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A Family Legacy

Right at home in the Hall of Fame

By Lee Pace

It began with a press release in April 1981 that a new Carolinas Golf Hall of Fame had been created, and the venture continued with an inaugural inductee banquet on June 1 at the Southern Pines Elks Club. All five of those first inductees as designated by a committee headed by Jack Horner of the Durham Herald-Sun and composed of members of the now-defunct Carolinas Golf Reporters Association had some connection to Pinehurst and the Sandhills.

Richard Tufts was the grandson of Pinehurst founder James W. Tufts, a former president of the USGA and a noted authority on the Rules of Golf.

Donald Ross lived in Pinehurst after moving from Dornoch on the northeast coast of Scotland in 1900 through his death in 1948, and designed seven Sandhills area courses and just under 400 nationwide in a prolific career.

Harvie Ward and Billy Joe Patton were North Carolina natives and golfing bon vivants, playing with style and spirit and winking to the gallery while making birdies. Between them, they won four North & South Amateurs from 1948 to 1963.

And Estelle Lawson Page ruled the Women’s North & South Amateur from 1937 to 1945, winning six of nine over that period.

Seventy-five more golfers have entered the Carolinas Golf Hall of Fame (now under the auspices of the Carolinas Golf Association) since then. In the early days, plaques commemorating their inclusion were housed at Seven Lakes Country Club at the behest of Peter Tufts, the Seven Lakes course designer and son of Richard. Later the display moved to Pine Needles Lodge, where it was housed in 2007, when it moved to its current home.

Pinehurst Resort management in the 1990s expanded the 1900 Carolina Hotel eastward with two major projects — the Grand Ballroom as the centerpiece to an expansive new meeting center, and then the spa and fitness center. One elongated hallway leading from the hotel’s East Wing to the ballroom afforded an important opportunity. The resort offered use of one wall for the Carolinas Golf Hall of Fame. Over the next quarter century, the exhibition has grown to 82 members and was recently reorganized to provide additional wall space for the Hall of Fame to grow.

This year the owners of the resort for the last 42 years took their place along that hallway.

Inducted in mid-February were Robert Dedman Sr., whose Club Corporation of America bought the resort in 1984, and Robert Dedman Jr., who took the baton upon his father’s death in 2002 and has guided Pinehurst to unparalleled heights in the last dozen years.

“The Dedmans’ impact cannot be measured simply by courses renovated, courses built or championships hosted but something far more lasting — stewardship,” said longtime family friend and former USGA President Jim Hyler in introducing Dedman Jr. during the induction ceremony held, appropriately enough, in the Grand Ballroom. “They have not only owned the Pinehurst Resort but cared for it. They understood Pinehurst is not just a destination but a trust, passed from one generation to the next, carrying with it the soul of the game itself.”

Also inducted was Jack Nance, the recently retired executive director of the Carolinas Golf Association, which has been headquartered since the 1980s in the Sandhills area. Nance in his remarks paid tribute to what the Dedmans had meant not only to Pinehurst but the region and the state of North Carolina having hosted four U.S. Opens, one U.S. Women’s Open and offering land between the Carolina Hotel and its golf clubhouses for the USGA’s new Golf House Pinehurst and World Golf Hall of Fame.

“What your family has done for golf here in the Carolinas is extraordinary and permanent,” Nance said. “From bringing the U.S. Open to Pinehurst to what we see today across Moore County — the USGA Hall of Fame and satellite headquarters, the massive road renovations, and the never-ending projects, the economic boom — it all traces back to your family’s vision. Your award tonight is well earned, and your legacy will be long-lived.”

Dedman Jr. said his family’s long involvement at Pinehurst had “been a labor of love for two generations” and told of his father’s humble upbringing in Arkansas, his G.I. Bill financed law degree after World War II and his entrepreneurial instincts that hit in the early 1950s. Dedman was playing golf in Palm Springs, California, at a golf community that featured three courses and one central clubhouse operation and it occurred to him that the model could work in a metropolitan area like his own home in Dallas. That launched the idea for Brookhaven Country Club, which opened in 1957 and was the first domino to fall in what would become ClubCorp — a massive global operation with country clubs and city clubs around the world.

“Over the next 50 years, ClubCorp became a world leader,” Dedman said. “My father raised and elevated the standards of excellence in the club industry. He democratized the industry, making clubs more affordable and accessible, clubs that were exclusive but not exclusionary. That has been a guiding principle since the beginning.”

The initiative of Dedman Sr. was restoration — rebuild the facilities that included having a chef fall through a kitchen floor, cultivate quality playing surfaces on the golf courses, bring championship golf back to Pinehurst, add new courses in Nos. 7 and 8 and expand the room inventory with the acquisition of village of Pinehurst properties such as the Holly Inn and Manor Inn.

The initiative of Dedman Jr. has been transformation — green light the restoration of the No. 2 course back to its early 1900s character of bouncy fairways and perimeters of natural hardpan sand and wire grass, redesign and re-engineer No. 4 in a similar fashion, add The Cradle short course and launch a major expansion south toward Aberdeen that will include courses No. 10 and 11. Dedman noted the company has invested some $250 million over the last five years in the facility.

“And there’s more to come,” he said. “These are exciting times in Pinehurst.”

That Pinehurst has had just three owners over 131 years (the Tufts, Maxton native Malcolm McLean and the Dedmans) is remarkable — even more so that one family has been constant for the last four-decades plus.

“In recent years, Bob talks about wanting to be the soul of American golf,” Hyler said. “The Dedmans have been caretakers of an unbelievable asset. I am glad they’re being properly recognized for many years of stability and leadership.”

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Gimme Five

The club that can do no wrong

By Lee Pace

“Nothing is so beautiful as spring.”

Unless it’s a 185-yard par 3 with the pin on the left.

With apologies to Gerard Manley Hopkins for using his line of verse as a hook for this missive on my favorite golf club, there’s nothing that gets the juices flowing more than pulling my vaunted 5-wood (or 21-degree hybrid in contemporary parlance) and setting up for a gentle draw.

The 17th hole at my home course, Old Chatham in Durham, N.C., invites this distance and ball flight perfectly from the next-to-back tees if the pin’s rear left.

The sixth green at Pinehurst No. 2 is placed at an angle suggesting a right to left ball path and, at 200-plus yards from the Ross Tee, hits the sweet spot for a 5-wood shot, a bounce and some roll on those always firm turtleback greens.

Stand on the 17th tee at the Ocean Course at Kiawah with the Atlantic off to the right and you might well face a shot in that 185-yard range — all carry over a hazard with the water bordering the green on the right. It takes some cojones to aim a hair right over the water and curl it back — but that 5-wood is johnny-on-the-spot.

All great fodder indeed for my favorite club.

Mind you, we’re not suggesting my modest resume even sniffs the same league as Jack Nicklaus wielding his 1-iron on two of his most famous shots — to the 18th green at Baltusrol in winning the 1967 U.S. Open, or hitting the pin on the 17th green at Pebble Beach in collecting the 1972 U.S. Open championship.

Or Ben Crenshaw rolling in that mammoth putt from 60 feet on the 10th at Augusta in 1984 with his Wilson 8802 putter, the club nicknamed “Little Ben” that his dad bought for $20 out of Harvey Penick’s golf shop in Austin.

Or Phil Mickelson performing magic lob shots with the 64-degree wedge that he personally grinds to take the bounce off the trailing edge and the heel so that when he lays it open, the sole sits flush to the ground.

When I first started playing golf seriously in the 1980s, I had a Tommy Armour 5-wood with a persimmon head. That blond-colored wood with the lacquered finish set up perfectly no matter the ground — it would flush the ball off a tight lie or whip like butter through the Southern summer Bermuda grass.

Persimmon gave way to metal heads and later titanium. Fairways woods became “hybrids.” At various times, I played forged irons and later, cast clubs. I wielded Wilson irons in the early days and later played Pings and now have a bag full of Titleists.

But no matter the manufacturer or the makeup of my set of clubs, priority No. 1 has always been getting that 5-wood just right — that club that was more forgiving than the 3-wood or 3-iron and was ideally suited for approach shots into long par-4s and par-3s. Today the club of choice is a Titleist H1 19-degree with a regular flex Tensei shaft.

That 5-wood looks just right and feels just right.

It certainly did to PGA Tour player Pat McGowan some four decades ago.

McGowan played on the PGA Tour throughout the late 1970s and through the 1980s, and it wasn’t until the mid-1980s that he broached the idea of a 5-wood.

“Almost everyone carried a 1-iron, no matter who you were,” says McGowan, the director of instruction at Pine Needles Lodge & Golf Club in Southern Pines. “Most good amateurs with low single-digit handicaps carried a 1-iron. It was almost like a 5-wood was a sissy club. You carried a driver, a 3-wood and a 1-iron.”

He put a Ping 5-wood into play in the mid-1980s.

“It had a black head and a red, laminated insert,” McGowan says. “I hit it higher with that club than my 4-iron. I’ll never forget at New Orleans, it must have been 1986 or so, I came to a long par-4 or short par-5, I can’t remember which, but there was a bunker all the way in front of the green, and that 5-wood cleared the bunker, landed on the green and stopped on the green. I said, ‘Oh, my God.’ I couldn’t hit that shot with any other club. I hit it high and it landed soft. I took the 1-iron out.”

A few years ago, I was invited to a member-guest tournament at Forest Creek Golf Club in Pinehurst. The competition was five nine-hole matches on the club’s North and South Courses. My host and I played well together that weekend, and we needed to win our match on Saturday afternoon to collect first place in our flight.

The last match was on the back nine of the South Course. We had a 1-up lead on the par-3 17th, our eighth hole of the match. The South Course at Forest Creek, a 1996 Tom Fazio design, is replete with picturesque holes, and this is one of the nicest — an amphitheater setting, downhill, a wide and shallow green with a pond across the front.

The flag was on the left, and the breeze was into our faces. My GPS device measured 182 yards.

I pulled my 5-wood and teed up my ball. I stood behind it and envisioned that crisp contact and a high, right to left ball flight. Believing is seeing, and that’s exactly what I got.

The ball stopped 6 feet from the hole. I made the putt and the match was over.

I won a very nice Scotty Cameron putter that weekend, and I still carry it in my bag. It’s held in high esteem but not quite as high as that smooth and silky 5-wood.

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The Scottish Invasion

Planting the roots of golf

By Lee Pace

Golf clubs across America in the early 1900s were frequently governed by fair-complected men who rolled their Rs, said aye and nae and wee, and spoke fondly of The Macallan and a dish from their homeland made of sheep’s innards.

Here in the Sandhills, the memory of Donald Ross, a native of Dornoch on the northeast coast of Scotland, is revered.

Hope Valley Country Club in Durham is 100 years old and has had a member of the Crichton family from Monifieth on its golf shop payroll every single day of its existence. That’s right — some 36,500 days (plus leap years) of paying Marshall and his offspring David and Maggie.

Other early Scotsmen who moved to America to carve a career in the golf business and landed in the Carolinas were Ralph Miner of New Bern Country Club, David Ferguson at Greenville (S.C.) Country Club, and Frank Clark of Asheville Country Club and later Biltmore Forest Country Club.

“You had to listen carefully,” Greenville golfer Heyward Sullivan said of Ferguson. “He talked through a thick burr. He used to say, ‘Laddie, the short game will help your long game, nay the long game will never help the short game.’ He wanted you to practice chipping and putting.” 

Hope Valley member Joe Robb once said of Marshall Crichton, the club’s first pro when it opened with a Ross-designed course in 1926: “A Scotsman replete with a brogue, bandy legs, a caustic tongue and a terrific sense of humor. Marshall’s brogue was so thick that his cuss words often sounded like music.”

One of the most fascinating stories of Scotsmen coming to America was that of the Findlay brothers — Alex and Fred. There were eight boys in the Findlay family of Montrose, and all of them learned to play golf. Alex was the oldest and in 1886 became the first golfer to ever post a 72 in competition. The next winter he left Scotland for America at the behest of fellow Montrose resident Edward Millar, who had established Merchiston Ranch near Fullerton in Nebraska in February 1887.

The so-called “Apple Tree Gang” at St. Andrew’s Golf Club in Yonkers, New York, is roundly credited with playing the first game of golf in America in February 1888. In truth, Alex Findlay had laid out a six-hole course at Merchiston Ranch by April 1887, played it with clubs he brought from Scotland, and sought to spread the virtues of golf in the Wild, Wild West. Some said as the game grew in popularity that he was the “Father of American Golf.”

“The people round about used to come and laugh at us for running after a white ball,” Findlay said in a 1926 interview with the London Evening Standard. “But at length I asked them to have a game and soon afterwards they were all keen to play. Before very long a golf club had been formed and the first steps to making America a golfing country had been taken.”

Meanwhile, Fred moved to Australia in 1909 with his wife in search of a warmer climate for their son, Freddie, who suffered from tuberculosis. Fred soon found work as head pro and course superintendent at Metropolitan Golf Club and stayed there for 14 years. Unfortunately, his son died at a young age despite the advantages of the warmer climate. Findlay’s daughter met a young man from Richmond, Virginia, who had served in the Navy during World War I and traveled to Australia as a merchant seaman.

Ruth Findlay married Raymond “Ben” Loving in 1924. They moved to Richmond and Fred followed them. Findlay knew Australian golfers Joe Kirkwood and Victor East, who had ventured to the States to play golf and give exhibitions, and both spoke highly of the New World and the opportunity for an accomplished golfer. His brother Alex cabled him from America, “Come at once.” 

“I came to Richmond to visit my daughter,” Fred said. “They were talking about building a course there. I loved the game, and I was interested in anything that would make an honest dollar.”

Findlay quickly established himself as a talented golf architect in the mid-Atlantic region. Though his career would not prove as prolific as that of Ross, who is credited with some 385 course designs in the eastern United States, he was “the man” in the state of Virginia, designing some 40 courses.

One of his early works that remains today is the James River Course at the Country Club of Virginia, in Richmond. He took 14 holes from a plan drawn by William Flynn and added four more, and supervised the construction of the course that opened in 1928. The collaboration certainly worked out well, as the James River course was the venue for the 1955 and 1975 U.S. Amateur Championships.

His most revered and solo design opened one year later — Farmington Country Club in Charlottesville. Findlay made his first visit to the site just west of the campus of the University of Virginia in September 1927, and the course opened two years later.

Findlay was given a special piece of ground when a group of Charlottesville business leaders decreed the town should have a sports and social club. The site had been under the purview of 13 owners over nearly two centuries, dating to 1744, when King George II of England conveyed 4,753 acres to Michael Holland of Hanover County. A manor house built in 1785 and expanded in 1803 under plans drawn by President Thomas Jefferson would be refurbished and expanded to serve as the clubhouse.

Findlay surveyed the misty mountain range to the north and west that would one day become the Shenandoah National Park. He traversed the slopes and hollows and in his mind pictured the flight of a golf ball cracked from his wooden-shafted mashie, soaring through the crystalline air and across a winding brook. He scanned the hillsides and factored the flow of fairways amid the Scotch broom running rampant.

“I just walk around and commune with nature in her visible forms,” Findlay said of his process. “And then, as if by inspiration alone, it comes to me suddenly, and I see the finished course far more plainly and vividly than if it were charted on cold blueprint paper. It has a character. And then I set out to make it what I have dreamed of — to materialize my vision. Nature herself gives me most of my ideas.”

Loving helped his father-in-law build the course and stayed on for half a century as the club’s general manager. After years living in Richmond, Fred moved back to Charlottesville and spent his later years playing golf, fishing, hunting and painting.

Newspaperman Ross Valentine wrote of Findlay at age 90 in October 1961: “To see Fred Findlay, clear-eyed, lean-muscled and fit as a fiddle on the eve of his 90th birthday, with whipcord and steel wrists hit a golf ball straight down the middle, was inspiring.”

Findlay immersed himself in the idyllic settings of Farmington and the surrounding countryside, capturing many in paintings that hang in the clubhouse today. The Findlay Room is decorated with three scenes from the 1950s and early ’60s — one of the third hole of the golf course and two with pastures, distant mountains and the lakes where he frequently cast a fishing line.

Findlay died on March 9, 1966, at age 94, in a Charlottesville nursing home, where he had recently moved following a period of declining health.

“Aye, Laddie,” the old Scotsman said, “if I had my life to live again, I wouldna’ change one day. The world owes me na’thing. My life has been coupled with nature, and I am sure there is nothing that keeps one closer to God.”

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.” 

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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.

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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.”

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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.”