The Golden Age of Pinehurst The Story of the Rebirth of No. 2
Lee Pace
There is something in the air of Pinehurst that makes it insidiously attractive; all who breathe it want more of it. Here, golf is the sport of sports; experts are counted by the dozens and enthusiasts of all kinds by hundreds. Every weekday on the links may be seen by many parties of players of both sexes and all ages, oblivious to everything but the fascination and charm of this most healthful and invigorating of all sports. Golf is popular everywhere, but particularly so at Pinehurst, where climactic conditions are ideal for the game and where players have the advantage of a course that is unquestionably the finest in the south, and which compares favorably with, if it does not surpass, any other in the United States. H.C. Fownes 1901
w
The Golden Age To understand where Coore & Crenshaw are headed and sales of apparatuses and syrups found on every Main with their 2010-11 restoration of Pinehurst No. 2, it’s Street in America in the late 1800s—the apothecary shop incumbent to understand where the golf course has been. (today’s drugstore or pharmacy). He concocted syrups for It lies today in Pinehurst through a fascinating series of root beer and ginger ale and built the grand and ornate coincidences, circumstances and twists of fate that have fountains used to dispense them. As he neared the age of evolved over more than a century. sixty, Tufts turned his business operations over to subor In truth, there is no good reason for Pinehurst to exdinates. He was active in philanthropic work and sought ist. There is no good reaon behalf of the Invalid Aid son that a patch of land Society of Boston to locate a known by locals in the wintertime health resort for late-1800s as the “pine those suffering from conbarrens” should one day sumption; he envisioned evolve into such a magnifa location not as far from icent center for the care, New England as Florida, nurturing and passiona two-day train journey at ate pursuit of the ancient the time. sport of golf. There is no Taylor was a sharp busiseaside port, no river landnessman himself and had ing and no urban enclave opened an insurance agency of commerce and popula- Billy Joe Patton plays out of greenside bunker on the 17th during his run in Wilmington in 1866 folof three North and South Amateur championships from 1954-63. tion nearby. There is no lowing the Civil War. He cooling mountain to have beckoned the lowlanders in traveled extensively throughout the Eastern Seaboard, the summer. and having a gregarious personality, was wont to strike Yet Pinehurst came into being—the butterfly flapping up conversations with perfect strangers. One day in its wings, if you will—on a chance meeting on a train 1895, pure happenstance landed Taylor and Tufts on in the late-19th century between James Walker Tufts of the same train. They struck up a conversation, and Tufts Boston and Colonel Walker Taylor of Wilmington. explained his vision to Taylor. Tufts made his fortune in patenting, manufacturing Taylor, legend has it, suggested that the train station
2
The Golden Age of Pinehurst
37
Among the lady golfers who enjoyed their annual visits to Pinehurst were Babe Zaharias and Patty Berg (far left) and Peggy Kirk Bell (far right), the latter of whom would later settle in the Sandhills and own the golf course and resort at Pine Needles.
52
The Golden Age of Pinehurst
To understand where Coore & Crenshaw are headed with their 2010-11 restoration of Pinehurst No. 2, it’s incumbent to understand where the golf course has been. It lies today in Pinehurst through a fascinating series of coincidences, circumstances and twists of fate that have evolved over more than a century. In truth, there is no good reason for Pinehurst to exist. There is no good reason that a patch of land known by locals in the late-1800s as the “pine barrens” should one day evolve into such a magnificent center for the care, nurturing and passionate pursuit of the ancient sport of golf. There is no seaside port, no river landing and no urban enclave of commerce and population nearby. There is no cooling mountain to have beckoned the lowlanders in the summer. Yet Pinehurst came into being—the butterfly flapping its wings, if you will—on a chance meeting on a train in the late-19th century between James Walker Tufts of Boston and Colonel Walker Taylor of Wilmington. Tufts made his fortune in patenting, manufacturing and sales of apparatuses and syrups found on every Main Street in America in the late 1800s—the apothecary shop (today’s drugstore or pharmacy). He concocted syrups for root beer and ginger ale and built the grand and ornate fountains used to dispense them. As he neared the age of sixty, Tufts turned his business operations over to subordinates. He was active in philanthropic work and sought on behalf of the Invalid Aid Society of Boston to locate a wintertime health resort for those suffering from consumption; he envisioned a location not as far from New England as Florida, a two-day train journey at the time. Taylor was a sharp businessman himself and had opened an insurance agency in Wilmington in 1866 following the Civil War. He traveled extensively throughout the Eastern Seaboard, and having a gregarious personality, was wont to strike up conversations with perfect strangers. One day in 1895, pure happenstance landed Taylor and Tufts on the same train. They struck up a conversation, and Tufts explained his vision to Taylor. Taylor, legend has it, suggested that the train station in Southern Pines might be a good starting point for Tufts’ search for a site for his new resort. It was right on two of the nation’s major north-south transportation arteries—the railroad and U.S. Hwy. 1. There was The Golden Age of Pinehurst
53
The best golfing grasses vary in color. They may be red, brown, blue, dark green, light green, yellow, and at times even white and gray. A golf course that is consisted entirely of one shade of green would be merely ugly. There is great charm and beauty in the varying shades of color on a golf course.
Alister MacKenzie
The fifth and sixth holes at Dornoch (fifth green to the left, sixth to the right) sit beneath a gorse-covered hillside in the Scottish Highlands.
72
The Golden Age of Pinehurst 73
people would be in church this morning,” he said. “We can’t,” one of them replied, then nodded to a man standing a few yards away. “The minister’s right there.” The sport of golf is quite the religious experience in Dornoch, the Scottish hamlet with profound physical and emotional alliances with Pinehurst and the Sandhills. Both are small and remote (though Dornoch more so than Pinehurst). Golf is the mother’s milk of daily life at both addresses. Both have world-renowned courses—Royal Dornoch and Pinehurst No. 2, and it’s perhaps no coincidence that in 2011 they were ranked No. 15 (Pinehurst) and No. 16 (Dornoch) in GOLF magazine’s Top 100 World Courses. There is no noise pollution or visual obscenity in either. And, of course, there is the considerable thread of one Donald James Ross. Ross was born, raised and introduced to the sport and the business of golf in Dornoch, furthering his education under Old Tom Morris at St. Andrews. He immigrated to the United States at the age of twenty-seven, first settling in Boston but soon connecting with James Walker Tufts and his fledging resort in the North Carolina Sandhills. Pinehurst’s sandy soil reminded him of Dornoch, and the region’s signature wire grass was reminiscent of the ever-present Scottish whins. The design values Ross first absorbed at Dornoch followed him throughout nearly four hundred North American course creations. “You can see the characteristics of Dornoch in Pinehurst No. 2,” says Tom Weiskopf, winner of some two dozen professional events and architect of more than fifty courses. “The perched greens are certainly a similarity, though some of the greens at Dornoch are more of a flat grade. This is a look everyone is doing now. What would you call it? Retro? Retro 20th century? It’s out of respect to the great architects like Donald Ross and Alister MacKenzie that everyone today is trying to capture that classic look.” Americans limiting their Scottish golf excursions to the trophy courses of the British Open rota—St. Andrews, Turnberry, Troon, Muirfield and the like—are missing the experience of their lives if they let Dornoch’s remote location, some two hundred miles north of the capital city of Edinburgh, spook them from the effort. The A9 highway snakes its way northward, through villages like Killiecrankie The Golden Age of Pinehurst
73
John Sutherland (opposite) was Donald Ross’s mentor at the club; Ross (back row, second from left above) poses with family members on a return trip to Dornoch in the early 1900s. The antique box of Dunlop golf balls are among the artifacts on display at a replica clubmaking shop at the Dornoch History Museum.
82
The Golden Age of Pinehurst
and Kingussie, beneath the barren mountain peaks and alongside the salmon and mussel-rich River Tay. There are no billboards, just an occasional square sign with the outline of a cow, signaling motorists to watch for wayward farm animals. Sheep chew their cud in a pasture to the left; acres of blazing yellow rapeseed scream from the right. Castles and cathedrals and whisky distilleries dot the landscape. Pinehurst owner Richard Tufts made the drive in the 1950s—and this was before the construction of two bridges trimmed the journey considerably. So profound was the effect of the Scottish golf experience and the umbilical cord that nourished Pinehurst in the early days that he named his 1962 history of the resort, The Scottish Invasion. Tufts dedicated the book to “that most important person, the amateur golfer,” and included a page on “The Pinehurst Ideal.” That was his grandfather’s vision of establishing a “small friendly community where those in need of it could find health-giving relaxation.” The fulfillment of that vision was, over time, entrusted to the game of golf. “Golf came to America as a great amateur sport, rich with tradition and enjoying the best possible standards of ethics and good sportsmanship in its play,” Tufts wrote. Tufts also talked architect Pete Dye and journalist Herbert Warren Wind into the trip north to Dornoch. Wind wrote about the experience in The New Yorker in 1964, prompting many more Americans to make the pilgrimage. Ben Crenshaw has been to Dornoch and said he “very nearly didn’t come back.” David Fay, the USGA executive director for two decades, made the journey and played fifty-four holes in one day. Craig Stadler came north and told the locals, “Don’t change a thing.” Two more Americans who have made the drive up A9—and, in fact, did stay—are Don Greenberg and Chris Surmonte. Greenberg came to Dornoch from California in 1985 on vacation, joined the club and now splits his time between Dornoch and Tampa. Surmonte grew up in New Jersey, loved golf and, while traveling to various Brit-
ish links courses in 1997, was told he could probably get a job caddying at Dornoch. He was smitten and has been there ever since. Greenberg cites the par-four fifteenth hole, a short one of just over three hundred yards with a green sitting cliffside above the beach, as a hole that reflects the aesthetics and challenges of links golf and the kind of holes Ross built in the United States. “This course was Donald Ross’s introduction to golf,” he says. “I have played a number of Ross courses in America, and you very much see Dornoch in them. When I was caddying here, I would walk people to the mound on fifteen, drop a ball a hundred yards from the green, look around and tell them, ‘This is what Donald Ross and Dornoch are all about.’ “You can make anything from a two to a seven without hardly doing anything wrong. You can run it up, lob it up—it all depends on the wind and the pin position. You can knock it fifteen feet from the hole and still walk away with double bogey, not even hitting a poor putt. When the breeze picks up, it definitely affects balls on the greens, and fifteen is one of the more exposed greens.” “Dornoch has that perfect blend of charm and challenge,” adds Surmonte, who now runs Luigi’s, likely Dornoch’s best restaurant. “All golfers love it—from the pros down to twentyfive handicaps. You can go to Carnoustie, where you have your hat handed to you, or you can play holiday golf, where it’s charming. But if you want charm and challenge and eighteen perfect holes, Dornoch is it. You come all the way up here and you’re rewarded—the views, the village, the golf. Dornoch has it all.” The best vantage point for the Dornoch experience is the Royal Golf Hotel, where the front door is about fifty paces from the first tee. The lounge has nearly a thousand bag tags from golf courses around the world pinned to eaves above the bartender’s area—and one from Pinehurst is front and center. There’s a room off the lobby devoted to drying your clubs and clothes quickly after a squall, and the laundry
The Golden Age of Pinehurst
83
Among the many legacies of the Dedman family has been returning championship golf to Pinehurst; the grandstands were jam-packed in 2005 when Tiger Woods hit his approach to the eighteenth green.
136
The Golden Age of Pinehurst
preserve order amidst change and change amidst order.’ That’s pretty profound. Don Sr. had an incredible love for the game. But for him and his real passion for the game, I don’t think Pinehurst would have made the progress we did in the time frames we did. It took someone with a steady hand on the tiller to navigate through the changes that needed to be made.” The Dedmans have shared a love of poetry and quotations (Bob has published two volumes of his favorite passages), but their essential personalities are quite at variance. While Dedman Sr. was totally at ease with a microphone and an audience, the somewhat bashful Dedman Jr. has had to practice his oratory skills and his comfort level in groups. While Senior was gifted in the art of finding and making the deal, Junior is skilled in executing the details the next day, the next week, the next month. “No question about it,” Dedman Sr. once said. “Bob is more organized, more detail oriented that I ever was.” It’s fair to say the legacy of Dedman Sr. was his purchase of Pinehurst and the resort’s subsequent rebirth. The legacy of Dedman Jr. will now be a similar renaissance of the prized No. 2 course. “Bob Dedman took a big risk in this,” Bill Coore says. “I hope in time the Dedman era will be as revered as the Tufts era was.” “The Dedmans are like the ‘anti Wall Street,” adds Mike Davis, the long-time USGA staffer promoted to executive director in 2011. “They’re not worried about the next quarter. They’re looking at the long term.” Indeed, Dedman is proud that his family’s stewardship of Pinehurst is now more than a quarter of a century old. That longevity is starting to make a dent in the century-plus existence of the resort. “You have to have an incredible appreciation for the traditions of this place,” Bob says. “It is an incredible place to me and to many other people in the world. We have reverence for the past, while at the same time, we need to evolve. Pinehurst has seen a lot of glory in its 115 years, but I firmly believe its best years are ahead.” w
The Golden Age of Pinehurst
137
“IT’S A BEAUTIFUL DAY ...” A
t the opposite end of the phone line, is flesh and blood. There is a real person— not a computer navigated by a series of keyboard punches. “It’s a beautiful day in Pinehurst.” Ring the main number at The Carolina Hotel and Pinehurst Resort and you find Gloria Spencer or one of her fellow phone operators. “People say I make their day, pump them up a little bit,” says Spencer, who began working the resort phone lines in 1985. “It makes me feel good to say it. Rain or snow, it doesn’t matter, people call and say, ‘I called just to hear you say that.’ It’s a personal touch that’s important.” Spencer and a staff of five operators work the phones around the clock, presenting a subliminal message to callers that Pinehurst is a better place than any they might be calling from. “Pinehurst to me means serenity, it’s peace, it’s the people,” Gloria says. “When I first came to work here, I thought I was going on a picnic, it’s such a place of beauty. Pinehurst is such a peaceful, calming place.” Another signature greeting of Pinehurst is the three hundred yards of Carolina Vista, the lane that runs from Hwy. 2 north to The Carolina Hotel. The stately white building sits grandly in the distance with its copper roof and signature cupola, framed by a canopy of seventy-eight hollies and pines and hundreds of flowers nestled along the street. Travelers often have driven from distant parts or ridden for ninety minutes from the airport in Raleigh and are
170
The Golden Age of Pinehurst
taken aback as they pass from the here-and-now into antique nirvana. Jack Kennally has worked on the transportation staff at Pinehurst for a decade and has heard first-time visitors grouse about the long drive from Raleigh-Durham International. “They ask, ‘Why’d they build it so far from the airport?’” says Kennally, who then tells them Pinehurst was built before the airport. That gives them some perspective and puts them in the proper frame of mind when his shuttle turns off the round-about and winds its way up the Vista. “They love the architecture of the houses along the lane,” Kennally says. “They say, ‘Oh, it’s lovely.’ They imagine what it looked like back in the thirties, that kind of thing. The big dome, the copper cupola, are very striking. The drive up the Vista sets a nice tone for the visit.” Carolina Hotel General Manager Scott Brewton drives out of his way each day coming to work—eschewing a more direct route into the employee parking lot in back of the hotel in favor of entering via Hwy. 2 and Carolina Vista and passing by the old world grandeur of Ailsa House, Beacon House, Heartpine House and Little House. “You swing off the traffic circle and there’s a gentle rise, and it’s like the hotel comes out of the ground,” Brewton says. “There are flowers on your left and right, people walking dogs or carrying tennis racquets. It’s a nice visual to start every day.” May Wood, a golfer at Vanderbilt University
The Golden Age of Pinehurst
171
in 2002 and the winner that year of the Women’s North and South Amateur, remembers her first drive along Carolina Vista. “It was electrifying,” she says. “I almost teared up the first time I saw it. It was the most beautiful place I’d ever been.” A smile and warm welcome at the bell stand continue the transition from the kinetic energy outside the bubble of Pinehurst. “The first thing we want to do is say, ‘You’re at home, relax and come in,’” says Eddie Mitchell, a long-time bellman. “It’s our job to make sure people decompress as soon as they get here. If we do it right, by the time you get to the front desk, you’re ready to rest and relax.” The white rocking chairs around the porch wrapped to the south and west sides of The Carolina take relaxation to a higher notch. They’re perfect early on a Sunday morning with coffee and a newspaper, late in the afternoon with a good novel or at midnight over cordials and fond memories of the day past. The beautiful day theme carries from the hotel into the Village, where there are no right angles in the roads and no large signs on the shops and you half expect to see Beaver Cleaver or Barney Fife walking down the sidewalk. James Tufts’ New England roots dominate the architecture—the arched doorways, the Colonial Revival facades, the sharply pitched roofs and the gables, the cedar and redwood
172
The Golden Age of Pinehurst
trim, the white picket fences, the cabins built of juniper logs, the original heart-pine columns of the “Casino” building (now a real-estate agent’s office). Pinehurst has no drive-up windows, but one bank has a “Walk-Up Garden.” And then there are the colors, the two best being the forest green throughout the village and the sepia on the old photographs preserving the history— from the halls of The Carolina Hotel to the file books in the Tufts Archives. “Each day you spend in Pinehurst, you escape the real world,” says clothier Chris Dalrymple, who owns Gentleman’s Corner. “You mark it off as a day you succeeded.” Scott Straight has visited Pinehurst frequently from his home in French Lick, Ind., sometimes as a guest of the gathering hosted each fall by Fluor Corporation and other times on a spring golf outing with friends and family. When he first came in the early 2000s, cellular service was spotty in the Sandhills. “It’s like going back in time, back to a much simpler time,” Straight says. “I couldn’t believe it when I first visited. Here I was in this little village, this golf resort, with no cell service, no e-mail, totally removed from the world.” He smiles, noting the evolution of technology. “Unfortunately, somebody went and put a cell tower nearby,” he says. Still, Pinehurst is in a beautiful world of its own.
The Golden Age of Pinehurst
173
Playing a round of golf is not merely a question of getting around, like traveling over a race course or
walking around the block. It’s rather a question of taking nine or eighteen separate and distinct little journeys, each of which presents its own distinct pictures and its own distinct problems as part of the grand tour. Charles Banks 174
The Golden Age of Pinehurst
The pre-restoration seventeenth green (inset) was enveloped in smooth bunker dimensions and thick rough. Today the look is anything but.
The Golden Age of Pinehurst
175
green of the long and difficult par-four eighth hole with his second shot. And his third rolled off the back of the green. “There should be a special stat for golf at Pinehurst No. 2—‘GV’ for ‘greens visited,’” quipped David Fay, executive director of the USGA. “It’s not the hardest course I’ve ever played, but it may be the hardest to get the ball close to the hole on the green,” Tom Watson said. Payne Stewart reflected on having to hit a two-iron on the fifth hole in 1999. “You look at the size of the green, and then you look at the real size of the green, and they’re two different things,” he said. “You’ve got a rectangle that’s maybe twelve by twenty-five feet, and it’s the only place you can keep the ball on the green.” “It’s the most draining course I’ve played in a long time,” Lee Westwood added. “People sometimes ask what’s the hardest course I’ve ever played,” said two-time Open champion Lee Janzen. “Now I know.”
242
Those greens combined with the chipping areas, the flow of the holes and the strategic nuances are what led Tom Weiskopf to venture in a 1995 conversation that Pinehurst No. 2 is a better year-round test than Augusta National. “Augusta National is good one week a year,” Weiskopf said. “Augusta does not compare to this golf course. Augusta is only such one week a year. Augusta only shows its teeth and demands when the greens are so fast and with those unbelievably difficult pin positions. “I’ve played Augusta two or three weeks before [the Masters] and it’s a piece of cake—a piece of cake. Pinehurst No. 2 is never a piece of cake.” The template for U.S. Open set-ups since the 1950s called for long, stringy rough to border fairways and greens. A seven-iron approach that missed a green five feet to the right at Olympic Club in the 1998 Open required one shot and one shot alone—a lob wedge hit hard enough to dislodge the ball from its lie. Pinehurst presented the golfers with choices as they contemplated recovery shots. The
The Golden Age of Pinehurst
putter was the predominant choice in 1999; the USGA allowed for a slightly longer cut of grass in 2005, enabling players to more easily get a wedge under the ball and broaden the universe of pitches and chips. “You have so many options that you can actually get confused,” Woods said in 1999. One of his options was a putter with four degrees of loft and a three-wood with fifteen degrees. In the opening round, Woods used a three-wood for chipping and successfully managed one up-and-down; on the weekend a similar try rolled over the green and resulted in a double bogey. “When you have to hit a putt that hard and try to judge the pace, you take it back further than you normally do and you’re not used to the motion,” Woods said. “You don’t get a chance to do that very often, unless you play on links courses in Europe. But a three-wood motion, you can hit it easier and it gets up the hill easier. “Every hole here, over the green is not good. If you hit the ball in the rough, play short. If it comes out hot, great. If not, I’m chip-
ping straight up the hill or putting or bumping-and-running or whatever it is.” Some observers looked at the greens and said they were too domed on their horizons, that they were not the greens left by Ross upon his death in April 1948. Golf architect Pete Dye, who played No. 2 frequently during World War II while stationed at Fort Bragg in nearby Fayetteville, says the application of top-dressing over the years raised the surfaces beyond their profiles from the mid-20th century. Certainly the vision of the plateau green is accurate. They are evident in many of the greens at Dornoch, where Ross grew up, and some at St. Andrews, where he worked for a year under Old Tom Morris. Morris tweaked the design of the Old Course and was wholly responsible for the New Course, and plateau greens are key parts of those designs. Ross spoke of the importance of the chipping areas around the greens, and the sand he excavated to create them had to go somewhere. Trucking it off was not as simple in 1935 as it is today. “I think everyone realizes some of the crowning of these greens
The turtleback greens and hollows around them are reflected well in this elevated view of the first green.
The Golden Age of Pinehurst
243
“Pinehurst is more than good golf courses. It is a state of mind and a feeling for the game, its aesthetics, courtesies and emotions.� William C. Campbell
Distributed by The University of North Carolina Press 116 South Boundary St. Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27514 In Association with the Tufts Archives