donald Ross's arrival was yet enough.

Speaker 1

Who was James Walker Tufts.

Speaker 2

He was a man who made his fortune in the apothecary business. He created the Soda Fountain Soda Fountain syrups that spread throughout the eastern part of the United States and across the country back in the day when the apothecary shop and the drug store were part and parcel of every town in America. And he was, as I mentioned, he was not in the best of health, and by his sixties he was more into philanthropy and conceived the idea of a health resort far away from New England.

At the time, Henry Flagler had not yet developed the east coast of Florida, so Florida was not a destination in the late eighteen hundreds. So North Carolina just happened to be about a day's train ride from New England. So that's one of the reasons that it was within reach.

Speaker 1

So this resort was initially conceived as a health retreat. It evolved away from that, partly presumably because if you have a resort for people who are consumptives or who have tuberculosis, it might quickly become a kind of super spreader. Event once I sort of learned more about those diseases.

Speaker 2

And I don't think he understood that when he originally conceived the idea, And so they had to make a pirouet of one hundred and eighty degrees away from that, and mister Tuff's lived in Boston, and which happened to be the city that Donald Ross immigrated to when he

came to America in eighteen ninety nine. And that was another coincidence that mister Ross was in Dornock, Scotland, work in the golf shop at at Dornot Golf Club, when a Harvard professor named Robert Wilson got to meet him and know him and said something to the effective, young man, if you ever should decide to come to America, look me up. There is opportunity for a young man who knows golf in this country. Because golf was in its infancy in the late eighteen hundreds, and Donald Ross did

not come to America as a golf course architect. Came there were not specialists in the golf business at the time. One person could be the clubmaker and the caddymaster, and the event organizer, and the instructor and the greenkeeper and the agronomous. He did it all, and he learned those skills under old Tom Morris at Saint Andrew's doing an internship, and brought his skills back to Dornock where he was running the golf shop, and so Robert Wilson suggested, there's

opportunity in America. And then Donald Ross, which is one of many young Scottish golf golf professionals, golf agronomous greenkeepers who came to America seeking a niche and an opportunity in a sport that was just starting to get some roots.

Speaker 1

Could you say a little more about how golf came to Pinehurst? You mentioned this briefly earlier, but how golf arrived at the resort. It wasn't initially part of Pinehurst. And then what the earliest iterations of golf courses at Pinehurst looked like before Donald Ross arrived.

Speaker 2

They were very crude. As I mentioned, some of the guests brought their own golf clubs and balls and sort of hit them across the dairy fields. And James Tuff so well, I want if there's some opportunity for golf, and he happened to pose that question to others in his circle, and one man in particular, the manager of the Holly Inn, who his name was Alan Treadway. And the Holly Inn was the first hotel property in Pinehurst that opened in eighteen ninety five, mister Treadway said, no,

golf's just a fad. Save your money, don't waste it on golf. But fortunately mister Tuff's thought, well, maybe this is an opportunity, and he happened to know a physician in Southern Pines who played golf, who had been to Saint Andrews. Was not a golf course architect, but he

knew more golf than anybody in the town did. So he asked this physician to help him lay out a golf course and that's what became the first nine hole and then eighteen hole course that was laid out in eighteen ninety eight, and that was on ground that was to the south of the clubhouse as it exists today, and that is area where the Cradle golf course, the nine hole appendage golf course that was built in twenty

seventeen is located now. And why it was called the Cradle because it was routed on land on which the original nine and then eighteen hole course at Pinehurst was located. And I'm sure it was very crude. There was no grass on the greens. They were used a people call them sand greens, but that's really a bit of a misnomer. They were more clay than they were sand. They were a clay base with sand mixed in. They were flat, the hole was generally just in the middle of it.

The keeyen areas were built up that the caddy would actually take a little bit of sand, put some water on it, and build up a little artificial ty for a golfer to purcha his ball on. And so they were very crude and very rudimentary, but no more than two thousand yards for nine holes. But that's where they first started to play golf.

Speaker 1

So then Donald Ross arrives and he's not yet the Donald Ross that we know. Now, this is early in his American career. What did Donald Ross do with the golf courses at Pinehurst, say, just during the first couple of decades of the twentieth century, just a high level summary his overall kind of development of those first few courses at Pinehurst.

Speaker 2

Well, there were two key elements to Donald Ross's arrival in Pinehurst in December of nineteen hundred. Number one is he found the sandy soil which reminded him of Dornock and was reminiscent of his home. James Tuffs had found at Pinehurst, near where I live in the Triangle area of North Carolina, the Raleig Durham Chapel Hill area where we have red clay. I don't think the ground would

have been as appealing to mister Ross. He may not have lasted, it may not have interested him, but he found the sandy soil that was very good for designing golf courses for drainage. Here in Chapel Hill we can have a heavy rain and it's water logged for a number of hours, But sixty minutes to the south in the sand Hills area, it's sandy in the water drains. And also that area of North Carolina has a very rich Scottish heritage. Many natives of Scotland immigrated through Wilmington

in the seventeen hundreds. In the early eighteen hundreds. Just next door to Pinehurst is a town called Aberdeen. There is a county just south of Moore County called Scotland County. There are many roads in Pinehurst called mcass goal in McKenzie and MacDonald and Dundee. So I think the sandy ground and the Scottish heritage probably made mister Ross feel

very comfortable in the area. So he just he started designing golf holes in what he knew from Scotland and starting with a place to put a green and then building back from there. And so he rebuilt the number one course by nineteen oh one, he built eighteen holes of Number two by nineteen oh seven. He built a third course in nineteen eleven, and then a fourth course in nineteen nineteen. So those were the four core courses at Pinehurst Country Club that emanated from the main clubhouse.

They all were built on sandy ground, They all had san clay greens. The wiregrass, which is indigenous to Moore County and the sand Hills area of North Carolina, reminded him of the and the love grass of Pinehurst. So the gulf that he built was what he knew from Scotland and it was his American imitation of the courses he knew from Dornoch, from Saint Andrews, from Carnousti and the other places in Scotland.

Speaker 1

So zeroing in on the number two course, what did the initial iteration of that layout look like in nineteen oh seven.

Speaker 2

There are eleven holes still remaining on number two that are the same number and in the same general location as that original course in nineteen oh seven. The first and second holes are still one in two and they're the exact same spot, and eleven through eighteen or the same numbers and are also in the same spots. Some of them have been lengthened some but the greens, the pars, the configuration are pretty much the same as they were now.

Those first greens were flat. He did not build grass greens until nineteen thirty four, thirty five, thirty six, when technology had evolved and he and Frank Maples, who was the construction superintendent and the green superintendent, had developed ways to build bermuda grass greens that could survive the winters. And remember Pinehurst was a wintertime resort for the first seventy five years of its existence, so they had to build a grass that was hardy enough to survive the

winter and all the traffic that it was getting. And it took until the mid thirties before they could do that. But it is interesting that eleven of those holes are the exact same spot as they were. He added two more holes in nineteen thirty five, and yet two more holes in nineteen thirty five, I'm sorry, nineteen twenty three and nineteen thirty five thirty five when he rebuilt the greens, built the green complexes that we know today, and added

two more holes. Then it became to the routing and the configuration that we know.

Speaker 1

Today, going back to that nineteen oh seven course, or even the course that maybe existed through the teens, what was the esthetic character of the built features on this course. I've seen early pictures of Pinehurst where the courses look quite different than they do now, or than they did in the in the thirties and forties, So am i right that number two looked quite a bit different in nineteen oh seven than what we're familiar with today.

Speaker 2

Oh. Absolutely, there was no drainage or there was no irrigation, so whatever grass grew was all watered by by Mother Nature. Was not until the mid thirties when they redid the greens, or built the greens, i should say, and he built the final two holes, that they laid a single line irrigation system down the middle of each fairway. So it was not until the mid thirties that there was actually

irrigation on the golf course. So the only parts of the course that were maintained were the tees, fairways, and greens. There was no ornamental flowers, there was no raking of the bunkers. It was all very haphazard. And part of this look was some of the look that they wanted to go back and retrieve when they did the core Crenshaw restoration in ten twenty eleven.

Speaker 1

But it was.

Speaker 2

Very unkempt. It was very natural looking. I've got to imagine it looked very much like Royal Dornok looked at the time. We have seen early photographs and postcards from the early nineteen hundreds, and it just had a very raw, natural look. It reflected the sand hills of North Carolina. There was no lush bermuda grass. There was just a lot of a lot of brown, a lot of sage, a lot of shades of tan, and there wasn't a whole lot of green color at the time.

Speaker 1

So in the early years of the Number two course, how did players receive it, especially high profile players? What did they say about the course? What was their assessment of it?

Speaker 2

I think because of the length of it, I mean it played close to seven thousand yards going back to the when it first came to its final configuration in the mid thirties, I think the length was very stern, whereas the other Pinehers courses were shorter and geared more

toward the resort golfer of the club golfer. The Toughs family recognized in the early days that a way for them to get good publicity was to hold competitions that would draw golfers from across the United States, and that's what launched the North and South Championships that started in nineteen hundred. They had one for amateurs which still exists and has been conducted every year since one hundred and what thirty years now. Of the North and South Amateur

has never been suspended during any of the wars. And then there was the North and South Open. There was for professionals as well as amateurs. That was conceived in nineteen hundred and lasted for fifty years until nineteen fifty one. And that's where the Sam Snead's the Walter Hagens. Donald Ross was a professional, so he entered it. He won. So many of the good players, Tommy Armor, Walter Travers, Francis we met. All of these players came to Pinehurst.

They love the golf course, they love the strategy, they love how there was an equal balance of left to right holes right to left. There were short holes, long holes you had to play in your shots around the bunkers. You could play run up shots onto the greens. It was a total test. Ross believed that the long iron

was the ultimate test of a good player. How well could you hit a four and three and two iron into a green, which is why he had many at the time, very long par fours, like four hundred and forty four hundred and fifty yard par fours. So it was a complete test, and it got a lot of good publicity, a lot of good reviews, and words spread across the country, and so it grew, as it does today, thousands of golfers who wanted to play on this very challenging, difficult golf course.

Speaker 1

Were there any particular holes at Pinehurst Number two in this era of the course that stood out as the holes that people would talk about as the best holes on the course.

Speaker 2

One of the things, Garrett, that has stood out about number two over the years is there doesn't seem to have been a consensus of signature holes.

Speaker 1

That's why I ask it's kind of funny that way. It's the way that we talk about Pineers Number two now is as sort of a hole as opposed to a couple of representative holes.

Speaker 2

The signature feature certainly is the know what are called the upside the inverted saucer greens or the upside down walk shaped, which is the convex shape with the center elevated and the fall offs around the edges. The greens might be seven thousand yards in square footage, but maybe only thirty five hundred of them. Is the center part of the green that will actually hold a golf ball, You know, so many of them you hit the edges,

So it's the green complexes. And then in nineteen thirty five when Donald Ross built the green complexes as they exist today. He also, in addition to long irons, he also believed that chipping was one of the key tests of a good golf course and making recovery shots. He wanted the golfer to have choices to be able to putt from off the putting surface, to hit a bump and run, or if they wanted to in a more elevated shot that would stop quickly. He would have those options.

So he developed all these dips and swales and hollows around the golf course, around the greens that where the ball would take off and run and you would never know how far it might go. And so this has been one feature that is totally different from most US Open courses that have heavy bermuda rough upright around the greens that if you miss the green you pull out a log wedge and hack it out and you know, try and get as much club on the ball as

you can. Now you have choices as to and that's part of the strategy is to figure out what is the best shot for this particular hole. So, to answer your question, no real signature holes, but there is certainly a signature feature.

Speaker 1

Well, the green have become the signature feature. But there is some doubt, is there not about where this style of green came from. If you look at vintage photographs of Pinehurst number two, the greens don't necessarily have so strongly as they do now that inverted saucer or turtleback character. They're a little bit more at grade. And so how did the Pinehurst number two greens evolve into the shapes that they still have today.

Speaker 2

Pete Die was stationed at Ford Bragg in World War two and he came over and played Pinehurst. You know, he liked to joke more than the Good Lord should have allowed him to be. He didn't actually see combat in the war, but he was. He was at Ford Bragg and one of his jobs was to drive his sergeant over to Pinehurst and they played quite a bit of golf, and he remembers the shape and the and the levels of the greens, and up until his death he was adamant that those greens grew in size because

of top dressing over many many years. Unfortunately, people who knew those greens back in the day there aren't many of them left, so it's hard to say. But if you do look at photographs from the nineteen seventies from Golf World, from when the tour was through, there is that elevation to most of the greens, and the players

of that era do talk about that. So some of this crowning of the greens grew organically when Richard Tuffs, who was the grandson founder James Tuffs and was the president of the USGA in the mid nineteen fifties, was a giant in golf administration. If the greens got away, they got a ray under his watch, so to speak. So Donald Ross was rich Tuft's godfather, and they had

a very close relationship. They were very close. I don't think Richard Tufts would have let anything happened to number two to get too far away from what Donald what he thought would have been Donald Ross's original intent.

Speaker 1

Well, another subject when it comes to the greens is sand greens versus bermuda grass greens. You've already sort of covered this, but I'm always curious, you know, what what was it like to play on the original sand or as you as you put it, clay greens earlier in the course's life. What were those greens like and how did people go about, you know, negotiating them.

Speaker 2

I guess they were very much like going to a putt putt golf course where you put on a hard surface that doesn't have a lot of breaker, a lot of undulation. We have heard, read written accounts and seen photographs of the caddies pulling its kind of a carpet

like structure. When their group would leave the green, they would sort of rake this carpet like structure across the greens to smooth them out and smooth across any footprints, and then they would dust the clay surface with a layer of sand so that it would give the green a little bit of structure and a little bit of substance to it and not make it as hard as

putting directly on clay. So it was not as hard as cement, but very firm, and the layer of sand gave it a little bit of texture and slow them down a little bit. I can't imagine that there was

a lot of break to them. Of course, the steamy was used at the time, so you could you know, you could knock your opponent's ball away from the green with your ball, So it was obviously a very different game that they played until the nineteen thirties when Bermuda greens were installed, and that Bermuda, I have to imagine,

was very slow. I mean, I mean, if you look at the putting styles, mini putters had a little bit of loft on them back in the day because they need a little bit of elevation to get the ball rolling. They were a very risty stroke at the time, so the combination of the loft and the risty stroke got

the ball elevated and got it rolling. And it wasn't until our rabid thirst for fast greens has evolved over the last thirty or forty years that agronomic technology has evolved and they're able to get just these incredibly fast greens.

I'd imagine that the North and South Open in nineteen fifty one and the Ryder Cup in nineteen fifty one were played on very bumpy greens that might have rolled at the seven or eight, and they are going to be picture perfect and roll at eleven, twelve thirteen next week at Pinehurst for the US Open.

Speaker 1

It's a very different game.

Speaker 2

You know.

Speaker 1

Another thing about the sand green to Bermuda grass green transition is that it also brought the art of green contouring to the course. It sounds like because it from my understanding, the sand greens were fairly simple. They had to be fairly simple in terms of contour. But then when you start putting grass on putting surfaces, then you can get into more of this intentional contouring from an

architect that we see in Pinehurst Green. So truly, the greens that we're familiar with now really started their life in the mid nineteen thirties when they were able to introduce grass onto the putting surfaces.

Speaker 2

Absolutely, the green surfaces and the hollows and the swales and the undulations around them. Those have all been there since nineteen thirty five.

Speaker 1

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code Frida Egg. So, Lee, you were there to document Corn Crenshaw's restoration of Pinehurst Number two in what was it twenty ten, twenty eleven right around there.

Speaker 2

It started in February of twenty ten. Some of the work was done while the course was open. They shut the course down in the fall of twenty ten and reopened it in March of twenty eleven. So it was essentially a fifteen sixteen month project of all hands on deck and a lot of work.

Speaker 1

What was the biggest surprise for you in seeing how that project unfolded?

Speaker 2

First, Garrett was just getting an understanding of what they were doing, how they were going to do it, the reasons for it.

Speaker 1

I was.

Speaker 2

I'm very grateful to Ben and Bill for allowing me the access that they gave me while they were doing this work. It started in February two thousand and ten and they started on the eleventh hole. At the time, there wasn't a lot of understanding about what this project was all about. We were still twenty ten, we were still coming out of the Great Recession. There were rumors that Pinehurst was having some financial difficulties, which it was not.

They had closed the manor in, they had laid some people off, they had reduced some staff, they had stepped back in a lot of regards, just like every business had two thousand and nine twenty ten because of the Great Recession. But they wanted to start as far away from the main clubhouse as they could with the word just so as kind of keep it quiet to evolve. And the eleventh hole, the tea of the eleventh hole is probably as far away from the clubhouse as any

hole on the golf course. So I can remember this February morning when it was Bill cor Ben Crenshaw and their chief lieutenant, a man named Toby Cobb who was on the hole, and they were literally starting this process. And they stood back on the eleventh tee and they looked down the fairway and Bill Krr looked down and he pointed at all of the strict delineations that he saw of organized grass, of different elements of the hole

that you could see. You could see, you could see the woods on the right, you could see the hardpan sand, you could see the thick roff, you could see the intermediate cut of rough. You could see the fairways, you could see the first cut on the left side, you could see the thicker roff. Then you could see the hardpan. Then you can see the woods. He said, this is too organized. This looks like somebody sat down and drew

this up on a cat. This is not. And a key element Garrett of the Bill Core part of this restoration story was Bill knew the golf course intimately from having grown up in nearby Davidson County in the nineteen fifties and sixties, and he could remember coming to Pinehurst on summer days with some friends, some hometown friends, and there was nobody at playing in Pinehurst at the time because it was essentially closed in the summer, so for a dollar fifty they could get a ticket and they

could play Number two all day long. So he knew what it was like prior to the era of it being greened over, and so he said, this is not what made Pinehurst great, was all this structure and all this green. So he said, essentially, we're going to ugly the place up. We're going to make it look less

esthetically perfect. He counted seven, no, he counted six different layers of grass heights, from the greens to the tees, to the fairways, to the various cuts of rough, and he said, there should only be two cuts of grass on here, the greens and teas and the fairways. The rest of it. We're just going to let mother nature whole court. They then stripped out hundreds of acres of bermuda rough, and they actually gave the bermuda side to parks and school systems in the area, and they just

took it back to the native hardpan sand. They also found wiregrass from a variety of sources. Some of it they bought, some of they imported from the countryside. And Bill spent a considerable amount of time talking to the construction staffs on the art of planting wiregrass in a haphazard fashion that if you think about it, you know, the organized parts of our grain, of our brain want to plant seedlings or saplings in an organized fashion, in

straight rows or in ice patterns. And I can remember he was on the there was a hillside facing the tenth tee of the back tee, which it stretches us out to six hundred yards, and there's quite a slope. You go down a slope and up the slope where you get to the main fairway, and he talked to the construction people about planting the wiregrass in a haphazard fashion along this slope so that it didn't look like it was planted by a machine or somebody who was

thinking in an organized format. And it was the same thing with the edges of the fairway. So they went in and they removed the triple row irrigation, went back to the single row irrigation that they knew had been there through the mid nineteen fifties, and so they knew that the water would only be thrown roughly thirty to thirty five yards to the left and right of that single row irrigation. So all of these steps went into putting the golf course back to where it was originally.

Speaker 1

You know, something that strikes me about this restoration is how radical it was. I mean, truly they went all out. And you know, Bill and Ben are so polite and such good diplomats that they don't necessarily come across as rabble rousers, right, but this was quite the statement to take the course back to this vintage. Look. I wonder if there was any shock for you when you first saw what this course was going to look like after

Bill and Ben were done with it. Was there any shock for you, Oh my god, they're really going for this?

Speaker 2

Not really any shock once I and I understood pretty quickly from those first couple of days what they were trying to do, why they were trying to do it, the tools they had at their disposal, and I realized this was a fascinating story to be able to watch this. But I knew that it would be shocking to the members, to the resort guest, to the general public, because you know, who wants to make a golf course look less pretty?

But what they were doing was taking it back to what made it so great and what had made it so natural back from the early days, and in Pinehurst fell prey to many other golf courses of just this subliminal desire to make it look green, you know. And Ben Crenshaw, I promise you holds Augusta National in high reverence, having won one of the Masters there, and he still hosts the champions dinner. I mean, he revers the place and the spirit and the and the traditions of the Masters.

But he and I and Bill both will tell you that the Masters and Augusta in a sense do the game of off a disservice because the golf course is so perfect, it is so great, it is so manicured, and this one idyllic weekend every April, the entire golf world stops what it's doing. It sits and watches in reverence, you know, to this cathedral of golf in Augusta, Georgia, and they say, well, isn't this what golf is all about?

You know, this perfection, not realizing that this kind of green perfection is beyond the accessibility and the financial ability of most golf clubs, in most resorts, and this demand for perfect green is just not really realistic in the game of golf. That's why, And that's Pinehurst was as guilty as anybody else of let's make this green and pretty. Let's be green and pretty. And Ben Crenshaw had a just at a great comparison you liked to use with

the fairways. They looked like bowling alleys. They have become so straight, so edged, and the fairways were the edges were so green, but they looked nothing like the old pictures of Pinehurst. So that's why they they took them back and said, all right, it's not going to be as pretty, but we wanted we want to recapture what had been here many years before.

Speaker 1

When you finally got to play the course after it was restored, what most impressed you about the renewed or refreshed playing experience there?

Speaker 2

Number one was how firm it played. You know, there was it was not as thick and lush as it had been. And you know, there's kind of a distance is sort of a double edged sword. I mean, if if you hit it thirty yards more right down the middle of the fairway, that's great, but it'll also get

you into trouble a little bit quicker. And so when you hit a ball off the fairway before you knew exactly what kind of lie you were going to get, what kind of shot you were going to hit, Because I mean, you know, if you were on a tee and you pulled it a little bit in the rough, you could just, you know, grab an eight iron from the caddy and say, well, that's the best I can do. Is I'm just going to hack it out and hit

it as far down the fairway as I can. Now, you know, you've got two hundred some odd yards of mystery waiting. Well what kind of lie am I going to get? Am I going to get lucky? And am I going to be in a nice clean area of hard pan sand? And particularly for the pros, hitting the ball off hard pan sand is not difficult at all. I mean, that's that's easy for them. You know, they just compressed the ball and pick it right up off the sand. Or am I going to be steamied by

a tough to wiregrass? And is my ball going to be sitting in a tough to wiregrass and I'm going to have to kind of catch it three inches off the ground. There's just all kinds of variables to it.

So that's number one. And then the width of the fairways was just much different than the fairways had gone from roughly twenty three to twenty five yards of width to now they were thirty five to forty yards wide, so you had some room that you could if the pen was on the right side of of a green, you could aim to the left side to get a little bit of a better angle, and vice versa, so

you could work the angles a little bit better. And that so the combination of the taught fairways, the width, and the mystery of the wiregrass, those were the key things that were different about it right off the bat.

Speaker 1

Something that really impresses me about the course as it is now is, yes, it's width the fairway with but in the landing zones for drives, those fairways are often moving in really unexpected ways, like jogging one direction or another, or there's a tilt in the landing zone, like it tilts from right to left or left to right, so that although the course is wide, a lot of the drives are pretty difficult or demand that you kind of

choose a line right. And I would imagine that's something that the course got back with the restoration, because before that a lot of those whole corridors had kind of straightened out.

Speaker 2

I guess they had straightened out and they had narrowed up. So that absolutely what Donna Ross was so good about was working the angles and you know, going left to right, right to left, you know, sometimes two directions on one hole. And so given that with and Ad the taught fairways to it. Also, twenty fourteen was a little drier than normal.

We've had more of an average springs, so I don't think the course will play quite as firm as it did in twenty fifteen, but the width will certainly be different than the than the course was in two thousand and five. So that's certainly an element of the of the presentation that will be fun to watch next week.

Speaker 1

So I'd like to pick out a couple of holes and maybe just discuss each in a little more depth, maybe starting with the first hole. What are some of the features of the first hole that you think people should pay attention to?

Speaker 2

Well, number one, you've got plenty of room to drive the ball. You know, it's it's it's a wide fairway. The right side of the fairway is the best. Look at the green. The green represents so many in that

you know, it's it's set at an angle. You know, it runs kind of from front right to back left, so it's not it's not round, and right from the very start you're going to find that if you do not lay your ball on the crew to the center of the green, it's going to leak into a bunker front left, or it's going to go over in one of the hollows to the right. And if you miss it to the right, you're going to be faced with that decision, which is the ultimate decision for the good golfer.

And one thing that Martin Kaimer did so well in twenty fourteen was he pretty much said, at the beginning of the week, I'm going to putt from all the fairways or off the greens. And so he judged his speed, he judged his cadence of the putt, and he hit him just right going up those slopes and got the

ball to die near the hole. So, but many other people just aren't aren't comfortable with that, so they'll hit a seven iron into the edge of the of the green there on the right of number one, hit it into the upslope and then let it a little run out. So that first hole you're going to get you know, you're going to be hitting a short iron end of

the green, so it's not a particularly difficult hole. But then the second hole is a much much longer hole, you know, although even though it was designed to be a drive and a long iron, the players today will hit driver nine irons into the second hole.

Speaker 1

Four and five. These holes have a pretty interesting history. Maybe you could tell me, first of all, how did they get added to the routing of the course, because they were, you know, during Donald Ross's lifetime. I believe the latest addition to the course.

Speaker 2

Correct four and five used to be the first and ninth hole of what was the Number five course, which was not a full eighteen hole course at the time. It was really just a nine hole course that was mostly restricted to employees. And some of the holes now are routed where Pinehurst Number seven is. And in fact, Rhys Jones, when he was building Number seven in the nineteen eighties, found some old abandoned bunkers that had been

on these nine holes and left them pretty much. They weren't intact, but he rebuilt them and made them a part of the Number seven course. But in any event, mister Ross built what is now the fourth hole and

the fifth hole. The fourth hole was originally a par four and the fifth hole was originally a par five, and that's how they were played in the late forties, and for the nineteen fifty one Ryder Cup they were later flopped to the fourth hole becoming a par five and the fourth hole, I'm sorry, the fifth hole becoming a par four, and that's how they were played for the nineteen ninety nine US Open. In two thousand and five,

I believe they run a parallel to each other. Four goes out, five comes back, and the land to the far end of the fourth green and the fifty that actually was where the original World Golf Hall of Fame was positioned, and it was first open in nineteen seventy three. It's been since tore down and now, of course interesting what goes around comes around, and the Hall of Fame has gone to Florida and now it's come back to Pinehurst,

but it's much closer to the resort clubhouse. But anyway, to get back to the iteration, now, number four is

long par four, five is a short par five. Mike Davis made the change going into the twenty fourteen US Open because he went back to the original design of it and felt that the green of the fifth hole was better designed to receive the short iron shot for a par five approach than it was to receive a long iron approach off of a hanging downhill right to left lie in the fairway of the fifth hole.

Speaker 1

Yes, and if you look at the holes now, it seems pretty clear that the second shot on the fifth hole, now playing as a par five, is very interesting because you have that option to lay up or to go for it. It's not assumed that you're going to go for it. If it were a part four, then that

would be the assumption. But once you start to look at the layup option, it is pretty interesting because you are trying to figure out with that layup exactly where to put yourself so that you can best approach that green with your short third shot. So I think it's become a more interesting hole. But in order to pull that off, they had to move the tea quite a bit back right.

Speaker 2

They did build a new te and in fact, if the Hall of Fame had still been there, they would not been able to have accessed that lay on dog where they build a new tea. But you're right, That second shot is an interesting one because the fair way does can't severely from right to left, and you can play what you think is a safe shot up to

the right and it can catch that fairway. And with a firm fairway, you can roll down into a bunker or down into the waste area down to the left, and then you can have a very challenging shot coming off the hardpan sand or out of the bunker up the hill to a very difficult green.

Speaker 1

Yeah, it's a great hole. Next hole I'd like to zero in on. I mean there we could go hole by hole and there would be something interesting to say about each one. But I suppose skipping to number nine, the par three. What stands out to you about this hole?

Speaker 2

The shallowness of the green, how wide it is, and how you have got to really nail the distance on it. Number one. One of the great hole locations on the golf course is that far left location, just over the bunker on the left, where you know, if you don't take enough club you're in the bunker, a dark uphill,

got not a lot of room to work with. If you've got too much, then you go over the green down toward the road that borders the number the course seven neighborhood and the far far edge of the number two course. You know, one of the great things about Number two is that it doesn't come back to the clubhouse and so the number nine Green is as far away from the clubhouse as you can get, and it's on the edge of the property for the Number seven course.

But it's an absolutely gorgeous hole and it really stood out as one of the holes that contrasted the most when you took before and after photos of before the restoration.

You know that Bill Corey used to call the bunkers Tidley Wings bunkers because they were just round and perfect in shape, and they put the bunkers back into you know, and one of the resources I didn't mention earlier was that they were able to locate some aerial photography from the nineteen forties that showed the shape of the bunkers and that and the shape of the fairways, and so

they were able to use those as reference points. So in my book The Golden Age of Pinehurst that chronicled this restoration and the evolution of the golf course, you know, we've got several series of before and after pitchers and one of the best sets is of the ninth hole and just how neat and organized and non Pinehurst it looked before the restoration, and then how much it harkened

back to the early days of Pinehurst. And there's a great photo of Donald Ross hitting a shot off the ninth hole to the green, And what Core and Crunchhaw I think did was was very much in sympathy and in accuracy to what the course, what that hole looked like when Donald Ross played it many years ago.

Speaker 1

You know something else that's notable about number nine, as well as numbers four and five, is the movement of the land on all three of those holes. I think that people's impression when they see Pinehurst on TV is that it's mostly flat, but when you're there, that's really not the impression you get, right.

Speaker 2

No, there's some interesting subtle movement of the ground there. One of my favorite features on the whole course is on the tenth hole, about eighty to one hundred yards from the fairway is just a little dip in the fairway. I've asked people, why do you think it's there? And if you look at old maps, the tenth hole it used to be the seventh and then later it was the eighth hole, and the green was much further up.

It was not nearly as long as a whole, So I believe that little swale was in front of where the old green was. Before the tenth hole was stretched out and became a par five, there used to be you used to play what is now the tenth hole. Then you would veer off into At one point there were two holes. At another point there were three holes that ran down in an area where the number four

course is. Then you came back and picked up on the eleventh hole, which is why, as I mentioned earlier, eleven through eighteen or in the same spot as they always have been. The tenth hole was always there, but it was different numbers and it was a shorter hole at one point. So I've gotten away from your question. We got to talk about that little swale on the tenth hole, but that's just one of the neat need

little things of the golf course that it is. It's gentle typography, but there is some interesting movement on there. For sure.

Speaker 1

I love that observation about ten because I did notice that little contour right in basically the layup zone for the par five tenth hole, and so it sounds like if the green were more up against that contour long ago, that it would have been more of a value of sin type of situation right in front of the green. But now I think the way that it functions is so interesting because that swale is basically right where the

safest layup is on the hole. You know, if you're playing a layup shot on your second shot on the tenth hole, then the best place to be if you're a conservative player is essentially right in the middle of that swale, because there aren't really many other hazards super close to it. But because that swale is there, you got to start thinking, okay, am I okay with being

down below? Or do I kind of want to be a little more short of it, but then my shot is a bit longer, Or do I want to try to get past it but that's a little risk gear And so it just kind of messes with your head a little bit. And I've seen Coren Crenshaw do that on a lot of their par fives, on their own original designs, where these they put these funky little contours right in a layup zone just to give the player something else to think about and well.

Speaker 2

And another of the topo features that have interested there or the ground elements is the thirteenth Green, which sits up on the rise, and that's actually on an area that's an extension of the practice range which was called Maniac Hill. So there's a reason for that hill to

be there. You know, if you walk to the right, if you walk off to the right and beyond the thirteenth Green, you're essentially on the same level where the practice tea in area is not the practice tee that's used for the US Open, but for the resort and club. And it got his name from Maniac Hill just because of all the golf maniacs that used to be balls beat balls off of it. From you're back in the first part of the nineteen hundreds.

Speaker 1

I love that Maniac Hill. So getting to the end of the course sixteen through eighteen, such a great sequence of holes, what do you think is notable there in that one two three finish?

Speaker 2

Well, let's make it one two, three four finish and go back to fifteen because fifteen is just a bear of a par three with that green.

Speaker 1

It's so hard.

Speaker 2

The fifteenth Green to me is the epitome of the inverted saucer green, it just sits perched up there. You're hitting a long iron into it. It's just very difficult to hold. And then sixteen, you know, for us Mere Mortals is a great par five. I mean, I love it as a par five. It's always been a par four. For the US Open. Payne Steward made a great long par saving put there in the final round of the ninety nine Open.

Speaker 1

The has the.

Speaker 2

Sixteenth hole has the one water feature on the entire course, and it wasn't designed to be that way. It just the lake or the pond in front of the tee was originally just a depression that was not particularly attractive looking, so they in the early days they just filled it up with water so it would look a little bit nicer. But that's the only you know, one of the greatest golf courses in the country, and water does not come into play at all for anybody unless you just cold

top a tea shot. They're on the sixteenth hole and sixteen, seventeen and eighteen running three different directions. One goes west, seventeen comes back in the opposite direction, and then eighteen goes up up the hill and in the setting with what they have done at Pinehurst over the last ten to twelve years. They built up a restaurant and a watering hole called the Deuce that is right behind the green.

Used to there was it was a retail shop right behind the green, so there was no traffic, there was no there was no nothing back there. They would occasionally wheel out a portable bar and open it up on

the terrace behind the green. But ten twelve years ago, I can't remember exactly when they built the Deuce, which is what they call the bar and the restaurant there, and they've got a lot of seating there out in the bar, and so any afternoon you've got fifty two one hundred people out eating, drinking and watching players come through on the eighteenth greens. So no matter who you are, you have got a gallery on the eighteenth hole of number two. And you can also over to the members

club to the right. You've got the resort guests on one side, you've got the members on the other side. So all of them are sort of sitting there enjoying themselves, having a libation late in the day, and they will give you an applause or they will give you raspberries if you chunk a chip from the back. So it adds an entirely new element to that play number eighteen of number two.

Speaker 1

Yeah, the people who were there on the day that I played the course a little while ago were pretty amused by my adventures on and around that green, so that is definitely a part of the challenge now. So Lee, thank you so much for joining me for this conversation. Lots of fascinating detail there. You are a prolific author, and I know you must have some things coming out around the twenty twenty four US Open at Pinehurst. So what should people look for from you?

Speaker 2

Well, my most recent book, Garren, thanks for asking, is called Good Walks. It is a book I love to walk when I play golf, and Pinehurst number two is one of the ultimate walking golf courses. One thing I should mention is that years back, Pinehurst management, if you played Number two you either had to take a caddy, which is a great experience, or if you drove a cart, you had to keep your carts to the extremities of

the fairways. They still restrict carts, they don't allow them on the fairways of number two, but now they allow you to walk and carry your own bag. They even allow you to take pool cards, which they used to not. So now if you want to play Number two or any of the courses at Pinehurst, you can go by any means of transportation you want, which is just the

way the game is meant to be played. So anyway, I wrote a book about playing eighteen of the great courses in the Carolinas that have walking cultures, that have a well walking climate to them, that are walkable and have a great story. And we did a nice coffee table book with the University of North Carolina Press. So that's my latest book and you can find it online anywhere.

Speaker 1

Thank you so much, Lee.

Speaker 2

Good enjoy the Chad, Garrett Lafordason and Pinehurst again soon absolutely.

Speaker 1

This episode of the Friday Golf podcast was produced by Matt Rusius. Thank you, Matt. If you'd like to do something real quick to help out Friday Golf, to help us find new listeners for this very podcast, just go to wherever you're listening to us and leave us a rating and or review. We like hearing feedback. We want to know what you think of what we're doing with

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