Tag: Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

The Golfing Curmudgeon

Things you won’t find in the rule book

By Lee Pace

The caddie meant well. He was an extrovert with a bag on his shoulder, a rangefinder in his bib and an innate desire to please. He was not even carrying my bag, but he was pulling for me every shot of the way.

Settle!

Get legs!

Fly, baby!

Spit it out!

It was restraint and composure of epic proportions that prevented me from getting in his face.

Do not talk to my shots.

I know I hit it fat. I know I skinned it over the green. I know it’s flying into the woods.

But your well-meaning exhortations accomplish one thing: They rub salt into my wounds. And golf inflicts enough pain as it is.

While we’re at it, here’s some other stuff that chafes my arse:

Get to the first tee on time. If you don’t know the secret already, you’re not going to find it with a dozen more practice balls.

Get out of the stupid cart and walk. Over three June days in plus 90-degree heat, I joined two separate groups of 50-plus golfers and we all walked. One pushed a trolley and one flirted with heat stroke, but the physical challenge was part of the attraction. There is no greater tired than having walked, carried and busted 80. (OK, I am not militant on this point, I’ll ride where etiquette or local rules mandate. I would simply prefer to walk.)

Your jokes are wonderful. Your name-dropping is fascinating. Just put a lid on it when it’s your turn to hit. And have your glove already affixed to your hand when you’re up.

Spot your ball on the green with a penny or at the least a small plastic marker that most clubs provide on the first tee or at check-in. A penny is small and doesn’t reflect sunlight and it’s been good enough for Jack Nicklaus, Davis Love III and Paul Azinger. (Nicklaus, incidentally, carries three pennies during a round; Love uses only 1965 or 1966 coins; and Azinger places his penny heads up with Lincoln looking at the hole.) Spare me your prized Kennedy half-dollar that bounces the sun like a prism or that souvenir poker chip that looks like a battleship.

Do not concede yourself that 6-footer for par when it doesn’t count for the team bet, then write it on the card and begin to think your handicap is halfway legitimate.

Do not use golf as a verb.

A single in a cart? You do not exist.

Just because the professionals playing for millions of dollars on the hardest courses under suffocating pressure have elaborate pre-shot routines and take six hours to play doesn’t give you license to play monkey-see, monkey-do. Pick a club, pick a line, give it a nice rehearsal and hit the damn ball.

Memo to TV announcers, tour pros and architects: It’s a good hole and a good course and a good shot. Must we say golf hole and golf course and golf shot? I mean, it’s not a tennis course, now is it?

Manage your temper. Unless you are working at golf to feed your family or betting more than you can afford to lose, this is a game. You play a game. Treat it as such. Count your blessings that you have the opportunity to be out in the fresh air with friends in the first place.

Learn to eye the 100-, 150- and 200-yard markers and estimate your distance. It’s not advanced trigonometry. You can figure out you’re 135 yards from the center of the green with pinpoint accuracy with some educated eyeballing.

If you don’t have an official handicap, don’t give me an “average” score on the first tee. Tell me your three best recent scores. After all, a handicap is not about averaging your scores; it’s about gauging your potential.

If you are going to give me the line on a putt, give me the speed as well. The former is worthless without the latter.

If I want color commentary, I’ll gladly listen to David Feherty. Beyond that, your scores speak for themselves; I don’t need an explanation on every shot. And if you insist on providing pithy little bromides throughout the round, invent some new material. “Nice putt, Alice,” is a wee bit shopworn.

Unless you are my partner, what club I hit on a par-3 is none of your business.

What not to wear: white golf shoes in the winter (you wouldn’t wear white shoes into a restaurant in December, would you?); white footies with black shoes (and vice versa); shortie-shorts; golf sandals; and XXX shirts if you’re a medium (that went out in the ’90s).

Quit hyperventilating after running a putt past the hole. If you’ll stay focused and follow its path, you’ll have a free read on the break coming back. And if you are gyrating and slamming a club after yanking one into the woods, don’t ask, “Did you get a spot on that one?” By the way, I don’t venture into poison ivy for my ball. I’m sure not going there for yours.

Sorry about that 5-iron landing in the bunker. But you don’t get to hit a practice shot. Ever. And live to tell about it.

OK. I’m done. And I feel much better. Until I have to figure out an excuse for the next captain’s choice invitation.

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

We Shall Gather

There’s no need to rush

By Lee Pace

At the address of the golf swing, we talk about ball position, spine angle, grip pressure, takeaway and turn. At impact we talk about compression and clearing the hips and head position. Yet one element of the swing — under-appreciated and under-attended on the pages of golf magazines, YouTube instruction videos and Instagram golf pros — is the transition.

The top of the swing is the promised land of hitting good golf shots.

Getting too quick is kryptonite.

Taking your time is pure gold.

After all, if you’re going one direction and then want to reverse 180 degrees, you have to stop. What’s your hurry?

Renowned instructor Bob Toski tells his students to use the “Coca-Cola Swing,” employing a “pause that refreshes” at the top of the backswing.

“There should be no flash of speed at the top of your swing,” Toski says. “The club should be quiet and not bouncing. This gives you a chance to move the lower body down into the swing. You want to feel that you push the club back and pull it through. Think push, pause, pull.’”

Sean Foley, instructor over the years to noted golfers such as Tiger Woods and Justin Rose, counsels his pupils to be patient with the downswing. He uses the word “collect” in talking of the process of moving from backswing to downswing, particularly as it applies to the Englishman Rose.

“Too often, Justin gets a little tense at the top, and his transition back down to the ball is rushed,” Foley says. “Your arms should just fall from the top, rather than jerking the club down.”

Fred Couples, owner of the most liquid swing in golf and 1992 Masters champion, likes the word gather.

“Couples talks about ‘buying time’ at the top of the backswing,” says golf instructor Jim Nelford, a contemporary of Couples’ on the PGA Tour of the 1980s and ’90s. “Never be in a hurry. Take your time on your backswing. Couples will gather at the top and just let the club drop.”

Pat McGowan, a PGA Tour regular from 1980 through the early 1990s, was struggling when the tour arrived in New Orleans for the USF&G Classic in late March 1989. He was miserable throughout a practice round on the difficult Jack Nicklaus-designed English Turn Golf Club, all the penal water and sand accentuated by brisk winds. His friend and playing companion Phil Blackmar convinced McGowan to make rehearsal swings when the tournament started by swinging back to perfect position and exaggerating a pause to five seconds.

“You’ll look like an idiot, but so what?” Blackmar said, plunging the gallows humor knife as only good golf buddies can do. “You’ll look bad shooting 78. You might as well try it.”

McGowan did as suggested, shot a 68 to open the tournament, followed with a 70 and a pair of 71s for a ninth-place finish, his best of the year. You might get that story today from McGowan if you get rushed at the top on the practice tee at Pine Needles Lodge and Golf Club, where McGowan is the lead instructor.

“Some people act like the ball’s moving, that you’ve got to hit it before it runs away,” McGowan says. “The ball’s not going anywhere. Finish your backswing first. That exaggerated pause at the top during the practice swing carries over to the full swing and slows you down.”

Andrew Rice teaches that very move from his outpost at the Westin Savannah Harbor Golf Resort. He calls it the “Power Pause Drill.” At first, he’ll have a pupil swing to the top and pause for a count of three, then hit the ball. After that exaggerated feel, he’ll ask them to pause for just one second. The idea is that the feeling will become engrained.

“One thing I see is that golfers don’t complete their backswing,” Rice says. “Another is that they go jumping out of the gate with rotation, trying to get some energy running down the shaft into the clubhead. It’s a short, incomplete backswing.

“With this drill, they make a full, complete backswing and store that energy. It’s like touching home plate.”

John Marino, the longtime head pro at Old Chatham Golf Club in Durham, spent a lot of time talking golf over the years with Dick Coop, the professor at the University of North Carolina who had a sideline consulting with professional and elite amateur golfers on the mental side of the game. Coop played golf himself and was a member at Old Chatham.

“Dick liked to say, ‘If your shaft was a perch, let the bird land on it before you start your downswing,’” Marino says. “A smooth transition will help create good balance and good sequencing. Everyone wants to be ‘that guy’ at his club with perfect tempo. That idea helps you get there.”

Cameron Young is the poster boy on today’s PGA Tour for the benefits of coming to a complete stop at the top of the swing and then exploding into a massive spark of speed through the ball (he was No. 7 on the driving distance meter in 2023 with 316 yards a pop). Young learned to play golf from his father, David, who was the head pro at Sleepy Hollow Country Club, just north of New York City. As a junior golfer, Cameron struggled to match his swing plane going back and then coming through.

“Cam’s worked hard on not having a lot of rerouting during the transition, so the clubhead comes down not too far from the direction where it went up,” his father says. “He wants to get the lower body working toward the target while he pins his arms, club and upper body back, which makes it look like he’s standing still. There’s no conscious effort to pause.”

And you can find a talented and social media-conscious golfer on Instagram and YouTube today named Ben Kruper, who bills himself as “The Pause King.” Kruper developed his distinctive pause in 2023 working on his game while playing mini-tour events and developing a digital venue presence.

“I had a super quick transition and wanted to do something kind of drastic,” he says. “It’s helped my game a ton. That quick transition would get me way behind, I’d get stuck, and I’d have to flip at the ball. Under pressure, it got so out of hand.”

In one YouTube video, Kruper wields his syrupy tempo to one pure strike after another as golf instructor Grant Horvat watches.

“My God, you can’t hit it any better,” Horvat enthuses. “Perfect dollar-bill divots, one after another. You know, you’re pretty good at golf.”

With that, it’s off to the practice tee with a bottle of Coke to set beside that bucket of balls.

2024 Department Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

A Century In Linville

History in the high country

By Lee Pace

Back in the day when the summertime temperatures in the Sandhills inched into the 90s with humidity to match, and before Willis Carrier’s apparatus for cooling air had become mainstream through the handy and affordable window unit, back when you could fire a niblick or a rifle down the fairways of Pinehurst No. 2 in July with no worry of striking golfer or squirrel, the place to be was Linville.

It was 200 cooling miles northwest from the sandy loam, longleaf pines, white clapboard sidings and green trim of Pinehurst to the rocky outcroppings, rhododendron thickets and grayish buildings made of chestnut bark in Linville.

“Spend the week in Linville and make it a real vacation,” Pinehurst proprietor Richard Tufts advised in a 1942 letter to golfers promoting the Carolinas Amateur Championship, set for Linville Golf Club. “You need the rest, and there is no better place than Linville to take it.”

Pinehurst, Linville and Wilmington were three of the earliest bastions of golf in the state of North Carolina, and the names MacRae, Tufts and Ross are threads that tie them all together. In the late 1800s the MacRae family of Wilmington was instrumental in importing golf from its Scottish homeland, and after Donald MacRae Sr. developed extensive mining interests in the mountains, he believed a recreational menu that included golf would work well at the base of majestic Grandfather Mountain. MacRae and a partner named Sam Kelsey were officers in the Linville Land, Manufacturing and Mining Company, a corporation formed in 1888. Soon the company spent $22,000 to build the Eseeola Inn, which debuted amid the fanfare of bagpipe music and oxen races during a lavish grand opening on July 4, 1892.

“The Eden of the United States, a Fairy Land without a peer,” crooned an early advertisement for Linville and the Eseeola.

Linville originally had a 14-hole course that was redesigned and expanded to 18 — beginning in 1924 and reopening in 1926 — by Donald Ross, another Scotsman ensconced at Pinehurst since 1901 as its head golf professional, and who also made a tidy sum on the side in golf course design. The club and lodge were managed at one time by the Tufts family, who sent some of their staff to Linville to work when Pinehurst closed for the summer.

Wilmington native Isaac Grainger, a leading official in the Rules of Golf and USGA president in 1954-55, remembered his first trip from the coast to Linville in the early 1900s.

“By train from Wilmington to Goldsboro to Hickory to Lenoir and Edgemont, 24 hours, and then a six- or seven-hour drive by horse and buggy over the mountains at night,” he said. “That began a long series of exciting sojourns in the delightful spot which is synonymous with the name MacRae.”

Hugh MacRae II, great-grandson of the Linville founder, remembers seeing Ross as a child of 7 or 8. “He was a fine-looking man with a tweed cap and tweed suit and knickers and long stockings,” MacRae says. “He had a mustache. He was very pleasant and kindly. His Scottish brogue was very thick and difficult for a child to understand. He was very impressive.”

Though Linville is more than 4,000 miles from the western shores of Scotland, there’s more than a passing connection to the homeland of golf. Scots with names like Kirkcaldy served as early professionals. Today you can get a good breakfast or lunch just up the street at the Tartan Restaurant, and the Scottish Highland Games are an annual summertime staple. Sleep in on a Sunday morning at the Eseeola Lodge and you might be roused by the bagpipe music heralding services at the tiny Presbyterian chapel across the street.

“Little has changed at Linville from the early days,” MacRae says. “The first hole and 18th hole look nearly as they did in those days. You can drive back into Linville today and almost turn the clock back to the ’20s and ’30s.”

Today Linville Golf Club and Eseeola Lodge retain much of their Old World charm. There are neat rows of cottages lining the fairways to the first, second and 18th holes, each with the ubiquitous “Linville look” of chestnut bark siding. Grandmother Creek crosses the course a dozen times, and the fifth hole kisses against Lake Kawana, the 7-acre lake built for fishing and recreation.

There are few bunkers on the course (two holes have no sand traps at all), and the greens are small and quite the challenge. The blend of poa annua, bent, clover, blue and other indigenous strains is shaved to lightning-quick speeds in the summer, and the dips and hollows around the putting surfaces make chipping and pitching a mental and physical test of planning the angles and then executing the idea.

“Playing at Linville was always a thrill,” famed amateur Billy Joe Patton once said. “It’s a great course, one of my all-time favorites. Like all Ross designs, it’s a fine test; a wonderful, classic course that everyone can enjoy and appreciate.”

The club held a centennial celebration on June 9, marking the day a century earlier when Hugh MacRae felled the first tree as construction began on the course. Members hit balata balls with hickory shafted clubs from the plaque that rests on the right side of the first fairway.

“The slopes, the streams, with wide skies over all,” the founding MacRae said. “And here, content in pleasant sport, we meet our friends and ‘foes,’ and find them hard to beat.”

The golf course is getting a centennial tweaking at the hands of golf architect Andrew Green, who has become one of the go-to guys in the industry for classic course restorations. Green worked for 15 years in course construction, went off on his own in 2017 and was lauded for unearthing Ross’ architectural features at Oak Hill East in Rochester leading up to the 2023 PGA Championship. In a subsequent project at Scioto Golf Club in Columbus, Ohio, he met director of golf Bill Stines, who moved in 2020 to take the same job at Linville Golf Club.

A year after moving to Linville, Stineswas discussing the issue of the severely canted 10th green with Linville general manager Tom Dale and club officers, and how to solve the problem of too many putts rolling off the front of the green, 40 yards down the fairway.

“I said I would get the best expert in the business, someone who knew design, construction, agronomy and history to take a look,” Stine says. “That would be Andrew Green.”

The club retained Green in the fall of 2021 to start making plans. Working from Ross’ original course plan in 1924, Green identified the features, dimensions and undulations that had been lost over time and could be restored, ever mindful of equipment and maintenance evolution. The work needed to be done in the off-season so as not to close any part of the course during the height of the summer, so Green worked on seven holes from September 2023 to March 2024. The club is going to double-up on the construction crew this fall and knock out 10 more holes this winter. A more extensive restoration of the 17th hole to adjust fairway and green elevations is planned for the 2025-26 offseason.

That will leave the club with a course offering the ideal combination of Ross’ original design tenets paired with modern agronomy and playability in time to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the conclusion of the great architect’s original work.

“Other places, no matter what age they are, are trying to create history,” Dale says. “That happens on its own. You can’t manufacture it. You just end up with it if you’ve been around long enough.”

2024 Department Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

Bryson’s Bunker

Another shot for the ages

By Lee Pace

Photograph by Matthew Harris Golf Collection

The thread from 1999 to 2024 is quite eerie indeed.

Payne Stewart and Bryson DeChambeau, each of them a former golfer from Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Each of them with a youthful connection to Pinehurst and its esteemed No. 2 course, Stewart from having visited for a month in 1979 to play a local mini-tour rota, and DeChambeau coming annually with the Mustang golf team to play a fall match against a local school like Wake Forest or North Carolina at the behest of Bob Dedman Jr., the owner of the resort, and a graduate and benefactor of SMU.

Each of them maturing into gracious champions after hiccups as younger players with instances of churlish or snippy behavior with fellow competitors or tournament officials.

And each of them playing in the final group of the U.S. Open and arriving at the 18th tee with history in the balance.

Stewart in 1999 needs a par to hold off playing partner Phil Mickelson, but his tee shot on the uphill, par-4 finishing hole misses the fairway to the right. He’s in 5 inches of suffocating rough, the grass wet on a cool, misty day. He punches out, has 78 yards to the hole, hits a three-quarter sand wedge to 20 feet short of the back-right hole location.

Stewart makes the putt, and his right-hand fist pump, right-leg extension celebratory pose will be immortalized on film and later in bronze for the ages.

“Perfect — a perfect way to win,” Stewart said. “I think everyone in the field will attest to how great No. 2 is, to what a special place Pinehurst is. To win here means a lot to me.”

DeChambeau in 2024 needs a par to hold off Rory McIlroy, who’s playing one group ahead. He yanks his tee shot left of the fairway, the ball traveling more than 300 yards uphill and coming to rest under a magnolia tree, up against a root and sitting on the native hardpan sand that was exposed during the 2010-11 Coore & Crenshaw course restoration. He has 147 yards to the hole, punches out, and the ball comes to rest in a bunker sitting front right of the green.

He has 54 yards to the traditional final day, back right pin. He uses his immense physical strength to explode out of the sand to 4 feet, then makes the putt. As the ball rolls into the cup, DeChambeau extends both arms, arches his back, looks to the heavens and sets off on several seconds of unabashed joy.

“That bunker shot was the shot of my life,” DeChambeau said. “I’ll forever be thankful that I’ve got longer wedges, so I can hit it farther, get up there next to the hole.”

So now Payne’s Putt has alongside it Bryson’s Bunker in the pantheon of all-time greatest shots — not only in 129 years of Pinehurst history, but also in major championship golf.

Jack Nicklaus’s 1-iron hitting the flag at Pebble Beach in 1972, Tom Watson’s chip-in at Pebble a decade later, Seve Ballesteros’s winning putt at St. Andrews in 1984, Bob Tway’s bunker dunk at Inverness to win the 1986 PGA Championship, Tiger Woods’ chip-in at Augusta in 2005 . . . all iconic monster shots in golf.

“Bryson’s shot has to be as good as any of them,” says 2021 Open champion Jon Rahm.

“There’s no question Bryson’s shot was one of the best shots in U.S. Open history,” says Curtis Strange, a two-time Open champion and former North & South Amateur winner at Pinehurst. “His shot was one of the toughest, if not the toughest, shots in golf. Magnify that with last hole, U.S. Open pressure on a world stage? It was an amazing shot.”

The week after the Open, Pinehurst officials, at the request of DeChambeau caddie Greg Bodine, sent via FedEx an urn of sand from that bunker to DeChambeau’s residence. The golf staffers and caddies have half-jokingly wondered if the windows in the clubhouse behind the 18th green are now in danger with retail golfers attempting that shot and hitting the dreaded skulled shot flying who knows where. The club’s social media staff even mused after the Open that the preponderance of balls landing on the roof might escalate.

All around the golf course, the village and the Sandhills, knowledgeable golf students looked on in awe.

“The long sand shot, that’s the hardest shot in golf,” says former PGA Tour player Pat McGowan, who watched his son Michael play the first two rounds. “Oh my gosh, what a shot. He could stand there and hit 100 shots and not get it any closer. He could have skulled that over the clubhouse and made a double. But Bryson is so strong he just muscled it out.”

“The stat of a PGA Tour player getting up and down from a bunker from that distance is 1.7 percent,” says Pinehurst teaching pro Kelly Mitchum. “To do it on the final hole of a U.S. Open is pretty remarkable.”

Gus Ulrich, the longtime teaching pro at Pinewild Country Club and golf coach at Sandhills Community College, was struck with the authority and resolve DeChambeau exhibited during the minute before the shot.

“What impressed me was Bryson did not overanalyze it,” Ulrich says. “He didn’t rush it by any means, but he didn’t grind over it and agonize like, ‘Oh, I gotta make this to win the U.S. Open.’ He made up his mind pretty quickly, walked in and hit the shot. I think that’s what you have to do in that situation. The more you agonize over it, the harder the shot becomes.”

DeChambeau reflected on that very mindset afterward. Asked what he would remember most about the final two hours of a drama-laden back nine, he said: “Probably my caddie telling me I can do it out of the bunker. G-Bo just said, ‘Bryson, just get it up-and-down. That’s all you have to do. You’ve done this plenty of times before. I’ve seen some crazy shots from you from 50 yards out of a bunker.’ I said, ‘You’re right. I need the 55-degree. Let’s do it.’”

Course superintendent John Jeffreys was standing behind the green in DeChambeau’s line and considered there were about a half-dozen layers of ground undulation between the golfer and the hole — a “false front” leading up to the putting surface; a narrow plateau in the front portion of the green; a downslope and swale in the middle of the green; and finally, an upslope leading to the back crest where the pin was set.

“There’s a lot more to that green than you would think approaching it on the angle he had,” Jeffreys says. “There were a lot of areas to contend with that can help you or hurt you. What made the shot so great was he landed it on the downslope behind that first little plateau. That propelled the ball forward and it ran up to 4 feet.”

And the rest, as they say . . .

No doubt they’re making room as we speak in the history-laden hallway of the resort clubhouse to celebrate Bryson’s Bunker.

“It’s like we caught lightning in a bottle,” Dedman says. “It was otherworldly. To me, it’s almost as if it was preordained. I think maybe Payne and my father were up in heaven and put their thumb on the scale to Bryson’s advantage.” PS

Lee Pace has written about the Pinehurst experience for more than three decades from his home in Chapel Hill. Write him at leepace7@gmail.com and follow him on X @LeePaceTweet.

2024 Department Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

Photograph by Ted Fitzgerald

Miller Time

Finding the spirit of golf in Pinehurst

By Lee Pace

They are grouped together side by side in the new World Golf Hall of Fame in Pinehurst, these luminaries of the golf world of the 1970s: Lanny Wadkins, Hale Irwin, Tom Watson and Johnny Miller.

The museum that just opened as part of the USGA’s Golf House Pinehurst facility is organized around a locker for each of 160-plus inductees. Each display includes a photo and an assortment of memorabilia, and this quartet of golfers is represented by images from that 1970s era of long hair and shirts with wide collars and bright color palettes.

Each of the four won major championships, accumulated Ryder Cup points and fired ridiculously low rounds. And all carved a niche of some sort in Pinehurst.

Wadkins played at Pinehurst as a junior golfer from Richmond and later as a member of the golf team at Wake Forest University; he was runner-up in the 1969 North & South Amateur.

Irwin and Watson share the course record on Pinehurst No. 2, along with Gibby Gilbert, with 62s shot in the mid-1970s during the PGA Tour’s foray at Pinehurst, with Irwin winning the Colgate Hall of Fame Classic in 1977 and Watson winning back-to-back in ’78 and ’79.

And Miller has a 63 on No. 2 and collected first place in the 1974 Hall of Fame Classic. He shot his eight-under-par score in the second round and could have gone one lower if not for a missed 6-footer for birdie on the 18th.

“It was like one of those old Johnny Miller blitzes,” he remembers. “I dominated the course and scored a fairly easy 63, if there is such a thing.”

Fifty years ago. What goes around, does seem to come around.

That year the blond bombshell from Northern California scorched the PGA Tour with wins in three straight tournaments to open the season, took first in five others and banked over $350,000, a magnificent sum in those days. He drove the ball long and straight, smothered flagsticks with his irons, and seemed to have magnets drawing his putts to the cup. It was one year following his U.S. Open win at Oakmont, when he shot a championship record 63.

The World Open was first played in November 1973, with an outlandish 144-hole format over two weeks. It was shortened to 72 holes in 1974, and the tournament coincided with the September opening of the $2.5 million World Golf Hall of Fame. President Gerald Ford attended induction ceremonies, and among the 13 original inductees were eight still living: Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus, Sam Snead, Byron Nelson, Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, Gene Sarazen and Patty Berg. Honored in memory were Bobby Jones, Walter Hagen, Francis Ouimet, Harry Vardon and Babe Zaharias.

Miller and Nicklaus were tied at 209 after three rounds, with Charles Coody and Bruce Devlin two back, and Bob Murphy and Frank Beard trailing by three. The 27-year-old Miller reveled in the challenge of going head-to-head against the 34-year-old Nicklaus.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if both of us shot in the 60s head-to-head,” Miller said. “I’ve held him at bay recently and I’ve had a lot of success against Jack, but I don’t talk much about it. I know he’s a better player than I am, but I’m not afraid of him.”

Miller and Nicklaus each shot one-over 72s, allowing Murphy and Beard to force a four-way playoff with 69s and 281 totals, three-under for 72 holes (only eight players beat par for the tournament).

The playoff started on 15, where TV cameras were set up. Beard scored a routine par on the par-3, leaving a birdie putt dead short that could have ended it there. Miller and Nicklaus got up-and-down from the fringe, and Murphy was eliminated after his tee ball found a greenside bunker.

Miller won the tournament with a two-putt birdie on 16 after Beard three-putted and Nicklaus missed a 12-footer for birdie. Miller hit a 3-wood to eight feet — “The best shot under pressure I’ve ever hit,” he says.

“To beat Jack Nicklaus in a playoff sort of capped off the year for me,” Miller says. “I enjoyed playing No. 2. It was perfect for my game. It gave you enough room off the tee, you had extremely difficult approach shots, and if you hit it real bad off the tee, you had broom grass, sand and trees. To me that course is the perfect course for my game. It’s the kind of course I like to design. It’s the perfect test of golf because it’s got difficult putting, it accepts the approach shot fairly, and it penalizes the poor shot. It gives you enough room off the tee, versus most U.S. Open courses, which give you only 25 or 30 yards.”

A different Johnny Miller came to Pinehurst in 1979. He had been the talk of the tour in the early 1970s for his good play but now had become the talk of the tour for his bad play. He slid to 48th on the money list in 1977 and 111th in 1978, with only $17,400 in winnings. Miller hadn’t won a tournament since early 1976.

“What’s wrong with Johnny Miller?” the world wanted to know.

Miller responded that there wasn’t anything wrong that a bunch of birdies and a little confidence couldn’t solve.

“Before Pinehurst I played in the Lancôme in Paris and won against a good field, and that signaled that maybe I was ready to play well again on the U.S. tour. I came home a week or two later and continued my good play,” he says.

Miller opened with a 69 and then equaled his 1974 heroics with another 63. “It was amazing. It was like it was ’73 or ’74 all over again,” he said. Miller wound up losing in a playoff to Watson.

But Johnny Miller was back. Pinehurst will always be special to him for those weeks in 1974 and 1979.

“I almost can’t tell you how good the golf course is,” he says. “It might not be the hardest golf course in the world, but for pleasure, for going out and having a pleasurable time with a smile on your face, it can’t be beat. It’s hard to get mad when you play Pinehurst.

“It reeks of golf, it has a definite golf spirit, very similar to a Pine Valley or Augusta National or Cypress Point. It’s very blessed with that golfing spirit.” PS

The Johnny Miller story and many others were included in Lee Pace’s 1991 book, Pinehurst Stories — A Celebration of Great Golf and Good Times. Write him at leepace7@gmail.com and follow him @LeePaceTweet.

2024 Department Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

Jump in a Lake

The rebirth of a great design

By Lee Pace

Cara Spencer remembers the 1990s when her parents and sisters spent most every weekend during the summer at their house at Woodlake Country Club in Vass. They swam. They learned to fish and water ski. They rode inner tubes and drove their boat around the 1,200-acre Lake Surf. They played golf and sipped strawberry daiquiris by the pool.

“Those were the glory days. Woodlake was the place to be,” Spencer remembers. “Our family has a strong sentimental connection to Woodlake.”

Woodlake certainly distinguished itself from its Sandhills competitors with a lake with 13 miles of shoreline; 36 holes of golf designed by Ellis Maples and Arnold Palmer; recreational amenities from swimming to golf, fishing to Jet Skis. One Fourth of July, The Embers blared out “I Love Beach Music” and other summertime shagging favorites.

“It’s laid back. We’ll have more fun in two weeks than some places have in two years,” longtime club professional and Woodlake resident Stuart Taylor liked to say.

That idyllic life at Woodlake for some 2,000 residents was rocked beginning in 2016 when torrential rainfall from Hurricane Matthew set in motion a domino effect that included a breach of the dam, the lake being drained by the State of North Carolina for flood control purposes, the golf courses closing, and the German ownership group losing the facility to bankruptcy.

Five years later, the community and club got a new lease on life when Atlantic National Capital bought Woodlake at auction for $3.5 million, and began negotiations with the county and state lawmakers to repair the dam. The new owners are headed by Fayetteville businessman Keith Allison and his three daughters, Cara Spencer being one of them. As Allison was growing his Systel Business Equipment company into a significant independent dealer of official equipment in the Southeast in the 1980s and ’90s, the family enjoyed their weekend retreat at their home in Woodlake.

“My daughters learned to ski at Woodlake,” Allison says. “My family and I have a longstanding association and sentimental attachment to Woodlake.”

The first move in the fall of 2021 was to hire golf architect Kris Spence to take a look at the overgrown Maples golf course that opened in 1971 and provide a resurrection plan (the 1996 Palmer course will remain closed). Spence remembers Spencer giving him a tour of the overgrown fairways.

“Nature had totally reclaimed it except for a few areas where it looked like homeowners had been cutting some grass,” Spence says. “Cara asked what I thought it would take to get it back open. Hell, I couldn’t even see it. The fairways were 6 feet tall, and there were trees in the bunkers.”

Spence knew from the outset that if the course was designed by Ellis Maples, there were likely some good bones underneath the jungle. Maples grew up in golf design and maintenance, his father Frank serving as the longtime Pinehurst superintendent under Donald Ross, and Ellis started working in golf construction and maintenance at the age of 14. In 1948, he supervised the construction of Ross’ final design project, Raleigh Country Club, and worked for five years as the course superintendent. Maples then went into private practice in 1953 as a golf course architect.

His most notable works include the Dogwood Course with Willard Byrd at the Country Club of North Carolina (1963); and Grandfather Golf and Country Club in Linville (1968). Spence was intimately familiar with the Dogwood Course, having handled a renovation of that course in 2015-16.

Spence hired subcontractors in the fall of 2021 to start clearing the Woodlake corridors and spent considerable time himself on a bushhog machine around the green complexes.

“The more I looked at the golf course, the more I realized this was some really good work by Ellis Maples,” Spence says. “We got the greens cleaned up, and I started to study them. I got excited. After a month, I went back to Cara and said, ‘I don’t think you know what you have here. You have one of the best golf courses in North Carolina.’ That’s saying a lot, especially for this region.”

The first four holes wrap around the lake and then venture into typical Sandhills ground with sandy soil and gently undulating slopes, and the course does not return to the clubhouse after nine, always a good sign that the architect was allowed to find the best 18 holes without the restraint of bringing the ninth hole back to the start.

Spence built a few new tees to add some length and adjusted some fairway bunker placements to catch the longer drives of today, versus the 1971 club and ball standards. Many of the bunker complexes are dotted with the wiregrass so indigenous to the Sandhills, along with acres of hardpan sand. The greens were sprigged with Tif-Eagle Bermuda.

The course reopened in September 2023, and will mark a complete renaissance when the dam and lake work are completed in early 2025 and the lake is restored. The golf shop has been renovated, a new restaurant has opened, and the course is open to outside play.

“Hole after hole you could pick as a signature hole,” says Woodlake General Manager Jeff Crabbe, a veteran of the area golf community and former staff professional at Pinehurst Resort. “There’s not a bad hole on the golf course. Once the lake comes back, it’s going to be pretty special. The vision of the ownership is to make this one of the most sought-after communities in the area and the state. We started from zero in a new membership program and are at 115. We’re proud of that growth.”

Spence compares the view across the lake to something you might see in the South Carolina low country and has been heartened with the opinions from a handful of visitors with high golf I.Q.s who have toured the course since it reopened.

“It’s been fun to watch people’s reaction to it,” he says. “They are like, ‘Wow, I hadn’t expected that.’ This is one terrific golf course. I don’t fall in love with golf courses per se, but I really admire this and appreciate what Ellis did 50 years ago. It is amazing that a golf course of this quality had escaped attention and recognition for so long. It was very satisfying to play a role, to put it back in its rightful place.”

Cara and husband Tommy Spencer live in Fayetteville and keep the family Woodlake tradition alive with a home of their own. One Friday evening in March, they jumped into a golf cart with their three children for the short drive to the Woodlake clubhouse and the first members dinner of the season.

“It was a nostalgic moment for me, thinking back to being a kid and my experiences here, and now having that for my own kids,” she says. “That’s why preserving Woodlake is so important to us.” PS

Lee Pace has written four books about the evolution of Pinehurst, its golf courses and village. His most recent is The Golden Age of Pinehurst. Write him at leepace7@gmail.com and follow him @LeePaceTweet.

2024 Department Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

Saving a Soul

Defending the identity of Pinehurst

By Lee Pace

Feature Photo: John May, James Van Camp and Bruce Cunningham

At 83 years of age, Jim Van Camp rises every morning, puts on a dress shirt and necktie, and goes to work in one of the oldest buildings in the village of Pinehurst. He takes the elevator to the third floor of the Theatre Building, which opened in 1923 and for decades was the hot spot for evening entertainment. Now his law firm leases an office complex at the top of the hexagonal structure conceived in the fertile mind of architect Aymar Embury II, and Van Camp settles in each morning with three other attorneys and seven paralegals at his disposal, not to mention a black Lab named Tweed and a Löwchen named Mr. Pringle.

“At my age, I should be retired, but I don’t know what the hell I’d do,” Van Camp says. “I’m not a big gardener, I don’t like mowing grass, I’m not married so I don’t have a bunch of honey-do lists. I like getting up in the morning and knowing I have something to do.

“I love the practice of law. I love the challenge. I love helping someone save time, save money, save their lives if we’re talking a capital case.”

Or in one very special case, save a town, a golf course and a way of life.

Pinehurst existed for 75 years beginning in 1895 as a “benevolent dictatorship” under the auspices of the founding Tufts family. The specter of needing to make major capital improvements and potential inheritance taxes for the generations after patriarch James W. Tufts prompted the family in the late 1960s to look to sell the resort, five golf courses and an entire town with commercial buildings, a police and fire department and all the infrastructure, and thousands of acres of undeveloped land.

The buyer in December 1970 was the Diamondhead Corporation, which was founded by Maxton native Malcom McLean, a former truck driver who made a fortune in the 1950s and ’60s creating a new industry — the container shipping business. Diamondhead had resort and residential development operations in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, and moved quickly into Pinehurst, bringing bulldozers and carpenters by the dozens.

“Diamondhead sold dirt, that’s what they did,” Van Camp says. “They bought 8,000 acres. Their plan was to sell the dirt, make a profit and get out. There was no municipal government back then, no restrictions on them at all.”

Diamondhead built condos within 15 feet of some of the fairways of the No. 3 and No. 5 courses on the west side of N.C. 5, some of them octagonal-shaped units derided then as now as looking like little spaceships. The company was encroaching on Marshall Park, a circular preserve in the middle of the village named in honor of Gen. George Marshall, who lived in Pinehurst following World War II. And it had plans to build condos in a triangle of pine forest between the first, 17th and 18th holes of No. 2, and to erect more commercial structures along the fourth fairway.

A Pinehurst Country Club member and resident named Stuart Paine said enough. He formed a group called “Concerned Citizens of Pinehurst” and looked for a lawyer to challenge Diamondhead’s aggressiveness in court.

That’s where Van Camp, 32 at the time and a partner in the law firm of Seawell, Pollock, Fullenwider, Van Camp and Robbins, entered the picture.

“I have no idea why Stuart hired me,” Van Camp says. “I had had some successes at trial, but I was young. I’m not sure he didn’t talk to other people, and they said, ‘Forget it.’ He was probably working down his list. He said, ‘I have $10,000. What can you do?’”

Van Camp and a team that included attorneys John May and Bruce Cunningham, each of them 26 and one year out of law school, set off over the next year to build a case, which was tried in Moore County Superior Court in Carthage in September 1973.

“The sense of the case was there was a culture here, an environment that was unique,” Van Camp reflects today. “Pinehurst has always been unique. No. 2 was part of that culture. As a matter of fact, it was one of the reasons there was a culture. To destroy that element of the culture would have destroyed the culture and the environment of the village. I did not have a lot of case law, but the argument sounded good.”

Among the exhibits Van Camp produced were aerial photos of the development around the No. 3 and No. 5 courses, and photographs capturing the history and ambience of a village designed by Fredrick Law Olmsted, the “father of American landscape architecture.” Van Camp was heartened that the judge, the Honorable A. Pilston Godwin, was a strict traditionalist, a man who chided attorneys if they were not dressed properly and could accurately ascertain by hearing a man’s surname if his ancestors were from England or Scotland.

“I really tried to sell the ambience of this place,” Van Camp says. “That was my argument. ‘Your honor, this just can’t happen. We need your help. This is what you’re being asked to destroy.’ The judge bought into it. He told their lawyers, ‘You better meet with Mr. Van Camp, because you’re not going to like my ruling.’”

Van Camp and the defendant’s attorneys worked out a settlement that prevented Diamondhead from building any structure along No. 2 with the exception of the already planned World Golf Hall of Fame headquarters, which would sit to the east side of the course’s fourth green and fifth tee and open in the fall of 1974. In addition, Diamondhead could not build more than 11 condominiums per acre on land adjoining a golf course; could not build any dwelling within 30 feet of a golf course; and could never use Marshall Park for any purpose beyond recreation.

Imagine the ramifications had No. 2 been blasphemed with goofy condos and 1970s-style commercial structures. Could that look have infected the village itself? Where would it have stopped? What would have been left when Diamondhead eventually lost the club and the resort to the banks in 1982? Would there have been enough for a resurrection project of a “fallen angel,” to use the words of Robert Dedman Sr., who bought Pinehurst in 1984 and revived it with the help of son Robert Jr. into the golfing colossus that will host its fourth U.S. Open Championship in June?

We’ll never know. But you want the odds?

“There’s no telling what this place would look like,” Van Camp says. “It was a time and place, and something tragic was going to happen. We had the right cause from Stuart, some smart young attorneys in John and Bruce, we had the right judge. I was just the mouthpiece at the hearings. And it worked. It kept what was important about this place. The whole character of this town would have changed.”

With that, Jim Van Camp turns back to his legal pad and briefs, rubs Mr. Pringle’s head and plows through his afternoon. Outside the Village Theatre, the carillon in The Village Chapel peals out as it does at the top of every hour. It’s just another beautiful day in Pinehurst. PS

Author Lee Pace chronicled Payne Stewart’s magical week in 1999 in his book The Spirit of Pinehurst, published in 2004.

2024 Department Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

A Love Affair

Payne and Pinehurst

By Lee Pace

Another U.S. Open in the offing.

And this one just so happens to roll around one neat quarter-century after one of the most famous strokes in Open history — Payne Stewart’s 20-foot putt on the final green to edge Phil Mickelson by a shot in June 1999. Three months later, Stewart was gone, the victim of a mysterious airplane malfunction that took his life and five others on a planned flight from Orlando to Dallas.

The “Payne Pose” statue sits today by the 18th green of No. 2 and is the most photographed visual in Moore County. Stewart’s spirit remains strong in other corners of town, among them at the Pine Crest Inn.

Stewart was just out of Southern Methodist University in the summer of 1979 and was preparing to compete for his PGA Tour playing privileges in the tour’s twice-a-year Qualifying School, the next one to be held in November at Waterwood National Country Club near Houston. He traveled to Pinehurst in mid-September to enter a series of four mini-tour events run by the National Golfers Association. Seventy-two hole tournaments were scheduled for Whispering Pines, Seven Lakes, Pinehurst No. 4 and Hyland Hills. The players put up their own money and competed for purses between $30,000 and $40,000 per tournament. A handful of players stayed at the Pine Crest Inn, where proprietor Bob Barrett gave them a generous price on room and board.

“It was like golf camp for a month,” remembers Peter Barrett, one of Bob’s two sons. “Payne was the funny guy of the bunch. He had control of the whole group. There were a lot of different personalities there. They were on a mission. They all had their eyes on the big-time, and they were playing with their own money. They were pretty serious, but they still had some fun.”

After the four tournaments — two won by Scott Hoch, one by Kenny Knox and one by Mike Glennon — Stewart packed up his car and was saying goodbye to Barrett in the parking lot. There he offered a marketing deal to Barrett: Stewart would put the Pine Crest’s name and logo on his bag for $500 a year. Barrett said he’d pass. Stewart had talked about a potential trip to Asia if he didn’t get through the upcoming Tour Q-School (he did, in fact, miss qualifying and go to Asia), and Barrett didn’t figure the Pine Crest needed exposure in the Far East. And $500 in 1979 was a lot of money.

“What an investment that would have been, huh?” Barrett says ruefully.

Stewart became smitten that fall with the personality of the Pine Crest, its homey feel and the ebullience of “Mr. B’s Old South Bar,” a renowned watering hole. Whenever the PGA Tour returned to Pinehurst over the years — for the Hall of Fame Classics in the early 1980s or the Tour Championships of the early 1990s — Stewart returned to the Pine Crest, if not to bed down at least to eat and drink. In the early 1990s, he negotiated his NFL clothing deal over dinner in the Crystal Room, an adjunct of the main dining room. He sang and hung out with his buddies and bet on NFL football in the bar. He also ate a lot of banana cream pie. Marie Hartsell, a cook in the inn’s kitchen for some 35 years until her retirement in 2010, prepared one of the inn’s signature desserts, and whenever Stewart visited over the years, he’d dive into a banana cream pie.

“He’d eat a whole pie by himself,” says Barrett.

Stewart rented a house on Pinehurst No. 6 during the 1999 Open but visited the Pine Crest early in the week to see his old friends. He signed his name in huge script letters on the wallpaper of the men’s rest room (an iteration of that signature is framed and hangs in the lobby today). Stewart also told Barrett he was playing quite well.

“Pete, I think I can win this thing,” he said.

Stewart spent a few minutes that evening talking to Patrick Barrett, the 9-year-old son of Bob Barrett Jr., also a son of the longtime owner of the inn. Patrick had shrugged off his introduction to golf two years earlier, primarily because it had been forced upon him by his grandfather. But now that the youngster was making his own connection to the game, golf seemed like something that might be fun to pursue. Stewart made quite an impression.

“They connected because Payne sat down, looked Patrick in the eye and made him feel special,” says Andy Hofmann, the boy’s mother. “Patrick spent the entire Open week following Stewart.”

Patrick is now 34 years old. After graduating from the University of North Carolina and playing on the Tar Heel golf team, he entered medical school and today is a surgical resident at a hospital in Seattle. Like all of us who were there somewhere along the 18th hole on June 20, 1999, he marvels that blink — 25 years are gone.

“Grandpa knew a lot of players,” Patrick says. “He knew them before they were famous because they’d stayed at the Pine Crest. The only golfers I knew then were Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus. He called Payne over and introduced me. Grandpa said, ‘This guy is going to win it.’ Payne shrugged it off and said good to meet you, made a fuss over me. It was kind of embarrassing thinking back on it. I didn’t even stand up.

“He signed a piece of paper for me. It said, ‘To Patrick, keep swinging, Payne Stewart.’ I’ve got that piece of paper somewhere. Now all of a sudden golf was cool. My mom gave me lunch money and turned me loose every day that week.

“I was so short, I couldn’t see much of the action, but I could feel the energy. I was more interested in autographs and celebrities than the golf. But that week I decided I wanted to play golf, to learn the game. I was absolutely golf-obsessed from then on out. I started to play with a real purpose.”

The dominoes fell that week for Stewart. He was a “feel player” competing on a golf course that rewarded right-brained tendencies. He’d missed the cut at Memphis the week before and got to Pinehurst five days early to map out his game plan. He was playing clubs and a ball suited to his skills after a half-decade of chasing endorsements with ill-fitted implements. He had matured from his younger, petulant ways, losing on the final day of the Open at the Olympic Club in 1998 with grace and composure.

And Stewart was confident and comfortable in Pinehurst.

He made eye contact and smiled at the locals in the grocery store. He joked with the ladies at check-in on Sunday when asking for scissors to cut off the sleeves of his rain jacket (starting a new fashion trend, by the way). He had a heartfelt reunion with old friend and instructor Harvie Ward before he took off for the final round in his navy plus-fours, red/navy striped shirt, navy tam, and white socks and shoes.

“I think it’s safe to say I love Pinehurst,” Stewart said when it was over. “This is a special place. It was a perfect way to win. I think everyone in the field will attest to how great No. 2 is and what a special place this is. To win here means a lot to me. This place is a gem. It’s beautiful. It’s phenomenal. We never see a golf course like this on the tour. It’s a refreshing change of pace.”

Needless to say, the echoes from ’99 will reverberate through the pines over the coming months. PS

Author Lee Pace chronicled Payne Stewart’s magical week in 1999 in his book The Spirit of Pinehurst, published in 2004.

2024 Department Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

Cool Aids

Teaching the feel of a swing

By Lee Pace

The concept of the golf school was still in its infancy in the early 1980s, though pioneers like Peggy Kirk Bell at Pine Needles Lodge and Golf Club had already been entertaining guests for a quarter of a century for multi-day immersions in golf instruction, competition and fellowship.

The management at Golf Digest magazine believed that golf schools at top-echelon resorts taught by the game’s best instructors would be an excellent way to promote the brand and earn a buck, and so by 1982 the Digest schools visited Pinehurst each spring and fall, bringing instruction luminaries like Jim Flick, Jack Lumpkin, Bob Toski and Gary Wiren to the Sandhills.

Wiren spent time not only on the renowned “Maniac Hill” practice ground at the flagship resort, but he and Peggy Kirk Bell were close friends, and Wiren spoke and taught often down Midland Road at Pine Needles.

Today, one of the foundational training aids in the golf instruction centers at both Pinehurst and Pine Needles (and probably most practice ranges in the Sandhills) is one of Wiren’s inventions. In the early 1980s Wiren played off a favorite drill from three-time British Open champion Henry Cotton in which Cotton had golfers simulate impact by swinging against an old tire — shaft leaning forward, hips clearing and head behind the ball. Wiren thought a softer and safer rendition would be to manufacture a large bag of durable fabric and stuff it with towels.

The bright yellow Impact Bag was introduced in 1982 and became one of the most noted training aids in history. It launched Wiren into a sideline of developing and nurturing the creation of devices to help PGA professionals teach and golfers to learn. Today, at 89 years of age, Wiren and his family operate a business called Golf Around the World, built around an online sales catalog of training devices.

“Telling a golfer is one thing,” says Wiren, who played in the 1994 U.S. Senior Open at Pinehurst wearing knickers and carrying his own bag. “Letting them feel is altogether different.”

Wiren lives in West Palm Beach, Florida, and still makes regular trips each January to the PGA Show in Orlando, where a growing section of the floorspace is dedicated to golfing entrepreneurs who have created better mousetraps to augur a player’s ability to find the proverbial light switch in their golf game.

You might find Jim Hackenburg, who was teaching on Martha’s Vineyard in 2007 when he had the idea of attaching a rubber ball about the size of an orange to a flexible shaft that was designed to help golfers feel the proper motion, sequence and tempo of the swing. Today the Orange Whip is as ubiquitous in golf instruction as the Impact Bag.

Holding court in his booth devoted to his Tour Striker line of training aids is Martin Chuck, an Arizona-based teaching pro. Chuck, frustrated in 2008 by his students’ inability to strike the ball with forward shaft lean, took a 5-iron into his club repair shop and ground off the bottom four grooves of the club, rendering it worthless unless the golfer hit down on the ball sufficiently to force contact in the middle of the clubface — not the bottom edge. Any shot hit on the bottom of the clubface would simply dribble along the ground.

Bernie Fay was a blue collar worker and part-time handyman in Chicago who loved golf and a decade ago conceived a 42-inch polymer shaft with an attached elbow cuff that promotes a wider turn and keeping the left arm straight. He put his life savings into what he calls the “Most Important Stretch In Golf,” or MISIG, for a business name.

“I think that golfers know something that other people do not,” Fay says. “They have something in them that others might not: the light of hope. They have figured out spiritual art. Something beautiful. It’s pure, and I am awestruck when I think about it. The light of hope is always on them.”

This year one of the more novel introductions to the eternal hope for a better golf game is Mike Dickson, a Maryland-based instructor who has created and manufactured a line of devices under the LagMaster banner. Like Wiren, Chuck and many others before him, Dickson was confounded over 17 years teaching at Congressional Country Club in Washington with the average golfer’s tendency to “cast” the club, releasing it well before impact.

But instead of solving the problem at the bottom of the move, Dickson’s LagMaster addresses the issue at the top of the backswing and the early part of the downswing. The device is placed on the grip of the club, and with a properly executed backswing, one end of it touches the right shoulder at the top of the backswing (for a right-handed golfer). The feel Dickson is teaching is to keep the end of the device touching the shoulder into the downswing until the left arm is parallel to the ground. To do that, the golfer has to retain the 90-degree angle of the club and the left arm.

Presto: No cast, and an eventual compression of the ball at impact.

Dickson looks around him at the Orange County Convention Center in January 2024 and takes in all the inventions.

“The whole goal of any training aid in this building is to give somebody a sensation, a feeling without me having to describe it or put my hands on your body,” he says. “If you feel it, you’re going to own it.”

Dickson is a proponent of Homer Kelley’s The Golfing Machine, one of the key elements being the action of the right shoulder. Kelley teaches that the right shoulder swings down “on plane,” along the same line as the club shaft and staying “back and down” until after the hit. Tom Watson credits that move with helping him during his late-career success on the PGA Champions Tour.

“That’s what I am trying to accomplish with the LagMaster,” Dickson says. “You have to turn the right shoulder under to maintain the angle. If I can give you a good grip and sequence you the right way, all this other mess goes away. It’s been fun to watch it evolve.

“A guy ordered the device and wrote back immediately. He said, ‘Mike, after the first three swings, I couldn’t believe how different it felt.’ I see that every day.”

Dickson left Congressional in 2021 to start his own golf academy at Little Bennett Golf Course in Clarksburg, Maryland. He teaches there and runs his LagMaster as a side hustle that, he says, “looks like it’s going to be bigger.”

Indeed, the water is warm in the training aids ocean. PS

Lee Pace has written about golf in Pinehurst and the Sandhills for more than three decades. Write him at leepace7@gmail.com and follow him @LeePaceTweet.

2024 Department Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

Feature Image: USGA Golf House Pinehurst (Copyright USGA/Chris Keane)

Golden Age, Take III

Pinehurst adds to its allure

By Lee Pace

Some old-timers believe the “golden age” of Pinehurst ran from Donald Ross’ final arrival at his routing for the No. 2 course in 1935, through Ben Hogan’s watershed win in the North & South Open in 1940, the Americans’ easy win in the 1951 Ryder Cup, and up to the end of the ownership era of the Tufts family in 1970.

A strong argument can made that the quarter-century from the PGA Tour’s return to Pinehurst in 1991, Payne Stewart’s brushstroke in 1999, three Women’s Opens at Pine Needles and the Coore & Crenshaw-led renaissance of No. 2 in 2010-11 comprised a golden age of its own.

And how about the last decade? A trifecta of those golden ages, for sure.

Competitors, officials, writers and spectators who visited for the 2014 U.S. Open and will return this June will surely be stunned at the explosion in innovation in the Sandhills golf and hospitality worlds. Here are 10 of the big stories of the decade.

USGA’s Golf House Pinehurst — Renowned amateur Billy Joe Patton organized a petition in the early 1960s for the USGA to bring the U.S. Amateur to Pinehurst No. 2 (which did happen in 1962). Thus fell the first domino in more than a dozen USGA competitions at the resort and in the Sandhills. So it’s no wonder that Mike Davis, the USGA CEO from 2010-21, should say in 2020, “There is no better place for the USGA to plant new roots than the Home of American Golf.” Construction on Golf House Pinehurst, the USGA’s 30,000-square-foot research and test center, began in the summer of 2022 on a 6-acre site just to the west of the Pinehurst clubhouse, and more than 65 USGA staffers were working in the building by the end of 2023.

World Golf Hall of Fame — There was Cooperstown for baseball, Canton for football and Springfield for basketball. But there was no hall of fame for golf. Pinehurst officials in the early 1970s attempted to rectify that with the construction of the World Golf Hall of Fame, which opened in 1973 on land near course No. 2 with an induction ceremony that included Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer. The concept didn’t survive in Pinehurst at the time and the shrine moved to Florida, but the USGA announced in 2022 it had purchased the Hall of Fame and its assets and would integrate them into its new Golf House Pinehurst. The new facility will open later this spring.

Pinehurst No. 4 — Pinehurst owner Robert Dedman Jr. and club officials believed after the bold restoration of course No. 2 by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw in 2010-11 that the adjacent No. 4 course should undergo a similar conversion geared toward more fidelity toward Pinehurst’s past in terms of visuals, playability and maintenance. They hired architect Gil Hanse and design partner Jim Wagner for the job, the course closing in October 2017 and reopening 11 months later. The result was a course that morphed from its svelte Augusta persona into an unkempt Scottish presentation — spot on with what Donald Ross might have conceived in 1919, when the course first opened.

The Cradle — Alternative golf. Small golf. Hit-and-giggle golf. The 21st century has seen a groundswell of niches geared toward enjoying golf without the time sink or skill level required for an 18-hole round. While building No. 4 in 2017, Hanse and Wagner took 10 acres of ground to the south of the clubhouse and crafted a nine-hole course with holes ranging from 56 to 127 yards long. The course is so named as it’s positioned on ground where in 1898 some of the first crude holes were routed in what was to become known as the “Cradle of American Golf.”

Southern Pines Golf Club — Kyle Franz was a self-professed “golf architecture geek” when he came to Pinehurst in 2010 to work on the Coore & Crenshaw team on the No. 2 restoration. In his spare time, he scouted the area for other classic venues that might benefit from less grass and chemicals and more sandy and wispy wire grass. He cracked a grand slam with his work on Mid Pines (1921 Donald Ross course, renovated in 2013) and more recently with his reawakening of Southern Pines Golf Club (1912 Ross, renovated in 2022). “When in the Pinehurst area, head straight for this beauty — you will leave more invigorated than when you arrived,” says Ran Morrissett, also a local architecture buff.

Left: The Cradle (Photograph courtesy of Pinehurst Resort)

Right: The Manor (Photograph By John Gessner)

Woodlake Country Club — There was just one Donald Ross at Pinehurst in the early 1900s. But there were lots of Maples — among them Frank, who was Ross’ right-hand man, and Ellis, who was Frank’s son and learned golf course construction as a teenager. One of Ellis’ Sandhills golf projects was Woodlake Country Club, which opened in 1971 and was routed around Lake Surf as part of a residential community. The course went fallow when its owner ran into problems precipitated by the 2007-08 financial crisis, but a new ownership group hired Kris Spence to revive it beginning in 2021. Woodlake is open to limited play now with a grand opening in the spring. “This is a resurrection,” Spence says. “We’re bringing this back from the dead. It’s probably one of the most satisfying things I have done.”

Pinehurst No. 10 — How much golf is enough? You never know at Pinehurst. Dedman weaved the former Pinehurst National into his collection in 2014 and anointed the Jack Nicklaus-designed course as Pinehurst No. 9, then stood pat for a decade. Now in the post-COVID glow of the golf industry explosion in general and the robust demand among members and the traveling public for Pinehurst’s existing nine courses, Dedman believed in 2022 it was time to pull the trigger for a new course on land the resort has owned several miles south. Designer Tom Doak had a slot in his schedule and jumped on the job, with the course opening in April. “We’ve got a really cool piece of land,” Doak says. “This ground has more variety and a different feeling to it than any of the other courses at the resort.”

Eating, Drinking, Making Merry — And just where are all these golfers flocking to the Sandhills going to fuel up and rest up? Pinehurst Resort has added to its inventory the last decade with an innovative reinvention of an old steam plant into a micro-brewery and barbecue restaurant, and the restoration of two century-old hotel properties — all in the village of Pinehurst.

The Magnolia Inn is the second oldest boarding establishment in Pinehurst and opened in 1896 as a four-story building, and in the early 1900s was used for overflow from the Carolina Hotel. The Magnolia has been through a number of ownership changes over a century-plus and was brought into the Pinehurst Resort fold in 2021. The inn has been refurbished, and its Villaggio Ristorante & Bar is one of the town’s most popular restaurants with pasta dishes ranging from carbonara to Bolognese to primavera prepared fresh, in-house daily.

The Manor Inn opened in 1925 and like the Magnolia has gone through a number of iterations. Pinehurst bought it in 1990 and used it as a “budget-minded” option in its portfolio. Resort officials decided in 2018 to renovate it into an upscale, boutique-style property geared toward smaller golf groups. It reopened in the fall of 2019 with all of the interior spaces completely renovated, leaving only about 15 percent of the hotel’s framing in place. The North & South Bar offers nearly 100 styles of bourbons, whiskeys, ryes and Scotch.

Continuing its theme of keeping one foot in the past and one eye on the future, Pinehurst in 2018 took a 7,000-square-foot steam plant and converted it into a restaurant and micro-brewery. The Pinehurst Brewing Company buzzes every night with locals and resort guests queuing up for its 1895 Lager (named, of course, for the founding year of the resort), and pork, brisket and chicken smoked out back on oak and hickory. We’ll find out in June if Rory and Rickie have enough sense to order the Blackberry Habanero on the side. PS

Golf writer Lee Pace has written about golf in the Sandhills for four decades and has authored books on the history of Pinehurst Resort, Pine Needles, Mid Pines and Forest Creek. Write him at leepace7@gmail.com.

2024 Department Golftown Journal