Tag: Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

Thirty Something

Standing the test of time

By Lee Pace

Photographs by Ryan Montgomery

In the decade that Bob McCann has been the owner of Forest Creek Golf Club, he’s developed a deep respect for the position the club’s South Course holds in the minds and hearts of its members.

“There is something about the South Course that is so special,” McCann says. “People get romantic about it. They like the North Course. But they really love the South Course.”

Both courses are the work of noted golf architect Tom Fazio, the South opening in 1996 and the North following in 2005 as the lynchpins of a club and residential community just northeast of the village of Pinehurst. Terry Brown, the original developer, hired Fazio to design both courses and gambled that one man could create two vastly different experiences on the same piece of property.

“I can certainly argue that we created two contrasting styles at the same address — as much as if we’d done one course and someone else had done the other,” Fazio says. “The South Course has an Augusta look and feel with gently flowing lines, wintertime overseeding and big, white-splashed bunkers. The North favors a course like Pine Valley with lots of sand, irregular boundaries and native grasses popping through wide expanses.”

The South was named one of the top three Best New Residential Courses of 1996 by Golf Digest. Mike Keiser, the developer of golf destinations such as Bandon Dunes in Oregon and Cabot Links in Nova Scotia, ranks Forest Creek as No. 5 in a personal list of the best private clubs in the United States with two or more courses, following Winged Foot, Baltusrol, Olympia Fields and Monterey Peninsula.

“I am such a fan of Forest Creek,” Keiser says. “Both courses are so well done. They were built as golf first, clubhouse and residential second. That shows you where the focus was, and it’s certainly worked out. They have two wonderful courses. Tom Fazio is brilliant. He made them look so different, and that’s hard to do.”

Now 30 years into its existence, the South Course is closed and is getting a major overhaul, and will reopen in October. Green complexes and bunkers are being rebuilt to modern maintenance and playability standards. The irrigation system will be brand new. Select trees are being culled to help with sunlight and air flow, particularly around the greens. And the original bent grass greens are being replaced with hybrid Bermuda.

For years, Forest Creek prided itself on having Bermuda greens on the North and bent on the South, with one of the two courses being in perfect condition at any given point in the year — the Bermuda surfaces on the North being healthy during the dog days of August, and the bent of the South playing firm and quick during the height of the spring and fall Sandhills golf seasons. But the summer heat extremes as the 21st century evolved made that too challenging on the South Course.

“We studied the green complexes very closely for many years,” McCann says. “We knew that with changes in climate, we had to go with Bermuda on the South. But there are no architectural changes. Some bunkers will be a little smaller and a little easier to get in and out of for our older members. But the original design has stood the test of time. I love that about what Tom created 30 years ago.”

In a perfect what-goes-around-comes-around moment, the same man who spent a year in Pinehurst in 1995 and into 1996 directing the construction of the course is now Fazio’s construction representative on the restoration job. It was Ron Smith’s first golf course building job in the mid-1990s when he worked for Central Florida Turf, the contractor on the first course at Forest Creek. He’s built golf courses all over the world in the three decades since and in 2016 went to work for Fazio Design.

“The pressure here now is this course has got to be better,” Smith says. “That sets a pretty high standard to begin with. The great thing is, I know the history at Forest Creek. It’s exciting to be back here again. We’ll get this golf course back to the standards we set 30 years ago.”

Smith grew up in Ohio, and his father was in the coal mining industry. He learned to use a bulldozer at age 12 and started playing golf at 20. When the coal business went bust across the Rust Belt in the early 1990s, Smith pivoted to building golf courses.

“Forest Creek was the first job I had as a project manager,” he says. “It just happened to be a Tom Fazio golf course. I was a nervous wreck the first time I met him. But he was a great guy and so talented. We’ve done a lot of work together over many years.”

Fazio was working in Pinehurst at the same time building Pinehurst No. 8, and neither Brown at Forest Creek nor Pinehurst owner Bob Dedman Sr. had a problem with Fazio designing two courses just 2 miles apart as the crow flies. Forest Creek would be a private club within a residential community and No. 8 was a resort course — ergo two separate marketing pools. Blake Bickford was Fazio’s associate designer on both jobs in the mid-1990s and is again involved in the Forest Creek restoration.

“This site is tremendous, and it’s always been one my favorites,” Smith says. “It’s got the lakes, the sand, the big pines. It’s pretty easy to build a great golf course on that piece of land, particularly when you’ve got someone like Tom directing you. People always ask me, ‘What’s your favorite course you’ve built?’ I always put Forest Creek in my top three. When this job is done and it reopens, it will definitely still be there.”

The South Course overhaul will be the crowning achievement for McCann, the Pittsburgh native and retired Wall Street executive who has had an ownership interest in Forest Creek dating to 2011, when the members bought the club from the original developers. McCann was the majority owner of a group that bought the club in late 2017 and since has become the sole owner.

“When the South Course reopens in October, it will be quite a milestone for Forest Creek,” McCann says. “We’ve been working toward this point for eight years. There was a time 10 years ago when the members were scared we were going to go under. We’ve had a solid business plan and a lot of great people working together to get Forest Creek back on firm footing.”

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

The Happy Plodder

Getting a feel for the land

By Lee Pace

Bill Coore arrived at the site of the new No. 11 course at Pinehurst early one Saturday morning in April. He parked his rental car near the abandoned clubhouse of The Pit Golf Links, the course that existed from 1985 to 2010 before going under due to financial duress. Its demise allowed Pinehurst Resort owner Bob Dedman to later purchase and repurpose the land for two new courses pegged The Sandmines, a salute to the tract’s purpose a century ago as a source for sand in highway construction.

First came Pinehurst No. 10 opening in the spring of 2024 with 18 holes designed by Tom Doak. Now in the works are 18 more to be known as No. 11 from the architectural wizardry of Coore and partner Ben Crenshaw.

Coore had been in Pinehurst all week working with chief design associate Ryan Farrow and the construction crew in finishing shaping the greens and taking a final inspection tour before heading to South Carolina and the grand opening of the new Coore & Crenshaw course called Anson Point in Bluffton.

That there was no golf cart left by Pinehurst staff for Coore’s use was no surprise. There was no need. He applied some sunscreen, grabbed a bottle of water and set off as he always does on his golf course design projects — on foot.

“I try not to get into a golf cart,” he says. “I like to walk and feel the land with my feet. You can see things and sense things going slowly and walking that you might otherwise miss. You see and feel the details better. Someone once said that I’m a plodder. That’s probably right. On a great piece of land, you can do it more justice on foot.”

Coore spent considerable time walking this same ground 15 years ago when he was in town working on the restoration of Pinehurst No. 2. He was looking for 18 new holes on this Aberdeen site that at the time Dedman was considering for what would be designated Pinehurst No. 9. But, in the spring of 2012, Dedman pivoted and bought Pinehurst National, weaving it into the resort and club fabric as the new No. 9. He sat for a decade on the Aberdeen site until the demand for more golf in 2022 prompted him to the pull the trigger. Coore & Crenshaw would have designed that course, but they were too busy with other projects, ergo the pivot to Doak.

“I have high hopes for this course,” Coore says. “That we didn’t build that original course and now are building this one has worked out great. Hindsight is 20-20, but it’s worked out better for all parties involved. The course we laid out in 2011 would have been interesting, but the course we have out here now is far better. The routing is better.”

Over four hours, Coore dissected the flow of the course and its many nuances.

Most notable was the ruggedness of the ground. The course that Pinehurst native Dan Maples designed in the 1980s was called The Pit because the land had been mined for sand in the early 1900s, and it was never touched. The furrows and burrows from long-ago excavation machinery were left intact, with years of wild plant and tree growth adding to the texture.

“This site was totally manufactured years ago, with the piles and mounds of material they didn’t want,” Coore says. “It sat there for decades, and trees grew up through them. You’re left with a site that looks totally natural for golf.”

Because the land was so untamed, Coore & Crenshaw designed a course with relatively benign putting surfaces. And there is only one water hazard, a lake behind the seventh green that is largely out of play. There is enough drama in the ground itself that multi-tiered greens and water to suck up poorly struck shots are simply not needed to make the course interesting and testing.

“The greens on this course are almost the supporting cast,” Coore says. “There are not a lot of contours and movement. They are pretty subtle because everything around them is so wild. It felt like if the greens had a lot of contouring, it would be way too much. The land is up and down and twisting and turning. If you get to the greens and have the same thing, it would be too much.”

Construction crews began clearing in November 2024, with the machines moving dirt and shaping fairways in October 2025. As of April 2026, the holes had been largely designed and sculpted, and the greens all “floated out” in the parlance of golf construction. The course will be sodded in the summer and open at some point in mid-2027.

During the 2010-11 restoration of No. 2 — in which he and Crenshaw removed hundreds of acres of Bermuda rough, reshaped the fairways and bunkers, and restored the perimeters of hardpan sand and wiregrass — Coore would stop to speak at length to the workers on the art of installing irrigation heads so that the water didn’t leave green grass in uniform lines, and of planting wiregrass so it looked random and unplanned.

Similarly on No. 11, he conferred often with the tree removal crew and Pinehurst superintendent Kevin Robinson on which trees to remove and which ones to leave alongside the fairways.

“We did that slowly and deliberately in artistic fashion, intuitive fashion,” Coore says. “It’s not like having a highway crew coming in here and clear-cutting. There are some nice rolls to the edges of the holes; they meander.”

As Coore walked the course, he talked of the process of finding the holes, applying the brush strokes and supervising the shapers and diggers.

“It’s like putting a puzzle together,” he says. “You see these interesting landforms and say, ‘OK, that’s a great spot for a green here.’”

Among the interesting puzzle pieces is the par-3 sixth hole that runs downhill and back up to the green, inspired when Crenshaw suggested that a hole similar to Harry Colt’s eighth at St. George’s Hill in Surrey, England, might fit nicely.

“Inspiration? It comes from anywhere and everywhere,” Coore says.

One feature prompted him to say, “Hang on to your hat.”

Another elicited a smile and a shake of the head. “Who could imagine some of this stuff?”

There are old mounds in fairways with pot bunkers cobbled out, leaving Coore to make another comparison to U.K.-style golf.

“This is just a punch-wedge out to safety. You go, ‘OK, I’ve gotta get out of here and not worry about aiming for the green.”

There are vestiges of the ancient mining operation, including a piece of railroad track on the 13th that Coore moved to the periphery of the hole — out of the line of a bouncing golf ball but within eyesight.

“This will be an eccentric golf course. I call it ‘wildly wonderful.’ It’s different. I have very high hopes for it,” he says.

Coore turned 80 in December 2025, and Crenshaw is 74. But they’re still active, with current projects in the Bahamas, Montana, Colorado and Northern Michigan.

“As long as I’m physically able and people want you to do their work, I’ll keep doing it,” Coore says. “Fortunately, we’re still in demand. If you have interesting sites, you are constantly motivated and excited to work them. I feel like a kid out here playing in the dirt.”

2026 Department Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

Love in the Air

A romance with golf

By Lee Pace

I was first attracted to the sport of golf during the summer of 1971, when I found Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino and an amateur named Jim Simons riveting theater on ABC-TV’s grainy images from Merion Golf Club in the U.S. Open. My dad bought me some clubs, and I tried to teach myself the game from some stupid and dangerous cover story in Golf Digest called “Square to Square,” which is perhaps why it took nearly a decade for golf to supplant my seasonal devotion to football, basketball and baseball. When I ventured into the newspaper business in 1979 and found the golf beat among my domains, the love affair was ignited. The more I wrote, the more I played. The more I played, the more I wrote.

My romance with golf has evolved over four-plus decades of writing and playing, of course with the requisite to-and-fro cycles. As a Spanish playwright once mused, “When love is not madness, it is not love.” I have posted sweet scores and nasty numbers. I have met saints and scoundrels. I have discovered “it” — whatever it might be on a given day — and have at other times been rendered clueless. But the tryst continues unabated.

Now spring is upon us once again. The fairways are green and taut. The sun lingers well into the evening, inviting that golden hour nine holes. It’s time to sweat again walking up that fairway on the back nine, to remember all the reasons we’re smitten with golf.

Today I love the sport because of the number at the end of the round. I am what my scorecard says I am. I am a 78. Or a 92. Period. If I played golf on the PGA Tour, I’d post my score and bolt. No talking to the media. The number says it all. Which is why I run for the hills when I casually ask, “How’s your golf game?” and the guy wants to take me hole-by-hole. And I love knowing, whatever my score says I am today, I can be something better tomorrow.

I love tinkering on the practice range — long thumb or short thumb? Flared feet or square? Good connection at the top. Dead hands with the wedges. Get the toe of the club through the ball. Good posture (flat back, not rounded). Follow the shot with the body.

I love lugging my bag around an old Donald Ross golf course — Mid Pines in Southern Pines, Hope Valley in Durham, Forsyth in Winston-Salem, Biltmore Forest in Asheville, Cape Fear in Wilmington, among them. I love the compactness, the quirky and smallish greens, the fairway undulations, the classic old homes lining the fairways. I love to see these heirlooms are being well taken care of by a strong greens chairman who knows the benefit of cutting down some trees. You want healthy grass? Give it some air and some light.

I love the outliers in golf — Pete Dye, bunker rakes with wooden tines, poa annua greens, courses with nothing more than a simple mark at 100, 150 and 200 yards, clubs that do not have a painting of a guy in a red coat hanging on a wall, small scorecards of uncoated card stock that fit easily into your pocket. And I know the kids need the work and mean well, but I really love it when I drive up to a golf course and am left alone to gather my clubs, shoes and accouterments at my own leisurely pace.

I love the quirks of golf course architecture. Seth Raynor had his squared-off edges on some greens, spines running through others and his signature holes like Alps, Redan, Road, Short, Cape, Biarritz and Punchbowl. Mike Strantz had his blind shots, right angles, sand pits, berms and ridges. Perry Maxwell had his dramatic rolling greens like the gems found today at Old Town Club in Winston-Salem. And Tom Fazio has his knack of unveiling a golf course with everything properly outfitted in cashmere and pearls. As one client, William McKee of Cashiers, has said: “There’s nothing loud, just soft, rolling, curving lines. Tom simply has this uncanny ability to create courses that have an evolved appearance, courses with instant patina.”

And God do I love going to the British Isles to play golf. There is the drive north to Dornoch and the deranged Scottish skies, sunny to the left, stormy to the right. There are the trophy courses, Ballybunion and St. Andrews and Turnberry, but there are the hidden gems, Enniscrone and Ballyliffin in northwest Ireland, the Lahinch Old Course farther south, and the northeast corner of Scotland with Nairn and Brora.

I love the literature of the game, especially with Charles Price commiserating about the old days in Pinehurst, Dan Jenkins recreating the glory days at Goat Hills and P.G. Wodehouse with another side-splitting work of fiction. I love ducking into the Old Sport & Gallery in the village of Pinehurst and rifling through the collectibles and vintage books, of rounding the corner to the Old Golf Shop and marveling at the reproductions of famous golf paintings — a watercolor of the ninth tee at Hoylake, Old Tom Morris in front of his golf shop at St. Andrews, golfers enjoying the game on a rudimentary course beneath Edinburgh Castle.

I love the peach cobbler and pimento cheese at Augusta National, the stovies at St. Andrews, the clam chowder at Pine Lakes in Myrtle Beach, the omelets cooked to order at The Carolina, the ice cream sandwiches at the turn at Eagle Point in Wilmington and the BBQ chicken wraps at Old Chatham in Durham.

And boy do I love the Zone, when I find it. You know that 10-foot putt is bottoms, you pick a fairway stripe off the tee and nail it, your mind is so pure and uncluttered and that click at impact so sweet and soft. I once shot near-par with two swing thoughts: Stop (at the top) and GO!

I love the friends I’ve made, the people I’ve met in golf. I lament that colorful personalities like Harvie Ward, Billy Joe Patton and Bill Campbell have long departed. As Campbell, a gentleman’s gentlemen in the game, so aptly noted, “In golf there are no strangers, only friends we have not yet met.”

And of course I love golf because of Pinehurst. There’s nothing quite like the rocking chairs at The Carolina, the stroll from the old hotel past Ailsa House, Beacon House, Heart Pine House and Little House to the golf courses. The spires of The Village Chapel loom above us all, serenading us with hymns throughout the day. The No. 2 course at sunrise is quite sublime: an orange orb flashing behind the third green, for example, through the trees separating the fourth and fifth holes, bathing the convex putting surface and all the dips and hollows around it in blissful light and shadows. Mist hangs in the air. Woodpeckers chuck away in the pine forests.

Scottish golf pro Tommy Armour felt the love many decades ago: “I have seen strangers, jaded and dull, come to Pinehurst and after a few days be changed into entirely delightful fellows.”

There’s a lot to love in that sentiment.

2026 Department Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

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.”

2026 Department Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

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.

2026 Department Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

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.”

2026 Department 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.

2026 Department Golftown Journal

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