Lee Pace, golf historian and author of multiple Pinehurst books, joins for the 6th installment of the Great Courses Podcast Series. Lee dives into how Pinehurst Resort came to be and breaks down how golf wasn’t originally in the plans. They then talk about the history of Pinehurst Course No. 2 and how the course evolved over time through Donald Ross’s work.
Episode 6 in the Great Courses Podcast Series
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-history-of-pinehurst-no-2-great-courses-6/id1131723994?i=1000657389546
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Lee Pace welcome to the podcast thank you for being here oh great to be here Garrett uh heard you often and look forward to talking about pinhurst 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 write 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 well I I do quite number of after dinner talks um 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 and coincident but there’s there is not one good reason for Pinehurst to be here uh for it to exist um absolutely none you can parse it till doomsday and not come up with a good reason for it uh uh it was just a series of coincidences of of happen stance that that made it all occur golf was not part of the original equation uh dating back to the mid 1890s when James tus who was from Boston wanted to create a a wintertime health resort for people like himself who were frail of health and it was actually conceived as a as a sanitarium for consumptives and golf was not a part of the equation um truth is that U kiaa has more stake in being Pinehurst and 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 1739 and there was a golf club in Charleston by 1786 of course they didn’t exist but so something a golf resort along the sea in the 1800s you could understand or if it was um in an urban area or if it was longer longer River or if it had happened in Asheville which was a summertime escape from from all the heat in the South you could understand that but James tus happened to learn about 5,000 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 a Carolina hotel of the early days of Pinehurst it was butt ugly I mean there was nothing attractive nothing no no Aesthetics at all but this is where he decided to to create a new New England style Village um imported the the many of the plants uh the grass U 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 um 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 stance and then um of course Donald Ross’s arrival was was yet another one who was James Walker tuus he was a man who made his fortune in the Apothecary business he created the soda fountain uh soda fountain syrups that spread throughout the eastern part of the United States and across the the country back in the day when the Apothecary shop and the drugstore were part and parcel of every every town in in America and he was as I mentioned he was not in the best of health and by by his 60s um he was more into pH philanthropy and conceived the idea of a health resort um 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 1800s so North Carolina just happened to be about a day train ride from New England so that’s one of the reasons that it was uh Within Reach so this resort was initially conceived as a 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 um when Once once you sort of learned more about those diseases and I don’t think he understood that uh when he originally conceive the idea and so they had to make u a pouette of 180 degrees uh away from that and Mr tus lived in Boston and which happened to be the city that Donald Ross immigrated to when he came to America in 1899 and that was another coincidence that Mr Ross was in dor Scotland working the golf shop at at dnut golf club when a Harvard Professor named Robert Wilson um got to meet him and know him and said something to the effect of young man if if you ever should decide to come to America uh 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 1800s and then Donald Ross did not come to America as a golf course architect uh he came there were not specialists in the golf business at the time one person could be the club ma Club maker and the caddy master and the event organizer and the instructor and the Greenkeeper and the agronomist he did it all and he learned those skills u under old Tom Mar at St Andrews doing an internship and brought his skills back to doru where he was running the golf shop and so Robert Wilson suggested there’s opportunity in America and and Donna Ross which is one of many young Scottish golf golf professionals golf agronomist greenkeepers who came to America uh seeking a niche and an opportunity in in a sport that was just starting to get some Roots could you say a little more about about how golf came to Pinehurst you mentioned this briefly earlier but how 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 they were very crude um um as I mentioned the some of the guests brought their own golf clubs and balls and started hitting them across the dairy fields and James Tu said well I wonder if there’s some opportunity for golf and he he happened to pose that question to others in his Circle and one man in particular the the manager of the Holly in who his name was Alan Treadway and the Holly in was the first hotel property in Pinehurst that opened in 1895 Mr tread Treadway said no golf’s just a fat save your money don’t waste it on golf but but fortunately Mr tu thought well maybe this is an opportunity and he he happened to know a physician in Southern Pines who played golf who had been to St Andrews was not a golf course architect but he knew more golf than anybody in the 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 18 hole course that was laid out in 1898 and that was on ground that was to the south of the clubhouse as it exist exist today and that is area where the Cradle Golf Course the nine-hole appendage golf course that was built in 2017 is located now and why it was called the Cradle because it was routed on land on which uh the original N9 and then 18 hole course at Pinehurst was located and I’m sure it was very crude uh there was no grass on the greens uh they used a um the people call them sand greens but that’s really a bit of a misnomer they were more CL clay than wor sand they were a clay base with sand mixed in um they were flat the hole was generally just in the middle of it the teen areas were built up um that the caddy would actually take a little bit of sand put some water on it and build up a little artificial tea for a golfer to perch his ball on and so they were very crude and very rudimentary but um you know no more than 2,000 yards for nine holes but that’s where they they first started to to play golf 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 20th century just a highlevel summary his overall kind of development of those first few courses at Pinehurst well there were two key elements to Donna Ross’s arrival in Pinehurst in December of 19 1900 number one is he found the sandy soil which reminded him of doruk and was reminiscent of his home if James tus had founded Pinehurst near where I live in the triangle area of North Carolina the Raleigh Durham Chapel Hill area where we have red clay I don’t think the ground would have been as appealing to Mr Ross U he may not have lasted he it may not have interested him but he found the sandy soil that was very good for Designing golf courses for drain AG uh here in Chapel Hill we can have a heavy rain and it’s water logged for you know a number of hours but 60 Minutes to the South um in the Sand Hills area U it it’s Sandy and the water drains and and also that area of North Carolina has a very rich Scottish Heritage uh many natives of Scotland immigrated through Wilmington in the 1700s in the early 1800s uh just next door to Pinehurst is a town called Aberdine there is a county just south of Moore County called Scotland County there are many roads in Pinehurst called mcal and McKenzie and McDonald and Dundee so I think the Sandy ground and the Scottish Heritage probably made Mr 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 a a place to put a green and then building back from there and and so he re rebuilt the number one course uh by 1901 he built 18 holes of number two by 1907 he built a third course in 1911 and then a fourth course in 1919 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 sand clay greens The Wire Grass which IND is indigenous to Moore County and the San Hills area of North Carolina reminded him of the Winds and the love grass of Pinehurst so the golf that he built was what he knew from Scotland and it was his American imitation of the courses he knew from doruk from St Andrews from Cari and the other places in Scotland so zeroing in on the number two course what did the initial iteration of that layout look like in 1907 there are 11 holes still remaining on number two that are the same number and in the same general location as that original course in 1907 the first and second holes are still 1 and two and they’re in the exact same spot and 11 through 18 are 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 um he did not build grass greens until 1934 35 36 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 uh for the first 75 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-30s before they could do that but it is interesting that 11 of those holes are in the exact same spot as they were he added two more holes in 1935 and yet two more holes in 1935 I’m sorry 1923 and 1935 so in 1935 when he rebuilt the greens built the U green complexes that we know today and added two more holes then it became to the routing and the configuration that we know today going back to that 1907 course or even the course that maybe existed through the teens what was the aesthetic char character of the built features on this course I 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 30s and 40s so am I right that number two looked quite a bit different in 1907 than what we’re familiar with today oh absolutely there was no drainage or or there was no irrigation so whatever grass grew was um all watered by by Mother Nature it was not until the mid mid 30s when they redid the greens or 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-30s that there was actually irrigation on the golf course so the only parts of the course that were maintained were the te’s fairways and greens uh there was um no ornamental flowers there was no raking of the of the bunkers um it was um all very halfhazard and part of this look was some of the look that they wanted to go back and retrieve uh when they did the K crall restoration uh in 2010 2011 but it was it was very unkempt it was very natural looking I I’ve got to imagine it looked very much like uh Royal Doro look looked at the time uh we have seen uh early photographs and postcards from the early 1900s 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 um um shades of of tan and there there wasn’t a whole lot of green color at the time 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 I think because of the length of it u i mean it played close to 7,000 yards going back to the when it first came to its final configuration in the mid-30s um I think the length was very Stern whereas the other Pinehurst courses were shorter and geared more toward the resort golfer or the club golfer the the tough family recognized in the early 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 1900 they had one for amateur which still exists and has been conducted every year since 10 what 30 years now of the North and South Amer it was not has never been suspended during any of the wars and then there was the North and South open that was for professionals as well as amateurs that that was conceived in 1900 and lasted for 50 years until 1951 and that’s where the um Sam sneeds the Walter Hain um Donald Ross was a professional so he entered it he won so many of the good players uh Tommy armor Walter Travers uh Francis we met all of these players came to Pinehurst they loved the golf course they loved the the strategy they loved how the there was an equal balance of left to right holes right to left there were short holes long holes you had to plan your shots around the bunkers you could play runup Shots onto the greens it was it was a total test uh Ross believ 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 fors like 440 450 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 drew as it does today thousands of golfers who wanted to play uh this very challenging difficult Golf Course were there any particular holes at Pinehurst number two in this era of the course that stood out as the holes that people would would talk about as the best holes on the course one of the things uh Gareth that has stood out about number two over the years is there doesn’t seem to have been a consensus of signature holes that that’s why I ask it’s kind of funny that way it’s the the way that we talk about pineur number two now is as sort of a hole as opposed to a couple of Representative holes this the signature feature certainly is the you what are call the upside the inverted saucer greens or the upside down walk shaped which is the uh convex shape with the the center elevated and the falloffs around the edges um the greens might be 7,000 yards in square footage but maybe only 3,500 of them is the center part of the green that will actually hold hold a golf ball you know so many of them you hit the edges so it’s it’s the green complexes and then in 1935 When Donald Ross cut built the green complexes as they exist today um he he also in addition to Long irons U he also believed that chipping was uh one of the key tests of a good golf course and making recovery shots he wanted the the golfer to have choices to be able to putt from off the the putting surface uh to hit a bump and run or if they wanted to to hit a more elevated shot that would stop quickly he would have those options so he he developed all these dips and swells and Hollows around the golf course around the greens that where the ball would 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 U right around the greens that if you miss the green you pull out a lob wedge and and hack it out and uh 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 well the greens 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 Turtle Back character they’re a little bit more at grade and so how did the Pinehurst number two greens evolve into the shapes that they they still have today Pete Dy was stationed at Fort Bragg in World War II and he came over and played pineur you know he liked to joke more than the good Lord should have allowed him to he he did he didn’t actually see combat in the war but he was he was at Fort Brag and one of his jobs was to drive his Sergeant over to uh Pinehurst and they played quite a bit of golf and and he remembers the shape and the and the levels of the greens and um up until his death he was adamant that those greens grew in size because of top dressing over many many years um unfortunately people who knew those greens back in the day there aren’t many of them so it it’s hard to say but if if you do look at photographs of from the the 1970s from from golf world from when the the tour was through there is that um um elevation to to most of the greens um and and the players of that era do talk about that so some of this crowning of the greens uh grew organically when Richard tuus who was the grandson of founder James tuus and was the president of the usgaa in the mid 1950s was a giant in golf Administration um if the greens got away they got array under his his watch so to speak so is uh Donald Ross was Richard tough’s uh Godfather and they had a very close relationship uh they were very close um I don’t think Richard tus would have let anything happen to number two to get too far away away from what Donald from what he thought would have been Donald Ross’s original intent 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 what were those greens like and how did people go about you know negotiating them I guess they were very much like going to a putt putt golf course where you put on a a hard surface that doesn’t have a lot of break or a lot of undulation we have heard read written accounts and and and seen photographs of the caddies pulling it’s 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 and then then they would dust the clay surface with a layer of sand so that it would give the the 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 um um not as hard as cement but very firm and the layer of sand gave it a little bit of texture and and and slow them down a little bit um I can’t imagine that there was a lot of break to them of course the sty was used at the time so you could you know you could knock your opponent’s ball away from the green with with with your ball so it was It was obviously a very different game that they played until the 1930s when Bermuda greens were installed and that Bermuda I have to imagine was very slow I mean that I mean if you look at their the putting Styles um many Putters had a little bit of of of Loft on them back in the day because they needed a little bit of elevation to get the ball rolling uh they were very risty stroke uh at the time so the combination of the Loft and the wrist risty stroke got the ball elevated and and got it rolling and it wasn’t until um our our rabid thirst for fast greens has evolved over the last 30 or 40 years that that agronomic technology has evolved and they’re able to get just these incredibly fast greens I imagine that the North and South open in 1951 and the Ryder Cup in 1951 were played on very bumpy greens that might have rolled at a seven or eight and they are going to be pitcher perfect smooth and roll at a 11 12 13 um next week at pinhurst for the US Open it’s a it’s a very different game you know another thing about the the s 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 sound sand greens were fairly simple they 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 greens so truly the the greens that were familiar with now really started their life in the mid 1930s when they were able to introduce grass onto the putting surfaces absolutely the the green surfaces and the and the the hollows and the swells and the undulations around them those have all been there since 1935 so Lee you were there to document Corin kena’s restoration of Pinehurst number two in what was it 2010 2011 right around there it started in February of 2010 um some of the work was done while the course was open they shut the course down in the fall of 2010 and reopened it in March of 2011 so it was essentially a 156 Monon project of all hands on deck and a lot of work what was the biggest surprise for you in seeing how that project unfolded uh first Garrett it was just getting an understanding of what they were doing how they were going to do it uh the reasons for it um I was very I’m very grateful to Ben and Bill for allowing me the access that they gave me while they were doing this work um it started in February 2010 and I can and they started on the 11th hole um it at the time there wasn’t a lot of understanding about what this project was all about uh we were still 2010 we were still coming out of the Great Recession um there were rumors that Pinehurst was having some financial difficulties which it was not uh they had they had closed the uh Manor in they had laid some people off they had reduced some staff they had um stepped back in a lot of regards just like every business had uh 2009 2010 because of the Great Recession but they wanted to start as far away from the main clubhouse as they could with the work just so as kind of keep it quiet for it to to evolve and the 11th hole the tea of the 11th 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 K Ben krenshaw 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 11th T and they looked down the Fairway and Bill core looked down and he pointed at all of the strict delineations that he saw of organized grass of of different elements of the hole that you could see you could see the you could see the the woods on the right you could see the hard pan sand you could see the thick rough you could see the intermediate cut of rough you could see the fairways you could see the the first cut on the left side you could see the thicker rough the you can see the hard pan then you see the woods he said this is too organized this looks like somebody sat down and Drew this up on a cad this is not and and and a key element Garrett of of the bill K part of this restoration story was Bill knew the golf course intimately from having grown up in nearby Davidson County um in the 1950s and 60s and he could remember coming to Pinehurst on summer days with some friends some Hometown friends and there was nobody at playing in in Pinehurst at the time because it was essentially closed in the summer so for $150 they could get a ticket 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 GR green so he said essentially we’re going to ugly the place up we’re going to make it look less aesthetically perfect um he counted seven no he counted six different layers of grass Heights from the greens to the teas 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 hold 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 hard pan sand they also find found wire grass 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 wire grass in a halfhazard fashion that if if you think about it you know our the organized parts of our grain of our brain want to plant um SE seedlings or saplings in an organized fashion and straight rows or in nice patterns and I can remember he was on the there is a hillside facing the 10th T of the back te which it stretches us out to 600 yards and there’s quite a slope you go down a slope and up a slope to where you get to the main Fairway and he talked to the the construction people about planting the wire grass in a halfhazard 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 so and it was the same thing with the edges of the fairways um 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 mid1 1950s and so they knew that the water would only be be thrown roughly 30 to 35 yards to the left and right of that single row irrigation so all all of these steps went went into um putting the golf course back to where it was originally 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 come across as rabble rousers 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 they’re really going for this not really any shock uh once I and I I understood pretty quickly from those first couple days what they were trying to do why they were trying to do it the tools they had at their at their disposal um and I realized this was a fascinating story to be able to watch this and but I knew that it it would be shocking to the members to the resort guests 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 and what had made it so natural back from the early days and and Pinehurst fell prey to do many other golf courses of just this subliminal desire to make it look green um you know and Ben crenchaw I promise you holds Augusta National in high reference having won one the Masters there and he still hosts the the the Champions dinner um I mean he he reveres the place and the spirit and the in the traditions of the Masters but he and he and Bill both will tell you that the Masters and Augusta in a sense do the game of golf a disservice because the golf course is so perfect it is so great it is so manicured and this one idic weekend every April the entire golf world stops what it’s doing it sits and watches in in in reverence you know to this Cathedral of golf in in Augusta Georgia and they say well isn’t this what golf is all about you know this perfection not realizing that that this kind of green Perfection is beyond the um accessibility and the financial um ability of most golf clubs and most Resorts and this demand for perfect green is just not real realistic in the game of golf that’s why and that’s pineur was as guilty as anybody else of let’s make this green and pretty let’s be green and pretty and and um Ben kensaw had a just had a great um comparison he liked to use with the fairways they look 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 when you finally got to play the course after it was restored what most impressed you about the renewed or refreshed playing experience there number one was How firm it played um you know there was it was not as thick and Lush as it had been and you know there there’s kind of a distance is sort of a double-edged sword I mean if if if you hit it 30 yards more right down the middle of the Fairway that 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 cuz I mean you know if you were on a tea and you you pulled it a little bit in the rough you could just you know grab an ad 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 can now you know you’ve got 200 some odd yards of of mystery waiting well what kind of Li am I going to get am I going to get lucky and am I going to be in a a nice um clean area of of hard pan sand and 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 compress the ball and and pick it right up off the sand or am I going to be stamy by a tuft of wire grass and my is my ball going to be sitting in a tuft of Wiregrass and I’m going to have to kind of catch it 3 in off the ground there’s just all kind of variables to it so that’s number one and then the width of the fairways uh was was just much different the the fairways had gone from roughly 23 to 25 yards of width to now they were 35 to 40 yards wide so you had some room that you could if the pin was on the right side of the 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 um so the combination of the taught Fairways the width and the Mystery of the Wiregrass those were the key things that uh were’re different about it right off the bat something that really impresses me about the course as it is now is yes it’s width the Fairway width but in the landing Zone for drives those Fairways are often often moving in really unexpected ways like jogging One Direction or another or there’s a 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 I guess they had straightened out and they had narrowed up so that absolutely what what what Donna Ross was so good about was Working The Angles and you know going left to right right to left uh you know sometimes two directions on on on one hole and so given that width um um and and add the taught Fairways uh to it also 2014 was a little drier than normal uh we we’ve had more um of an average spring so far so I don’t think the course will will play quite as firm as it did in 2015 but the the width will certainly be different than the than the course was in 2005 so that’s certainly an element of the uh of of the presentation that will be fun to watch um in next week so I’d like to pick out a couple of holes and maybe just discuss each in a little more depth mhm maybe starting with the first hole the opening hole people are going to get familiar with it during the US Open it’ll be the first challenge that players face what are some of the features of the first hole that you think people should pay attention to well number one you’ve got plenty of of room to drive the ball um you know it’s it’s it’s a wide Fairway the right side of the Fairway is is the best look at the green uh 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 um it it’s not it’s not round and right from the very start you’re going to find that if you do not landay your ball on the crest 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 the hollows to the right and if you miss it to the right you’re going to be faced with with that decision which is uh the ultimate decision for the good golfer and and one thing that Martin kimer did so well in 2014 was he pretty much said at the beginning of the week I’m going to putt from off the fairways or off the greens and so he 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 uh into the edge of the of the of the green there on the right of number one hit it into the the UPS slope and then let it uh little run out so that first hole you’re going to get um you know you’re going to be hitting a short iron into the green so it’s not a particularly difficult hole but then the the second hole is a much much longer hole um you know although even though it was designed to be a drive in a long iron the players today will hit driver nine irons into the the second hole 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 life time I believe the latest addition to the course correct four and five used to be the first and ninth hole of what was the number five course which was not a full a 18 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 Piner number 7even is and in fact reys Jones when he was building number seven in the 1980s 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 Mr Ross built the 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 40s and for the 1951 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 1999 US Open um in 2005 I believe um they they run parallel to each other four goes out five comes back and the the land to the the far end of the fourth green and the 5T that actually was where the original World Golf Hall of Fame was positioned when it was first opened in 1973 it’s been since tore down and now of course uh interesting what goes around comes around and the Hall of Fame has gone to Florida now it’s come back to Pinehurst uh but it’s much closer to the resort Clubhouse but anyway to to get back to the iteration now number four is long par four five is a short par five U Mike Davis made the change going into the 2014 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 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 par 4 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 T quite a bit back right uh they did build a a new te um and in fact if the Hall of Fame had still been there they would not been able to have accessed that land where they did build build a new te but but but you’re right that second shot is is an interesting one because the Fairway 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 Fair way you can roll down into a a bunker or down into the waist area down to the left and then you can have a a very challenging shot um coming off the hard pan sand or out of the bunker up the hill to a very difficult grain yeah it’s a great hole next hole I’d like to zero in on I mean there we 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 out to you about this hole the shallowness of the green how wide it is and how you have got to really nail the the distance on it number one um one of the great hole locations on the golf course is that farle location just over the bunker on the left where you know if if you if you don’t take enough Club you’re in the bunker um a stark uphill shot not a lot of room to work with if you’ve got too much then you go over the green down toward the road uh that borders the the number the course seven uh neighborhood and the Far Far edge of the number two course so you know one of the great things about number two is that it doesn’t come back to the uh clubhouse um 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 uh property for the number seven course but um that it’s it’s an absolutely gorgeous hole um 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 um you know the bill Cy used to call the bunkers Tiddly Wings bunkers because they were just round and perfect in shape and they they put the bunkers back into um you know and one of the resources I didn’t mention earlier was that they were able to locate some aerial photography from the 1940s that showed the shape shape of the bunkers and the and the shape of the fairways and so they were able to use those as reference points so the in my book The the Golden Age of Pinehurst that chronicled this restoration and the evolution of the golf course U you know we’ve got several series of before and after pictures and one of the best sets is of the ninth hole and just how how neat and organized and um non Pinehurst it looked before the restoration and then how much it hearkened back to um uh the early days of pin Hurst and there’s a a great photo of Donald Ross hitting a shot off the ninth hole uh to the green and and what K and crenell I think did was was very much um um in in sympathy and in accuracy to what the course what that hole looked like when Donald Ross played it many years ago you know something else that’s notable about number nine as well as numbers four and five is is the movement of the land on all three of those holes it’s a little bit more dramatic than a lot of the land that the course occupies but I think part of what’s so neat about pineh hurst’s property is the variety that you find in the topography because you get some of those more dramatic movements like you get on forign five and N then you have some subtler subtler land that’s still kind of rolling and doing interesting things then you have a couple of holes that are flat 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 no there’s there’s some um interesting subtle movement of of of the ground there one of my favorite features on the whole course is on the tenth Hole uh about 80 to 100 yards from the Fairway is just a little dip in the Fairway um I’ve asked people why do you think it’s there and and if you look at old Maps um the the 10th 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 hole so I believe that little swell was in front of where the old green was before the 10th hole was stretched out and became a par five there used to be you used to play what is now the 10th 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 11th hole which is why as I mentioned earlier 11 through 18 are in the same spot as they always have been the 10th hole was always there but it was different numbers and it was a shorter hole at one point so I’ve I’ve gotten away from your question we had to talk about that little swell on the 10th hole but that’s just one of the neat little neat little things of of the golf course that um um it is it’s it’s it’s gentle typography but there is some interesting movement on there for sure I love that observation about 10 because I did notice that little Contour right in basically the layup zone for the par five 10th 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 valley of sin type of situation right in front of the green but now I think the way that it functions is so interesting because it’s it’s that that Swale is basically right where the safest layup is on the whole you know if you’re if you’re playing a layup shot on your second shot on the 10th hole then the the best place to be if if you’re a conservative player is essentially right in the middle of that sale 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 riskier and so it just kind of messes with your head a little bit and i’ I’ve seen cor and crenchaw 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 and another of the Topo features that have interesting are there or the the ground elements is the 13th 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 a reason for that hill to be there um you know if you walk to the right if you walk off to the right and Beyond the 13th green you’re essentially on the same level where the practice teaing area is not the practice tea 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 beat balls beat balls off of it from you know back in the first part of the 1900s I love that Maniac Hill so getting toward the the finish of the course now I I love the entire back nine at Piner number two and something I something specific I I love about it is how the routing kind of makes you feel as though you’re getting lost in the property it has this sort of wandering character the holes are constantly changing direction and by the time you get to the middle of the back nine you’re just not sure where you are in relation to where you started or where you’re going and there’s this this wonderful feeling of kind of pleasant confusion that over comes you uh David mlay kid calls this becoming bemused in in the middle of a golf course and you really get that sense uh as you’re playing the back nine at Pinehurst but uh getting to the end of the course 16 through 18 such a great sequence of holes what do you think is notable there in that one two three finish well let’s Pi a one two three four finish and go back to 15 because 15 is just a a bear of a par three with that green it’s so hard the 15th 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 uh very difficult to to hold and then 16 you know for us mere mortals it’s a great par five I mean I love it as a par five it’s always been a par four for the US Open um pay Stewart made a made a great long par saving putt there in the final round of the 99 open um the has the 16th hole has the one water feature on the entire course and it wasn’t designed to be that way it just the the lake or the pond in front of the tea 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 um that’s the only you know one of the greatest golf courses in the country and and water does not come into play at all um for anybody unless you just cold top a t- shot they’re on the 16th hole and um 16 17 and 18 run in three different directions one goes west 17 comes back in the opposite direction and then 18 goes um up the hill so you’ve got a very long Par Four you’ve got a medium length par three and you’ve got a medium length Par Four up the hill so you’ve got a lot of different lengths you got um um 16 goes a little right to left 18 goes left to right and 17 is a is a great short par 4 with a terrific bunker front right uh works much the same as the bunker on nine does front left the 18th green obviously an iconic location right next to the clubhouse and I think people have a or most golf fans at least have a picture in their mind of what that whole setting looks like I think something that maybe gets under discussed is the contouring of that green and how creative it is do you have a way of describing how that green is molded essentially there’s um you know just a a little bit of a you know sometimes they call it a river or a little um undulation that that runs through the green and and separates it from Back to Front um and you you need to play to the back portion of the green or the front portion of the green and the uh the the location for the final round of the US Open generally is back right that’s where it was where where Payne Stewart made made his putt so it’s um it’s it’s a it’s in keeping with all the greens on the golf course is in that um you know there are fall-offs around the greens you have to be able to read the subtleties of it and in the setting with what they have done at Pinehurst over the last 10 to 12 years uh they built a um a restaurant in a watering hole called the deuce that is right Behind the Green used to there was um it was a 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 10 12 years ago I can’t remember exactly when they built the deuce which is what they call the the bar in the restaurant there and they’ve got a lot of seating there out on the bar and so any afternoon you’ve got 50 to 100 people out eating drinking and watching players come through on the 18th green so no matter who you are you have got a gallery on the 18th hole of number two and you can also over to the members Club to the right You’ got the resort guest 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 um they will give you an Applause or they will give you raspberries if you chunk a chip from the back um you know so it it it adds an entirely new element to that play number 18 of number two yeah the people who were there on the day that I played the course a little while ago were were pretty amused by uh my my Adventures on and around that green uh so that is definitely a part of the challenge now uh so Lee thank you so much for for joining me for this conversation lots of fascinating detail there uh you are a prolific author and I know you must have some things coming out around the 2024 Us open at Pinehurst so what should people look for from you well my most recent book Garrett thanks for asking is called uh good walks um it is a book I love to walk when I play golf and U Pinehurst number two is one of the ultimate walking golf courses um you know one thing I should mention is that years back Piner 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 have they allow you to walk and carry your own bag they even allow you to take uh pull 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 it’s just the way the game is meant to be played so anyway I wrote a book about playing 18 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 uh that’s my latest book and you can find it online anywhere thank you so much Lee good enjoy the chat Garrett look forward to seeing you in Pinehurst again soon absolutely yeah
1 Comment
a great tar heel!