GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

On the fourth Saturday in March, a banquet will be held in a room at the Pinehurst Resort to inaugurate two new members of the Carolinas Golf Hall of Fame: David Eger and Don Padgett II. The venue is appropriate to the honorees because it’s just a quick stroll down the weathered steps of the clubhouse to the first tee of the No. 2 course, where Eger won the Donald Ross Junior as a 17-year-old and the North & South Amateur as a 38-year-old, and where Padgett competed in the PGA Tour’s one-and-done 144-hole World Open in 1973.

It’s also a golf course on which both left an indelible administrative imprint — Eger in helping reintroduce No. 2 to the world of competitive golf in the 1990s, and Padgett for his vision to suggest and then oversee the Coore & Crenshaw renovation in 2010-11.

“David was a key voice in the USGA’s decision to take the 1999 U.S. Open to Pinehurst,” says David Fay, the USGA executive director from 1989-2010. “He is someone whose opinions on golf courses were taken most seriously by me and others at the USGA.”

“Don created the vision for restoring No. 2 to is original state, an incredibly gutsy undertaking for a course that had hosted two very successful U.S. Opens,” says Mac Everett, the chairman of the Presidents Council that led corporate sales efforts for the 2014 U.S. Open and U.S. Women’s Open at Pinehurst. “But his vision was only a start. There remained the planning, execution and completion of the project. This is where Don excelled.”

The Carolinas Golf Hall of Fame is an august body comprised of crack golfers from the South Carolina coast (Beth Daniel) to the North Carolina mountains (Billy Joe Patton) to the Sandhills (Peggy Kirk Bell). There are professionals (Raymond Floyd to Betsy Rawls), amateurs (Harvie Ward to Estelle Lawson Page), architects (from Donald Ross to Tom Fazio), club professionals (Dugan Aycock to Gary Schaal) and administrators (Richard Tufts to Hale Van Hoy). In general, two to three new honorees are recognized every other year.

It’s not at all by design but rather providential timing that two with such deep connections to Pinehurst should be recognized one year after Pinehurst staged its fourth U.S. Open, and its first with the sparkling new USGA Golf House Pinehurst and World Golf Hall of Fame buildings sitting in the backdrop.

When Pinehurst and its owner Bob Dedman Sr. were digging their way out of the Diamondhead bankruptcy messiness in the 1980s, Eger remembers the resort presenting itself to the PGA Tour, hat in hand. He was five years into his career with the tour, running tournaments and serving as a rules official, and two of his mentors had deep Pinehurst roots — P.J. Boatwright, who ran USGA competitions, and Clyde Mangum, who lived in Pinehurst in the mid-1900s while running the CGA as executive director.

One day in 1987, Eger got a call from Ron Coffman, the longtime managing editor of Golf World magazine (published in Southern Pines at the time) who was also friends with Don Padgett Sr., who had just been appointed director of golf at Pinehurst.

“Ron invited me to come up and play No. 2 with him and Padge,” Eger says. “I had always thought of Pinehurst as a wonderful, wonderful place, but obviously it fell on hard times for a while. We were playing the course and Padge assured me if the Tour was interested, they would bend over backward to do anything within reason to have another event. Lo and behold, we were looking down the road for a new spot for our Tour Championship. Pinehurst in late October, after it had cooled off and the bent was healthy and firmed up, would be a perfect spot.”

Eger was impressed with everything he saw and heard and reported back to PGA Tour Commissioner Deane Beman. That’s how the 1991 Tour Championship came to be, with Craig Stadler beating Russ Cochran in a playoff for the title. Eger looked at the leaderboard during the final round and noted that only Stadler and Cochran were in red numbers.

“Two players under par,” he mused. “That looks like a U.S. Open.”

A portend of things to come, no doubt.

Fay was in Pinehurst that week, closely inspecting the logistics, the course, the accommodations, the traffic, the galleries and the overall ambience. He came away with a thumbs-up. He believed a U.S. Open at Pinehurst could be “Tracy-and-Hepburnesque, a match made in heaven.” That week led to the announcement less than two years later that the USGA would stage the 1999 U.S. Open at Pinehurst.

“The players loved Pinehurst, but not all of them loved the golf course,” Eger says of that first Tour Championship. “So many didn’t understand this was a golf course where you did not necessarily shoot right at the pin to get the ball close. You had to play these undulations and angles. The sooner they understood that the better. If they refused to buy into that philosophy, they were not going to score well. It was a difficult thing for players accustomed to taking dead aim at a pin to have to aim 30 feet away.” 

Padgett II watched all of this from a distance as he was running the golf operation and later the entire resort at Firestone Country Club through the early 2000s. His father retired at Pinehurst in 2002, and two years later longtime CEO Pat Corso left to establish a club management firm. Padgett II became Pinehurst’s new CEO. He kept a low profile during the 2005 Open, all the prep work having been done before his arrival, but he watched and listened closely.

Padgett, a man who had played three years on the PGA Tour, shot a 66 in the third round of a U.S. Open and kept close ties with current players, had quite the sharp eye. He    was struck by how much the buzz about the golf course seemed to have quieted between Pinehurst’s first and second U.S. Opens.

“The difference between ’99 and ’05 was amazing,” Padgett says. “So much of what you read and heard in ’99 was how great the golf course was. But in ’05, you didn’t hear that.”

Over the next three years, Padgett came to believe that narrowing the fairways of No. 2 and allowing the rough to grow had stripped the course of the essence of the Sandhills and obscured the similarities in the landscape that architect Donald Ross had drawn to his homeland in Scotland. The final nail was playing No. 2 with Lanny Wadkins in June 2008 and Wadkins ripping the course as being a shell of what it was during its so-called “golden era” of the mid-1900s.

That gave Padgett the confidence to suggest to owner Bob Dedman Jr. they flip the palette from the lush green look everyone coveted in golf to a haphazard display of hardpan sand and wire grass, gnarly edged bunkers and fairways watered only with a single-row irrigation system. The work by Coore & Crenshaw began in February 2010 and was complete 13 months later.

Eger, who left golf administration in the late 1990s to play the PGA Champions Tour — collecting four tournament wins there — was among the first golfers to play No. 2 in March 2011 after the course had been closed all winter

“The distinction between grass and the sand is wonderful,” he said. “It’s the way golf courses from the golden age looked. Pinehurst had that distinctive look of the scrub rough areas and wire grass. Putting it back took a lot of courage, but ultimately it was the right thing to do.”

The modern age of Pinehurst No. 2 is 40 years in the making. The Carolinas Golf Hall of Fame is properly saluting two of its major protagonists.