Tag: Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

A Quick Nine

The Pinehurst experience

By Lee Pace

In June I will complete revolution No. 69 around the sun. As a new year dawns, it’s natural to pause, reflect and be grateful for what you’ve experienced. One very satisfying and interesting compartment of my professional life has been chronicling golf in Pinehurst — beginning in 1987, when I quit my last real job to forage an existence amid words, photos, paper and ink (later adding packets and protocols and something called HTTP).

So, I’m lucky indeed for having been able to write my Quick Nine stories of the Sandhills.

The 1980s/’90s Resurrection of Pinehurst — First there was the 75-year era of the founding Tufts family in Pinehurst. Then the awkward and clumsy decade of Diamondhead. Then in marched Robert Dedman Sr., of Dallas. “Partner, I think this place is worth saving. This is one of those places you just can’t duplicate — it’s kind of like buying the St. Andrews of America,” Dedman said. It took time, money, astute leadership and vision. Gradually, Pinehurst once again became a player in American golf.

Payne Winning in 1999 — No one knew exactly what to expect when the USGA awarded Pinehurst No. 2 its first U.S. Open. Would the crowds come? Would the town support the influx? Would the golf course stand up? Those questions and many more were answered with shiny gold stars, the leading domino falling toward No. 2 being the first course designated as a U.S. Open Anchor Site. The drama and emotional wattage of Stewart rolling in a 20-foot putt on the last stroke of the championship was just icing on the cake.

The Life of Peggy Kirk Bell — She certainly knew how to play golf, having won the Titleholders and the North & South Women’s Amateur, and having been a founding member of the LPGA Tour. But Peggy and her husband, Warren “Bullet” Bell, learned the hospitality business as they went along, and Peggy turned an impromptu golf lesson to a lady guest in the 1950s into a thriving golf instruction business that in November 2025 saw Pine Needles Lodge & Golf Club hosting its 59th Couples Golf Jamboree. Her spirit permeates the Sandhills today.

The Last Amateurs — My 1991 book Pinehurst Stories was built around interviews and chapters on 18 elite names in golf who had a good story to tell from their golf lives around Pinehurst. Hands down the highlight of that research was interviewing and getting to know Billy Joe Patton, Harvie Ward and Bill Campbell — three elite players from the mid-1900s with magnificent amateur records. Patton cried talking about his Pinehurst experience. Ward’s eyes twinkled. And Campbell spoke with a notable degree of eloquence. All three loved the Sandhills.

Ben Hogan’s First Win — Hogan was winless in eight years on the pro golf tour in March 1940 and just about to call it quits. A club pro job was waiting for him at home in Fort Worth. But the volcano detonated in the North & South Open on the hallowed ground of No. 2, with Hogan shooting a tournament record 277. From there he went to Greensboro and Asheville and won two more tournaments, breaking par in 11 of 12 rounds. The world of golf never knew what hit it.

The Coore/Crenshaw Project — “This will be the smartest thing we’ve done or the dumbest,” said Pinehurst owner Bob Dedman Jr. in 2010. Dedman had just given golf architects Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw license to dial the clock back on his No. 2 jewel to an era broadly defined as “The Golden Age” between Donald Ross’ death in 1948 and Pinehurst’s sale to the Diamondhead Corporation in 1970. It was a brilliant move indeed, restoring the course to the gnarly look of Ross’ homeland in Scotland.

The Changes in the Village (Not) — Pat Corso, the president and CEO of Pinehurst Resort from 1987-2003, looked at a vintage black and white aerial photo of the village of Pinehurst one day in the early 1990s. The photo was taken probably in the 1950s. “Except for the cars, it looks exactly the same,” he said. It would today as well. Marty McKenzie, a lifelong Pinehurst resident and businessman, likes to call it “The Magic Bubble.” There is still nothing garish or gaudy inside that bubble.

The Walking Game — Pinehurst owner Richard Tufts once said there would never be golf carts in Pinehurst. They defied the spirit of the old Scottish game, he said. Of course, Tufts and his lieutenants bowed to market forces in the 1950s and ’60s and the resort followed national trends over the coming decades that sadly saw those infernal contraptions as the default mode to playing the same. Happily, those trends reversed as I chronicled in my 2021 book, Good Walks. Today at many Sandhills courses you can walk-and-carry, take a trolley or hire a caddie — golf as it should be.

The Dynamic Decade — It was a bold and drastic move for sure when Coore & Crenshaw stripped out all that lush green Bermuda grass on No. 2 and in its stead melded sand and wire grass and jagged edges. That set the template for a crescendo of adventurous change over the next dozen years — The Cradle short course, the rebuild of No. 4, the transformation of an abandoned steam plant into the Pinehurst Brewery, the launch of the satellite golf destination south of town with No. 10 (open) and No. 11 (under construction), and the USGA setting up shop with offices and the World Golf Hall of Fame.

It’s been quite a run. It’s been a blast to have a front row seat.

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

Warming the Insides

Bowled over by red or green

By Lee Pace

It’s time for the ChapStick, wool stocking caps, corduroy trousers and a pocket full of handwarmers. Behold the dormant Bermuda, embrace the brisk winds and the low Southern sun. John Updike had the right idea: “Golf feels, on the frost-stiffened fairways, reduced to its austere and innocent essence.”

And the proper nourishment after a round of winter golf? A bowl o’ red, of course.

Oh, it’s a thing.

There’s a comfort station on the sixth hole of Bluejack National in Montgomery, Texas, that serves chili made of four cuts of beef. There’s a club in Decatur, Alabama, that for 20 years each December stages a combination “Superintendent’s Revenge” golf tournament coupled with a chili cookoff, with more than a dozen recipes entered. And Scottie Scheffler served Texas-style chili at the 2025 Champions Dinner at the Masters, replete with cheddar cheese, jalapeños and corn chips.

Two new dining establishments in the Sandhills each have their entry into the winter chili sweepstakes.

PL8TE/Southern Table opened in May 2025 at the Pinehurst No. 8 clubhouse, following the 2022 renovation of the golf course and coinciding with the opening of five luxury cottages on the premises. The new restaurant offers a fresh take on upscale Southern cuisine — staples with a modern twist, such as shrimp and grits with roasted succotash and BBQ-glazed pork chops with Cheerwine sauce.

Station 21 is the new Southwest-themed food and beverage facility at Pinehurst Sandmines, the restaurant so-named because 21 is the sum of 10 & 11 (the Tom Doak-designed No. 10 opened in May 2024, and the Coore & Crenshaw No. 11 will follow in the fall of 2027), and “station” hearkens to the Sandmines’ history of being a mining site for sand that was transported out via railroad cars. The menu includes appetizers like Texas Hill Country quail knots, hand-held offerings such as bison sliders, and full-plate specialties like authentic Mexican tamales with shrimp or pork.

And both PL8TE and Station 21 have chili offerings of decidedly contrasting colors, textures and tastes.

PL8TE’s version of “green chili” is built around pork and a host of green-hued ingredients — green tomatoes, tomatillos, cilantro, lime and green chilies.

Station 21 goes for “chili con carne,” a thick red elixir of brisket and short rib with beans, tomatoes, chipotle peppers and Guinness beer.

Michael Morris, chef de cuisine at both facilities, says the two versions are made in batches of six gallons at a time.

“Our chili recipes are built on layers,” he says. “The chili con carne uses equal parts brisket and short rib plus dark beer and chipotle for a smoky, beef-forward depth. The green chili is a dual-pork (loin and butt), tomatillo-based verde with plenty of roasted poblanos, fresh cilantro and a bright hit of lemon to lift it. Both are made in large batches and finished slowly to a simmer phase so the flavors meld — they’re approachable but rooted in classic technique.”

One interesting question on the version served at Station 21 is that it includes beans — some argue that a true Texas chili is comprised of meat and spices and nothing else.

“On the age-old question, we keep one foot in each camp,” Morris says. “Our chili con carne leans traditional Texas-style — heavy on the smoked meats, rich ancho and chipotle depth, Guinness for body, so the beans are there mostly to balance texture, not dominate it. Our green chili goes the opposite direction: bright, tangy, built on tomatillos, poblanos and slow-cooked pork. It’s meant to taste like the Southwest in a bowl. We build both around layers of flavor instead of heat for heat’s sake — beer reduction, citrus and base stocks to give them backbone without overpowering the ingredients.”

Both PL8TE and Station 21 are the result of Pinehurst owner Bob Dedman Jr. believing several years ago that the dining facilities across the resort had evolved into a sameness. Creating a barbecue and craft beer emporium in the village of Pinehurst (Pinehurst Brewery) and purchasing an existing upscale Italian restaurant (Villaggio at the Magnolia Inn) were major steps toward solving that issue. Then, in 2022, Dedman hired a restaurant industry veteran in Gonzague Muchery to further develop the initiative.

Muchery is a native of France, grew up in his family’s restaurant business and has spent 45 years in the culinary arena across the United States — from Ritz Carltons to a five-star venue on Amelia Island to high-end cruise ships. The first project under Muchery’s purview was the Carolina Vista Lounge, the restaurant and bar in the Carolina Hotel that replaced the Ryder Cup Lounge in the fall of 2023. The space was reimagined from a casual dining venue to an upscale bar offering dishes drawn from North America (buttermilk fried chicken sliders and double-patty grilled burgers) to South America (chili salt pork rinds and empanadas with andouille sausage).

Then came PL8TE and Station 21, the latter just opening in September.

“The concept at Station 21 is to curate an experience completely different from anything at Pinehurst,” says Muchery, the director of resort food and beverage for Pinehurst Inc. “The Southwest theme pays homage to the Texas heritage of the Dedman family (Pinehurst’s owner since 1984) and to the history of this property. This land has been used for hunting, so we have quail on the menu. One part of the No. 10 course was once a peach orchard, so we have peach salsa and a peach and chipotle rub for chicken, and a peach ice cream sandwich.”

Muchery’s French heritage comes through as he speaks of the marriage of recreation, food, drink, friendship, nature and the five senses at Pinehurst Sandmines and Station 21.

“Having an emotional connection with each facility is very important,” he says. “You come to this wonderful golf course, you walk it and feel the ground beneath you, then you come together after it’s over and talk about what a great experience you had. You have something to eat. You have a drink. In cooler weather you sit around the fire pit. You have a cigar and reflect on the day, you enjoy the moment. You think, ‘Oh wow, what a good time.’ We’re establishing the formula and culture for the next 30 to 40 years.”

As for the next three months, it will be cold and windy. The hands will go numb, the nostrils will go runny.

But take heart in a bowl of hearty sustenance. Color me happy — red or green, either is perfectly fine.

2025 Department Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

Doctor of Sport

Mind games with Bob Rotella

By Lee Pace

It’s not often you get an audience with a man who invented an entire industry.

But here on a June afternoon is Bob Rotella — 79 years old, sharp as a tack and fit as a fiddle — rummaging around his basement sports psychology laboratory outside Charlottesville, Virginia.

There are three rooms in his home in the Club at Glenmore community east of town where he has welcomed the likes of Rory McIlroy, Padraig Harrington, Tom Kite, Davis Love III and John Calipari for overnight visits to explore the art and science of the body and the mind in the field of competition. One room is a bedroom. Another is a workout facility. Then there is a “great room” of sorts with mirrors on the walls, a putting carpet and all manner of decorations, from a signed photo from Ben Hogan to a Claret Jug given to Rotella by Harrington after one of Harrington’s two Open Championship victories.

And of course, a couch. What shrink doesn’t have a couch?

“I love competing and playing,” says Rotella, a lifelong athlete and former college basketball and lacrosse player, “but I like helping people’s dreams come true more than anything. That’s pretty much what I do. I try to find something inside an athlete they never knew was there. I mean, I’ve had a lot of fun.”

My assignment to write and publish a coffee table book celebrating the impending centennial of Farmington Country Club (est. 1927) just west of Charlottesville has brought me to Rotella, who used his Farmington membership in the 1970s and ’80s as kind of a research lab to develop theory and practice on how the mind affects sports performance. Old-time members recall the sight of a young Rotella armed with pen and notebook interviewing golfers after matches to probe the depths of how their minds functioned with some hardware on the line.

Growing up in Rutland, Vermont, Rotella was a quarterback and safety in football, and played basketball and lacrosse at Castleton University. He wanted his life’s calling to be in teaching and coaching but over time began to ponder why it was, for example, he and his coaching mates would spend hours ruminating about how to get a player to take his sterling practice skills into the heat of competition and how to get a player to not let a mistake in the first quarter infect his performance the rest of the game.

“The people who were doing psychology with athletes in the early ’70s were all psychiatrists working with drug problems or serious clinical problems,” Rotella says. “I started thinking about it from a coaching perspective and performance enhancement. Some of the stuff these psychiatrists were writing, I thought, ‘What in the hell are they talking about?’”

In 1976, he moved to Charlottesville and joined the faculty at the University of Virginia to teach sports psychology and coach lacrosse. Soon after he got an offer for a tenure-track position that would include starting masters and doctoral programs in sports psychology and working directly with Cavalier athletic teams. He did that for 20 years and in 1996 left to devote full time to his sports psychology practice.

As of mid-2025, he had clients in golf who have won more than 80 major championships and was pegged by Golf Digest among the top 10 golf instructors of the 20th century. He’s ventured off the golf course for relationships with Red Auerbach, Greg Maddux, Tom Brady and Serena Williams, among many others. His work in the 1970s and into the ’80s was the domino that fell and led to a landscape in 2025 that has nearly every professional sports team having a “sports performance” or “sports psychology” consultant on the payroll.

“I took a few things that worked for me in competition and recognized how important the mind is in all forms of competition,” he says. “I got lucky and made a career out of it.”

Rotella has authored a half-dozen books, including his bestseller Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect. The one with most relevance for many golfers in the Sandhills entering turn four of life (present company included) is The Unstoppable Golfer — Trusting Your Mind & Your Short Game to Achieve Greatness. The premise of the book is that as golfers age and lose physical strength, they still have the ability to embrace their mental resources and develop their skills in getting up-and-down from 100 yards in. The short game, he says, is the path to “unstoppable golf.”

“To win this battle with yourself, you must have a good short game,” he writes. “Few of us can blast the ball 300 yards off the tee. But nearly all golfers have the physical ability required to pitch the ball, to chip it, to putt it.”

This focus on sharp execution of pitching, chipping and putting is nothing new. Players with great short games “should be the cockiest players on the planet” wrote the great English champion Harry Vardon in the early 1900s. “You won’t fulfill your potential as a golfer unless you embrace your short game, love your short game, take pride in your short game, and stop wishing you had someone else’s long swing.”

Unstoppable Golf provides a hard reset of a golfer’s approach to the game. Part of it is mental and developing the ability to believe you have a lethal short game. That comes through practice repetition and taking your skills to the golf course and executing shots under pressure.

“You are what you have thought of yourself, and you will become what you think of yourself from this moment forward,” Rotella says. “Your brain is a faithful servant.”

He hammers hard the human tendency to dwell on the negative, to carry the memory of that chunky 45-yard wedge shot well down the road but dismiss the time you executed a perfect bunker save to break 80.

“I talk a lot about getting people to have an instant amnesia of their mistakes but a long-term memory of their good shots and putts,” Rotella says. “Most people have a tendency to attach strong emotions to their bad stuff and have no emotion attached to the good stuff.”

Rotella’s wisdom applies to all golfers but makes most sense to the senior cabal. An hour to practice? Devote at least half that time, if not more, to the short game area. Take a lesson with your pro around the chipping green, not the full swing turf. Take that $600 you’d spend on a new driver and instead get a set of custom-fitted wedges.

“No matter what level a golfer plays at, the majority of his shots will be within 100 yards of the hole,” Rotella says. “The easiest way to take five to 15 shots off the average player’s handicap is by taking fewer shots around the green.”

Rotella offers the very same advice to a 15-handicapper playing in the club championship that he’d offer to McIlroy or Harrington on the final day of a major championship: Stay focused on your target, visualize the shot, commit to routine, and accept completely whatever happens to the golf ball.

“A lot of people have a dream, and then they’re scared to death they’re not going to get it,” he says. “I really want everyone to see the shot they want, so I want their eyes and their mind to be into where they want the ball to go rather than where they don’t want it to go. It’s really no different from a tour player to a 25-handicapper.”

I’m sold. No more signing up for demo days at the club in lustful pursuit of a driver that might add five yards. Let’s hit 25 pitch shots each from 20, 40 and 60 yards and then climb in the bunker. Do that, Rotella says, and you can evolve into the kind of golfer he pegs as “the silent assassin.”

That has a nice ring, for sure.

2025 Department Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

Sledge Family Values

Key players in Pinehurst’s history

By Lee Pace

Today Moore County has approximately three dozen golf courses and the 10th highest tourism economy in the state of North Carolina. In fiscal year 2023-24, hotels in the Sandhills reported a 21.7 percent increase over the previous year in room collections.

The U.S. Open at Pinehurst in 2024 drew more than 225,000 people to town and, according to a USGA study, generated a $200 million economic impact.

Heady numbers, indeed.

There are only a handful of people left who can remember when there were just four courses at Pinehurst Resort, when the town shut down for the summer, when the second hole on Pinehurst No. 2 was a challenging par-4 negotiated with a driver off the tee and a long iron into the green.

Bill Sledge is one of them.

“We lived in Elm Cottage, which is about 300 yards from the second fairway of No. 2,” says Sledge, who turned 94 in July 2025. “We were open eight months of the year. No one was here in the summer. My dad and I would walk to the second fairway, take a few clubs and a shag bag, and he taught me to play golf. He was maybe a 12- or 13-handicap, which wasn’t bad considering he didn’t play golf until he came to Pinehurst. But that’s where it started. I’ve loved the game all my life.”

Sledge is proud of having shot his age nearly 1,700 times by the time he gave up the game in 2024 because of dwindling eyesight.

“We didn’t have high school golf teams when I was growing up,” he says. “Then, early in my adult years, all I played was tennis. I got back into golf probably in the 1980s and have loved every minute of it.”

Isham Sledge was born in Nash County in 1892 and attended Kings Business College in Raleigh. He was hired as a bookkeeper in 1911 by Leonard Tufts, the son of Pinehurst founder James W. Tufts. Tufts incorporated the business in 1920 and made Sledge secretary/treasurer. Over time, Sledge became a key player in the resort’s evolution until his death in 1958.

“An accountant for Pinehurst came to Dad’s funeral and told me if not for my dad, Mr. Tufts wouldn’t have been able to keep Pinehurst after the Depression,” Sledge says. “My dad put together a consortium of banks that enabled Mr. Tufts to continue to operate. When I started to work for the company in 1955, we were still paying off that debt. It was like $150,000 a year, which doesn’t seem like anything today, but it was a lot of money in those days.”

Isham Sledge first lived in an apartment on the second floor of the Department Store Building, which now houses the Villager Deli, the Gentleman’s Corner and other businesses. He bought Elm Cottage on Cherokee Road in 1920 when he married, and the house remained in the family for some 70 years. Bill Sledge was born in 1931 (he had two older sisters, Nancy and Katherine) and has lived for many years with his wife, Ruby, in their home at Country Club of North Carolina.

“I think the village has done a good job retaining its charm,” Bill Sledge says. “I am sure Robert Dedman makes plenty of money, but they plow so much right back into the property. It’s been amazing to watch. You can’t really change the village. We’ve never allowed any McDonald’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken or any of that sort of thing.”

Leonard Tufts had four children — Richard, James, Albert and Esther. The three boys stayed in Pinehurst and were part of the mid-1900s management team, and their sister lived in New Hampshire. Isham bought Esther’s share of the company after World War II. Bill attended Davidson College and Cornell University and entered the hotel management business. He worked at Pinehurst for about a decade during the latter stages of the Tufts era, which ended in 1970 when Diamondhead bought the resort.

Sledge remembers the great amateur golfer Frank Stranahan coming with his parents every April. The Stranahans owned the Champion Spark Plug Co. in Toledo, Ohio, and their wealth allowed Frank the freedom to travel the country and play the amateur golf circuit. He won the 1949 North & South Amateur over local favorite Harvie Ward, who had beaten Stranahan the previous year.

“We had a three-bedroom suite on the second floor right over the entrance to the hotel,” Sledge says. “The Stranahans would stay a month in April, and the North & South Amateur was always played at that time. Frank loved to lift weights, and this was long before hotels had fitness centers. The bellmen always talked about having to carry Frank’s weights and barbells upstairs.”

Sledge was in college at Davidson when the 1951 Ryder Cup was held at Pinehurst.

“My dad gave me and my best friend a couple of tickets, and so we got to see Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson and Sam Snead up close,” he says. “All the great names were here.”

The ’51 Ryder Cup and the North & South Open held immediately afterward were watershed events in the resort’s history. Richard Tufts was running the resort at the time and became disenchanted with the professionals’ demands for higher purses. It aggravated him that half of the United States team that beat Great Britain and Ireland in September of 1951 did not stay in town to play in the North & South, which over its half-century existence was considered one of golf’s major championships.

Tufts discontinued the North & South Open and in its place established the North & South Seniors, which started in 1952 and still runs today.

“That was probably the most successful thing Pinehurst ever did under the Tuftses, creating the North & South Seniors,” Sledge says. “That filled the hotels. Not only ours but the Magnolia and Manor and Pine Crest and everything else in town. The golfers brought their wives, and it was a big thing — the golf and the social element. Then a group called the Three Score and Ten started coming the week after the North & South Seniors. That was two weeks of big business.”

After a two-decade hiatus from hosting professional golf events, Pinehurst and the PGA Tour reunited in 1973 with the one-off World Open. The Tour visited Pinehurst for a decade, then returned for the 1991 and ’92 Tour Championships. The dominoes by then were falling toward a relationship with the USGA and a run of four U.S. Opens from 1999 through 2024.

Now Pinehurst has its North & South Seniors and four more U.S. Opens on the calendar.

“It’s turned out pretty well for everyone,” Sledge says. “And to think, there wasn’t a soul in town in July when I was coming along.”

2025 Department Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

The U.S. Kids Catapult

A stepping stone to the top

By Lee Pace

There is a chance by the time these words hit your mailbox or coffee table that Ben Griffin of Chapel Hill will be teeing it up at Bethpage Black in the 2025 Ryder Cup. At the end of July, he was within reach of an automatic berth for the American team or being a captain’s choice by Keegan Bradley by virtue of his breakthrough year — solo victory in Fort Worth, team win in New Orleans and a total of eight Top 10 finishes, including the U.S. Open and PGA Championship.

And if not this year, another, perhaps.

Whatever success, including and beyond making a Ryder Cup team, that the 29-year-old might enjoy, he can look back to three years from 2009-11 competing in the U.S. Kids summer competitions in Pinehurst as a bedrock to his development:

2009 — Ninth place in the age 13 division.

2010 — First place in the 14 division.

2011 — First place in the 15-18 division.

“Ben had quite a run in Pinehurst,” says his dad, Cowan Griffin, who caddied for his son all three years. “It was a perfect environment to learn what competitive golf was all about. You were around class acts. The U.S. Kids produced a young man that respected his opponent, was courteous and kind, you treat each other fairly. You’re honest. It promotes just a slew of great traits for your future. That’s exactly what it did with Ben.”

More than a decade later, with his son among the elite of the PGA Tour, Cowan thinks back on that three-year run and enjoys the reflections. He chuckles at the memory of taking Ben to Pinehurst No. 6 in 2009 and having no idea that parents generally caddied for their children in U.S. Kids events. He dashed to the Belk store in Southern Pines for shorts, sneakers and golf shirts. He remembers Ben asking — and Cowan refusing to answer — where Ben stood through 16 holes in the final round in 2010 at No. 8, then being gratified to see the boy refocus, birdie the par-5 17th and win by one. He marvels at having watched Ben’s creative recovery shots on No. 2 in collecting the older boys’ division title in 2011.

“Ben was a real gritty player, and if he got in any trouble, he could manipulate his hands and make the ball hook or cut or go straight up in the air, almost like Phil Mickelson-type hands,” Cowan says. “Anywhere he was, he had an answer. “

As the U.S. Kids Teen World Championship was hitting its 20th anniversary in Pinehurst in early August 2025, Ben Griffin was an hour away, teeing it up on the PGA Tour in the Wyndham Championship in Greensboro, shooting four rounds in the 60s and finishing in a tie for 11th. He was seventh on the money list with $8.1 million.

That’s an amazing story for someone who inhaled the game of golf until their mid-20s, chucked the dream for a year in 2020 to enter private business, and a year later came back with a new set of priorities, and a refreshed game and mindset.

“It’s been an incredible journey, but since I’ve come back to golf I’ve put my mind to being one of the top players in the game, getting into the majors, getting into contention and winning on the PGA Tour,” Griffin says. “I’ve checked a lot of those boxes now, but I have to continue to keep the pedal down.”

Griffin was a golfer from near infancy. Cowan got into golf because his father, Douglas, loved the game, and he outfitted young Ben with a set of clubs as soon as Ben could walk. He was smitten from the beginning.

“We called him ‘Little Ben’ around the club,” says Rick Brannon, the Chapel Hill Country Club head golf pro from 1983 to 2017. “I can remember him on the range at 5 years old. He had a set of hand-me-down irons that were an inch longer than standard. The golf club was bigger than Ben almost. He had a motorcycle grip early on because that was the only way he could hit those long clubs.”

The talent he wielded at Pinehurst with U.S. Kids evolved over the years. Competing for East Chapel Hill High, Griffin won two state 4-A titles. And he shot 61 in the Dogwood Amateur at Druid Hills in Atlanta.

There was never any question about where Griffin would play collegiately (both of his parents are UNC grads), and he was in the Tar Heels’ starting lineup all four spring seasons from 2015-18. After leaving college, Griffin bumped around the various “minor league” tours, traveling to Canada, Latin America and across the U.S. on the Korn Ferry Tour. Then COVID-19 hit in the spring of 2020, and the golf season on the PGA Tour and all the satellite circuits were cancelled. Griffin was in debt to his sponsors and had nowhere to play.

“I wasn’t making any money,” Griffin says. “I wasn’t able to pay my own rent without help from parents, and health insurance, whatever it might be. I was 24, 25 at the time, and I was like, it’s a point in my life where I don’t want to have to rely on my parents for anything.

“It wasn’t necessarily like I disliked golf or anything. I still loved it. I was actually getting better. I felt like I was doing some really good stuff with my coach. But financially, I was in such a big hole. I didn’t see myself digging a way out of it.”

That’s when Griffin decided he was done with professional golf. He landed a job in early 2021 as a residential mortgage loan officer with Corporate Investors Mortgage Group in Chapel Hill and began working each day at the company’s headquarters at East 54, just a couple of hundred yards from the 16th hole at Finley.

“When I stepped away from golf, I was completely done,” he says, adding he envisioned golf as being a weekend distraction and a way to help his professional career with client golf.

As the summer of 2021 wore on, he started having second thoughts. His grandfather died on July 15, and the obituary included a reference to his love of golf. Doug Griffin’s motto was “hit them long and straight.”

Soon after, Griffin was driving to work one morning and absentmindedly turned onto Finley Golf Course Road instead of into the East 54 complex.

“I wasn’t thinking that much about golf at all, but these little signs kept popping up,” Griffin says. “Reading my granddad’s quote made me realize my dreams are on the golf course. I’d lie awake in bed and say, ‘Do I need to chase this dream one more time?’”

Griffin decided that he did. He has never looked back.

Lord Abbett CEO Doug Sieg organized an investor group to underwrite Griffin’s return to traveling the tour, and that November, he shot 71-74-64-71 and tied for 29th at Korn Ferry Tour Q-School. That locked up Korn Ferry Tour membership for 2022 (no more Monday qualifying), where he finished eighth in points to get a PGA Tour card for 2023.

“It’s easy to get caught as a mini-tour golfer, stuck like, man, this is so hard, my back is against the wall,” Griffin says. “So instead of that mindset, I had a more forward-thinking mindset of I’m already one of the best players in the world. I just have to go out there and prove it.”

They’ve known of that potential around Pinehurst for more than a decade.

2025 Department Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

History and Hospitality

A perfect partner for Mid Pines and Pine Needles

By Lee Pace

The golf courses at Mid Pines and Pine Needles were the 1920s offspring of a group of moneyed businessmen and regular visitors to Pinehurst who believed that the four courses at the resort weren’t enough for America’s most noted golf destination, and that they were so popular that an alternative that operated at a more relaxed pace would be attractive.

“There is the desire of a number of old Pinehurst guests who want to have comfortable quarters where they can be away from the activities of the hotels,” said Leonard Tufts, son of resort founder James Walker Tufts and the resort chief from 1902 through the mid-1930s.

Mid Pines opened in 1921 with a Donald Ross-designed course and a three-story, Georgian-style hotel; it was strictly a private club. Pine Needles followed seven years later just across the road, with Ross laying out the course through residential framed corridors and with an English Tudor-style hotel open to the public.

Both resorts have ridden the crests and valleys of wars (the U.S. Air Force used Mid Pines as a base during World War II) and economic calamity (Pine Needles went bankrupt in the mid-1930s). But they have endured because of the quality of the golf laid out by Ross, the Scotsman who came to America in 1900 and found the Sandhills’ sandy soils a mirror to what he knew from home.

The resorts have been further joined at the hip not only from their Roaring ’20s conception but having a shared ownership structure since the late 1900s, when the family of longtime Pine Needles proprietors Warren and Peggy Bell bought Mid Pines.

Now with Mid Pines four years into its second century and Pine Needles on the cusp of its own centennial, the resorts are transitioning into an initiative that one member of the ownership group says “will reposition them for the next hundred years.”

Mid Pines and Pine Needles are entering a partnership with Marine & Lawn, a hotelier with extensive experience renovating and managing historic golf-centric hotels in the United Kingdom. Among the early priorities for the new venture is Marine & Lawn taking over a total reconstruction of the hotel at Mid Pines. Renovation work will begin immediately, and the hotel will be shut down for six to eight months.

“What’s exciting to me is Marine & Lawn specializes in restoring old properties,” says Kelly Miller, president and CEO of the company that owns Mid Pines and Pine Needles as well as Southern Pines Golf Club. “They know how to refurbish a 100-year-old hotel.”

Indeed, there are cases in point across Scotland and Ireland:

At Rusacks St. Andrews, discerning travelers can sip a dram of Macallan Scotch beside a fireplace and gaze up at paintings of Old Tom Morris and the Swilcan Bridge in an iconic 1800s building to the right of the Old Course’s 18th hole.

At Dornoch Station in the Scottish Highlands, you’re just a short stroll from the homeplace of a young Donald Ross. You fall out of bed, devour a full Scottish breakfast and skip out to the ancient links swallowed up on spring days by a sea of golden gorse.

And at the Slieve Donard Hotel on the edge of the Irish Sea in Newcastle, you sleep in Victorian splendor and look out the windows at the majestic Mourne Mountains, then amble up the lane to Royal County Down.

Miller has talked with hotel consultants and potential partners in recent years about what to do with Mid Pines, a historically significant structure designed by the noted architect Aymar Embury II. The owners have refurbished some rooms in recent years to the standards of modern golf travelers, but other rooms hearken to the last century. How much money do you spend to revitalize the property? And what does the next iteration look like?

“In talking with various potential partners over the last 10 years, almost all of them said, ‘We’re going to tear Mid Pines down and build it back up, and you’ll never know,’” Miller says. “That hotel was not going to be torn down on my watch. Marine & Lawn has the experience to do the job right. They have the vision and operational experience. And, most importantly, they have enhanced the culture at every one of their properties while maintaining the heritage of each one.”

This will be Marine & Lawn’s first hotel venture in the United States, although its parent company, AJ Capital Partners, has extensive presence in the hotel industry through its collection of Graduate Hotels in college towns across America. The total investment in the two properties is estimated at $47 million over the next 12 to 16 months.

“This is an exciting initiative for our resorts,” says Miller. “We’ve needed for some time to upgrade our lodging facilities, and Marine & Lawn is the ideal partner for us.”

“We love the state of North Carolina and the Sandhills,” adds Haresh Tharani, a partner in the Mid Pines ownership group since 2018. “And we believe very strongly in the area. This is a way to enhance our portfolio while at the same time looking at other opportunities to bolster our presence in the golf capital of the United States.”

Warren Bell and his wife Peggy Kirk Bell, a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame, began operating Pine Needles in 1953, bought it in 1959, and it has remained in the family ever since. The Bells took on partners in 1994 to purchase Mid Pines. Today the enterprise is owned and operated by Miller, Tharani, Pat McGowan and their families, who will retain total ownership of the golf courses.

Miller said the family has had numerous conversations with potential partners and hotel owners and operators over many years, and had three criteria for a potential new venture.

“One, make sure that we respect and honor what Mr. and Mrs. Bell started here in 1953 and continue the history and tradition of the properties,” Miller said.

“Two, we wanted to reposition these resorts for the next 100 years. We think we’ve done a pretty good job with the golf courses and bringing them up to much higher standards. Now, it’s time to do that on the hospitality side.

“And three, we wanted to keep the family involved. Both Mid Pines and Pine Needles have been strong family operations for many decades, and we want the younger generation to have an opportunity to stay involved if they’d like.”

AJ Capital, founded in 2008 by Ben Weprin, manages over $5.4 billion in real estate investments in markets throughout the U.S. and U.K. The “AJ” stands for “adventurous journeys” and was launched as a platform for Weprin to pursue his passions of history, architecture and elite travel destinations. He had purchased and renovated rundown hotels in cities like New York, Chicago and New Orleans when his golf trips to the U.K. prompted the idea to purchase and restore historical hotels adjacent to iconic golf courses, thus creating Marine & Lawn.

“For us, it’s always been about preserving the heart and soul of golf through thoughtful hospitality,” says Phillip Allen, president of Marine & Lawn Hotels & Resorts. “What started with Rusacks St. Andrews has grown to six iconic properties across Scotland and Northern Ireland, each selected for its deep connection to the game of golf and sense of place. We couldn’t be more excited to now bring that ethos stateside — and we couldn’t imagine a more fitting destination, or better partners to do it with.”

2025 Department Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

Coore & Crenshaw Redux

Back in the sandmines again

By Lee Pace

Bill Coore was tromping through the woods about 3 miles south of the village of Pinehurst one morning in November 2011. The 900-odd acre site around him had quite the varied dossier:

It was mined for sand to blend into construction materials dating back to the early 1900s.

It later became a haven for hunters and dirt-bikers.

It was the canvas in the mid-1980s for golf architect Dan Maples to design a dramatic, do-or-die, high-testosterone course called The Pit.

One corner of the land now owned by Pinehurst Resort had been walked by Rees Jones and later Jack Nicklaus for ideas on golf courses they would build in the afterglow of the 1990s golf boom but before the 2001-03 “dotcom” bust and 9-11 aftershocks shuttered golf course activity for several years.

And it was where Coore and design partner Ben Crenshaw had been invited by Pinehurst owner Bob Dedman Jr. to chisel out a new course that would, at the time, be known as Pinehurst No. 9.

In 2011 Coore looked around at trees growing through moguls and mounds of sand left half a century before, at the various hues of sand, at the stark rolls of the land left not by Mother Nature but by heavy machinery, then nodded at his preliminary golf course routing sketched on a topo map.

“It gets me excited when I come out and look at this stuff,” he said then. “I’m not particularly thrilled with what we have on the plan, but I think it’s here. It makes you want to go stumbling through the woods.”

He nodded toward a mature pine popping through a hillside. “A dune like that with a tree growing through it? That just doesn’t happen. If you can figure out a way to utilize that, you’ve got a fascinating feature for a golf course. This is an interesting piece of ground. Overall, it’s a spectacular place.”

That golf course was never built, Dedman opting instead to buy the course originally known as Pinehurst National in 2014 and making it No. 9. Then, in the post-COVID golf boom in 2022, Dedman and resort President Tom Pashley began exploring options to add to their golf inventory and simultaneously put these 925 acres to work. Coore & Crenshaw were booked at the time, so Pinehurst retained Tom Doak to design No. 10 and told Coore & Crenshaw to reserve a spot on their schedule for a second course a couple of years down the road.

That time has come.

The Doak course occupies the western expanse of the site, with holes eight, 13 and 14 bordering N.C. 5 as it runs from the west side of Pinehurst Resort, south toward Aberdeen and an intersection with U.S. 1 and U.S. 15-501. The Coore & Crenshaw course will sit adjacent to No. 10 and extend eastward. The courses will share a common golf shop and restaurant, and the facility as an entity will be known as Pinehurst Sandmines.

“Some have suggested it was better we never built that first course. I would agree with that. I think the course we’re going to build now will be better than what we had before and will be a great companion course to what Tom did with No. 10,” Coore says. “This site is so interesting. I don’t think I have ever seen two more physically different sites that are contiguous, that touch each other, than the site for No. 10 and No. 11. They are massively different in terms of characteristics and landforms.”

The Doak course features wide, sweeping vistas and long, gradual slopes. Only the eighth hole embraces the ancient sandmines heritage with dramatic hillocks, mounds and a blind shot off the tee. The Coore & Crenshaw course will be more compact and have more of the flavor of the old Pit golf course, which was closed in 2010.

“This is choppy, ridgy ground,” Coore says. “It’s not as much elevation change, but it’s so quirky with the ridges and the piles and the trees and the angles. This is going to be so intimate in scale. You’re winding your way through trees and over old piles and across ridges. We’re far, far from the sea, but we have these contours and features and landforms that remind you of spots in Ireland or Scotland. And yet here it is, in Pinehurst.”

Pinehurst staff and subcontractors are working to clear centerlines for the fairways, and are using mini excavators because standard logging trucks would have trouble negotiating the terrain and would destroy some trees that Coore wants to save. Coore & Crenshaw’s lead shaper, Ryan Farrow, will move to Pinehurst in early fall to begin construction work.

“We do not want to be in a hurry,” Coore says. “We have a routing, but the concept of the holes will evolve. We’ll go little by little and study where to knock down the ridges, where to keep them as is. There are ridges and giant piles dating back many decades we’ll look at individually. There are some you’ll say, ‘Oh my God, let’s play over that.’ I’m pretty darn excited about this one.”

Given that Coore grew up about an hour from Pinehurst near the town of Denton and has fond memories of playing summertime golf marathons on the No. 2 course, the Sandhills have always held a special place in his golf-design heart. He was stoked to come to Pinehurst and design Dormie Club, a course that opened in 2006 on a piece of rugged ground just northwest of town. He was excited to return in 2010-11 and direct a major restoration of No. 2 predicated on ripping out much of the grass and smooth edges that had encroached over the decades and returning the layout to the ragged, linksy feel that architect Donald Ross left upon his death in 1948.

Now this project at No. 11 is an entirely different kettle of fish — a made-from-scratch course that combined with the Doak layout will give Pinehurst a satellite operation featuring courses from two of the game’s most noted architectural firms of the 2020s.

“I’m prejudiced because we’re doing one of them, but this will be a really big plus for Pinehurst. So many amazing resort courses are being built on properties ideal for golf. They are photogenic and dramatic and are the proverbial you-build-it-and-they-will-come scenario happening all over in America and other parts of the world. People go to Bandon, sit around the firepit at night, and a conversation might find advocates for any one of the five being the best golf course,” says Coore.

“At Pinehurst, it’s always been about No. 2, and rightly so,” he adds. “The addition of No. 10 and 11 will really be positive for Pinehurst. No homes, pure golf, interesting landforms, dramatically different from everything else.”

2025 Department Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

Bedtime Stories

When the day turns into night

By Lee Pace

The Pine Crest Inn opened in 1913 in the village of Pinehurst and nearly half a century later was purchased by Bob and Betty Barrett, of Erie, Pennsylvania. Barrett was a newspaperman who had visited Pinehurst regularly over the years — “At the beginning for two days, then for a week, then for two weeks,” he said.

They bought the inn for $125,000, and it has been in the Barrett family since, with the second generation taking over following Barrett’s death in 2005. By coincidence a home called the Chatham Cottage (built in the 1930s) was available directly across Dogwood Drive, and Barrett bought the house for his family to live in as they operated the inn, saying he didn’t want his two sons to grow up in a hotel.

For years, Barrett would use an extra bedroom in the house for Pine Crest overflow. Then, by the mid-1980s the family moved out, and it became an adjunct lodging option for the inn and was renamed the Barrett Cottage. There are groups who have been occupying the house the same week for more than three decades. The house has 16 beds with eight bedrooms and five baths.

Mike Close and a group of 16 to 28 golfers from Columbus, Ohio, have been visiting the Sandhills each October since 1996, making the Pine Crest and the Barrett Cottage their home base.

“It’s kind of like you’re going home; they treat you like a million dollars,” Close says. “This trip is all about friendships. We sit on the porch, smoke cigars, have a drink and tell stories. Some guys have known each other for 50 years or more. We love the Pine Crest. It’s quaint, it’s comfortable, and they have a great bar.”

There are just under 2,500 hotel rooms in the Sandhills area, ranging from the original lodging establishment that opened in 1895 to more recent facilities with brand names like Marriott and Hilton. All perform exactly as ordered — offering a comfortable bed and all the accouterments for golfers hopping from one world-renowned course to the next.

No one would label the Barrett Cottage as “luxurious.” It fits with the overall Pine Crest motif of ease and comfort you’d find in a visit to your grandmother’s. But increasingly in modern times, hoteliers and entrepreneurs have followed the concept of an adjunct, stand-alone lodging facility.

Travelers to the Pinehurst area today can drink a Scotch whisky in the home office Donald Ross occupied in the 1940’s, or play pool beneath the stained glass of a century-old church sanctuary. They can rock on the same screened-in porch where Mike Strantz quaffed a cold one after a day chiseling Tobacco Road out of the sand pits north of Pinehurst. And they can walk outside their five-bedroom house located 4 miles north of the village and play golf on a lighted par-3 hole with a fire roaring and the sound system at full blast.

“Golf groups would rather be all together under one roof versus being split up,” says Nikki Conforti, a golf package specialist at Talamore Golf Resort who frequently books guests at Talamore and its sister course, Mid South Club, into the Palmer Cottage fronting Midland Road between the two courses. “They can all hang out together at night after golf. It builds camaraderie and is a lot of fun. Our cottage is perfect for eight golfers, with a game room with a pool table, dining table and fire pit. If those walls could talk, I’m sure there would be some good stories.”

Talamore and Mid South were part of the 1990s golf boom when the Sandhills expanded its offerings. The Palmer Cottage is the result of additions, renovations and upgrades over nearly two decades to an existing house that Bob Levy, the resort’s owner and developer, bought in 2018. The cottage is marked on Midland Road with Talamore’s signature llama flag.

Another interesting lodging option is the Old Church at Pinehurst. Dan Keane, a regular visitor to Pinehurst from his home in New York City, was intrigued when he learned in 2020 that the Sacred Heart Catholic Church, located just behind the Carolina Hotel and serving the village of Pinehurst for more than a century, was for sale. Dan and wife Jenna bought the 5,300-square-foot church and renovated it into a destination with five sleeping spaces (four bedrooms and a loft) and a “great room” in the original sanctuary area, perfect for lounging, playing pool and meal functions.

“My wife and I have big families, so we’re all about having places for big groups to enjoy each other’s company. We saw the church was for sale and thought it was a good opportunity, not as much as a business decision, but it would be really cool to own and share with people,” Keane says. “It’s different from anything else. Watching a movie, having a game on, a bartender behind the bar — it makes for a cool experience. All churches are places for gathering. It speaks to why people visit the Sandhills — relaxing, enjoying, sitting by a fire pit, having a glass of wine. It’s everything you’d expect and more.”

Pinehurst Resort has seemingly infinite lodging options within four main facilities, the Carolina Hotel, Holly Inn, Manor Inn and Magnolia Inn. But it also has two outside-the-box offerings and in May opened the doors to yet another.

The Presidential Suite opened on the first floor of the Carolina Hotel in 2007 and offers 1,800 square feet of “wow factor” that would impress the CEO accustomed to the most opulent room in a midtown New York City hotel. In 2017 the resort purchased Dornoch Cottage, built by famed golf architect Donald Ross in 1925, and occupied by Ross and his wife until his death in 1948. Situated near the third green of Pinehurst No. 2, with four spacious bedrooms, a modern kitchen and Ross’s office still intact, Dornoch Cottage is made available to select guests and used as the site of parties and receptions.

In the 1990s the resort hired Tom Fazio to design a course to celebrate its 100th birthday in 1995, and the result was Pinehurst No. 8. Needing more beds for golfers in the post-COVID golf explosion, the resort has built a cottage village on a parcel of land between the eighth, ninth and 10th holes. Five cottages opened in May, and four more will follow in the fall, adding 52 new rooms in all.

Another premium spot in the Sandhills is the Stewart Cabin, tucked into the woods facing the pond on the par-3 14th hole at Tobacco Road in Sanford. The cabin is where Strantz stayed when on property designing the one-of-a-kind course that opened in 1998. The rustic two-bedroom cabin has been fully renovated with a full kitchen, outdoor grill and a fenced-in porch with rocking chairs.

Birdie Houses, billed as “luxury retreats powered by a global golf group chat,” is a product of the social media and Instagram phenomenon of the 2020s. The idea is to create a one-of-a-kind lodging facility in a famous golf destination and market it to golfers who wield their 7-iron by day and their phones by night, chatting and texting and posting about their experiences in golf. Birdie Houses has built a home on N.C. 73 north of Pinehurst that is the ultimate entertainment retreat with a 100-yard-plus golf hole, putting/chipping green, eight-person hot hub, gas fire pit, ping-pong table, NBA Jam, 85-inch TV and indoor simulator lounge.

The Pinehurst Birdie House is booked solid for all for 2025, proof once again you’d better queue up quickly for golf in the Sandhills.

2025 Department Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

Talk the Talk

And put on the headphones

By Lee Pace

By April 2020, Matt Ginella had spent seven years on a dream assignment collecting and producing golf travel content for the Golf Channel. But that spring the world ground to a halt in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak. Ginella, for years a print journalist before moving to television, was at his heart a storyteller, and found himself with oodles of time and a vault of interesting tales gathered from pursuing the sport around the globe.

Prior to the pandemic, he’d been reluctant to jump on the podcast bandwagon. Here a podcast, there a podcast, everywhere a podcast — one of these newfangled instruments to deliver what was essentially a radio show. But a new venture he conceived with fellow journalist Alan Shipnuck called The Fire Pit Collective was the perfect venue for Ginella to begin generating hour-long conversations with the fascinating people he’d met in the game. The Fire Pit Podcast was born.

“One might say I had an epiphany,” Ginella says. “The world was grounded. We were quarantined. Yet people were still interested in a quality narrative. It was the perfect launchpad, an outlet for my passion for telling stories.

“Over the years, I’d had access to incredibly interesting and inspiring people. We always left some of the best stuff on the cutting room floor. We turned that upside down, put those out in podcast form. We are hyperfocused on the best story, the type of story told in a fire pit atmosphere after a full day of golf. Pour a drink and sit by the fire. We’re letting people stretch, letting them go and giving them time to tell their best stories.”

The result five years later is a library of nearly 200 podcasts encompassing personalities, travel, equipment, the greats of the game and major championships.

One of the most entertaining shows was a two-parter from August 2022, about the “Manning Brothers Buddies Trip,” when Eli, Peyton and Cooper Manning travel to Scotland with buddies like Eric Church, Jim Nantz and Taylor Zarzour, navigating — in intricate color and hilarious detail — the golf courses, bars and cemetery walls next to the Old Course. It took 14 interviews and eight hours of tape to get the story pat.

“For this old soul, to have buddies on the ultimate buddy trip allows you to experience it vicariously, by connecting me via Facetime worlds apart, to have me there live and in person, is a very nice gift,” Nantz says. “A gift of friendship. Golf does that to you.”

Indeed, it does. Golf has always been revered for its rich literary heritage, and now the spoken word through the podcast has a significant place at the table.

The podcast format has been around for about 20 years, the “pod” coming from the Apple iPod that was introduced in the early 2000s. Podcasts are best described as on-demand radio — audio content like you would find on the radio but available in episodes that listeners can stream from the internet anytime, anywhere, on venues like Apple Podcasts or Spotify. In time, video was introduced, and now podcasts are streamed on YouTube and other social media. There are some 600 golf podcasts on Spotify.

January marked the third year of the Pinehurst area Convention and Visitors Bureau “Paradise in the Pines” podcast. The podcasts are hosted by CEO Phil Werz, run about 30 minutes in length, and are posted (in general) every other Tuesday. The theme of the podcast is to share conversations with the people who make the Sandhills the “Home of American Golf,” with guests having a direct tie to the Sandhills whether it be for golf, business or other interests. Guests have included Mike Hicks, the caddie for the late Payne Stewart; Angela Moser, the lead designer on Tom Doak’s staff for Pinehurst No. 10; and Jamie Ledford, president of Pinehurst-based Golf Pride Grips.

“Social media content is one of the most important things we do as a destination marketing organization,” Werz says. “The podcast was simply another way to produce content via a popular mechanism.”

Chris Finn launched a golf fitness and rehabilitation practice named Par 4 Success in Durham in 2013, and the company has grown substantially over a dozen years into ever-bigger headquarters facilities in the Research Triangle Park. He launched a podcast in July 2023 called “The Golf Fitness Bomb Squad,” installed production capabilities in a new company headquarters, and now consistently produces an average of two podcasts a week. One of them features a guest — someone from the golf equipment, instruction, fitness or other disciplines — and the second is a shorter subject addressing topics like off-season conditioning, injury rehab or improving mobility.

“No one in the fitness or rehab space was doing anything research- and science-based,” Finn says. “We talk to top instructors, equipment guys, fitness experts and bring it back to golf fitness. We’ve had PGA Tour and LPGA pros, and long-drive champions. Fitness is the underlying thread. We take a casual approach to introducing people to the fitness world in an unintimidating way. We meet them where they’re at instead of talking over their heads.”

The “No Laying Up Podcast” will hit its 1,000th episode in 2025 in more than a decade of production. What started as a group text among college friends in 2014 has grown into one of the most popular podcasts in the game as it strives to provide fresh, funny and informative conversation on all things golf. In early February, the No Laying Up gang was at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am — won by Rory McIlroy — just weeks after doing a deep dive on “The Lost Decade of Rory in the Majors.” It generates significant content on the pro tours but also ventures into topics such as gaining clubhead speed with Dr. Sasho McKenzie, co-founder of The Stack System. And they have had good access to top-level guests like Tommy Fleetwood, Jim Furyk and Mike Whan.

In 2015 Andy Johnson, frustrated by traditional golf media, set out to generate his own newsletter. He found an audience, and in time it evolved into The Fried Egg website, which has a decided bent toward golf architecture. Often on “The Fried Egg Podcast,” he and co-host Garrett Morrison delve into intricate detail on the design, personality and playability of the world’s top courses. You’ll learn of courses you’ve never heard of but want to immediately put on a buddies trip list.

The Golfer’s Journal was launched in 2018 as a hefty print book being released quarterly. Its motto is “Golf in its purest form,” and the magazine and accompanying podcast are not interested in the newest driver or golf ball design or swing technique. They find the most interesting people, venues and stories to write and talk about. Author Tom Coyne hosts many of the podcasts along with editor Travis Hill. Wide-ranging subjects have included a multi-podcast history of the Masters and Augusta National; interviewing Bill Coore about his golf design travels and a personal trip to Antarctica; and how Padraig Harrington is one of the most interesting people in golf.

There are podcasts for all interests and tastes — humor, travel, the mental game, swing technique and history. Like courses in the Sandhills, there are plenty of options for golf junkies to get their fix.

2025 Department Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

Calling Cards

The business of keeping score

By Lee Pace

The world’s oldest golf scorecard dates to December 1820 and the golf links at Musselburgh, Scotland. A member named James Cundell used the card to record 84 shots over 10 holes in a club match and noted in the margin, “Dreadful storm of wind and rain — atmosphere quite yellow — just like the lurid regions of Pandemonium.” The card sold in 2019 at a collector’s auction for the U.S. dollar equivalent of some $6,300.

Over two centuries, literally millions of scorecards have been churned out for golf courses worldwide. Some are simple one color on card stock. Some have a second color. Others have full-color photos, advertising or foil stamping. A nice touch for walking golfers is having a handy little pencil slip.

Odds are if you’ve stashed some scorecards away in your golf memorabilia bin, you’ll find a card with the tiny imprint in one corner of Golf Associates, Asheville, N.C. Quietly and with little fanfare, a small company in the mountains of North Carolina has carved a niche as one of the most pre-eminent manufacturers of scorecards in the nation. It has been in business for 55 years.

“It was early 1989; I had just taken the job at Duke and was at the PGA Show,” says Ed Ibarguen, the director of golf at the Duke University Golf Club. “I was wandering around the show and saw this company from North Carolina. They made scorecards. The guy stood up, shook my hand and said he was a huge Duke fan and would love our business. His name was Sherwood Pinkston. We developed a long-standing friendship. Sherwood’s gone now, but we’re 36 years into working with the same company.”

Pinkston grew up in Asheville and developed his business IQ by selling drinks at Asheville Tourists baseball games and hustling empty bottles for a penny each. He served in the South Pacific in World War II, then came home, started a family and ran assorted businesses — a diner in West Asheville and a dry-cleaning business, to name just two.

“He was the consummate entrepreneur,” says Jerry Davis, who worked for Pinkston from 1996 through Pinkston’s death in 2014. “He was not going to work for anybody. He was an avid golfer and a heckuva competitor. He was an ace at the pool table. He had big hands, but they were soft hands. He could make that cue ball go anywhere he wanted. He was a good golfer and an excellent putter, particularly on fast greens. You always wanted Sherwood as your partner.”

Pinkston played golf regularly at Beaver Lake Golf Course north of the city and Black Mountain Golf Course to the east. One day in 1968, he was paired with a man from California who said he’d just gone out of business trying to sell scorecards with advertising on them. That sounded like a good idea, so Pinkston approached the pro at Black Mountain and said he’d produce a scorecard for free if he could sell advertising.

The acorn was hatched.

He founded Golf Associates in 1970 and at first used the printing press at Hickory Printing Group, an hour east of Asheville. Pinkston called on golf courses from Mississippi to Miami, often sleeping in his car and eating a lot of saltines and Vienna sausage along the way. He got good results from a mail solicitation campaign, with one of his first orders coming from L.B. Floyd, the pro at Stryker Golf Course at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville and father of future Golf Hall of Famer Raymond.

“We offered a superior product, and if they would take advertising, it didn’t cost them anything,” Pinkston said.

One niche for the business was daily fee and public access courses that would allow Pinkston to sell advertising. That approach didn’t appeal to the private clubs, so Pinkston developed formats and ideas for scorecards that clubs would purchase.

“The Duke scorecards had had ads on them, and I wanted to get away from that,” Ibarguen remembers. “Sherwood had the idea of putting the logo in a foil stamp. He said he’d do it for no upcharge. He produced a beautiful card, one that I’d bet was as nice as you would find at the time for a public access course.”

Pinkston grew the business, added staff and eventually purchased a printing press (upgraded several times over the years). He expanded to add rack cards and post cards. His wife, Faye, took over running the business after her husband’s passing, and in 2020 she sold it to Gary Mannies, who had been in the yardage book publication business and had developed a friendship with Sherwood at trade shows over the years.

Today the company does work in its backyard, with cards at Biltmore Forest and Asheville Municipal; across the state at Quail Hollow in Charlotte, and Forest Creek, Dormie Club and Tobacco Road in the Sandhills; and to nationally recognized clubs like Whistling Straits, Fishers Island Club, Streamsong, Valhalla and Congressional.

“Sherwood is from ‘The Greatest Generation,’” says Davis, who knew Pinkston from playing golf around Asheville when he was looking for a career change in the mid-1990s after decades in the insurance industry. “He came back from the war determined to be a success. He just happened to find golf scorecards. Back then, most scorecards were bland and utilitarian. He introduced four-color. He started printing cards with UV coating on one side. That was a big innovation. It made the club logo stand out and pop off the card. That was a game-changer for us. For higher-end clubs, he started using linen and gold foil.”

Today, company sales representatives pay calls on courses across the nation and set up shop at trade shows like the PGA Show in Orlando every January, and the Carolinas PGA Show in Greensboro in February.

“I love the game, I love the people I work with, and it’s a creative business,” says Brayden Pitcairn, who’s been with Golf Associates for three years, as he looks over a display table of the company’s scorecards at the Greensboro show. “We want to produce something the golf staff is proud to hand to members and guests.”

Davis stands nearby, shaking hands with show attendees and reminiscing about the success of a company lasting well over half a century. His favorite story is having traveled with Pinkston to a trade show in St. Louis, driving back to Asheville and stopping at a motel in Nashville at 2 a.m. Davis went to park the car and bring the luggage in while Pinkston went into the office to register.

“I came into the office and Sherwood was trying to talk the guy at the desk into a deal for rack cards,” Davis says. “Now, the guy at the desk at 2 a.m. is not the decision maker. But that didn’t put Sherwood off.”

Entrepreneurs and golf. Some stumble, but the good stories are worth a round of applause.

2025 Department Golftown Journal