The First Domino

Big time tournaments return to Pinehurst No. 2

By Lee Pace

The phone rang in the office of Pinehurst Director of Golf Don Padgett Sr. one day in the summer of 1990. On the line was Deane Beman, the commissioner of the PGA Tour and a longtime brother with Padgett in the fraternity of golf administrative insiders.

“Padge, we’d like to bring our Tour Championship to Pinehurst next year,” Beman said of the season-ending “Super Bowl” of golf that in its first three years of existence had been played at Oak Hill, Pebble Beach and Harbour Town. “It will only cost you half a million dollars.”

“Thanks,” Padgett said. “As much as we’d love to have you, we’re not in a position to spend that kind of money.”

Padgett was three years into his tenure running the golf operations at Pinehurst, and owner Robert Dedman Sr. was six years into his initiative to rebuild what he called “a fallen angel,” a bastion of American golf history that had stumbled on hard times in the early 1980s and even been run by the bank for two years. Padgett’s charge from resort President and CEO Pat Corso was to “bring championship golf back to Pinehurst,” and the club in the previous three years had hosted a successful PGA Club Pro Championship and a U.S. Women’s Amateur.

But a half-million dollars to get the PGA Tour to town? That was beyond the pale.

A week later, Beman called back.

“OK, we’ll forgo the fee,” Beman said. “But we want to come the first week in October.”

Padgett and Corso conferred. Padgett told Corso he didn’t think the resort could afford to give up a prime fall weekend. Corso agreed, and Padgett told Beman he was sorry, but the dates were bad.

Beman called a third time.

“OK, when the hell can we come?” Beman asked.

“How about the last weekend in October?” Padgett answered. “Our peak season will be over, and the golf course and the greens will still be in good shape.”

“Deal,” Beman said.

And thus fell the first domino in what is now de rigueur around Pinehurst and the state of North Carolina — major championships on the No. 2 course. Since that Tour Championship (won by Craig Stadler on Nov. 3, 1991), Pinehurst No. 2 has been the venue for the U.S. Senior Open, three U.S. Opens, one U.S. Amateur and one U.S. Women’s Open. On the schedule are three more USGA events, including the 2024 Open.

“We could hardly have written a better script,” Corso says. “The weather was great. The golfers loved No. 2. The crowds were huge. It was everything we could have hoped for.”

“That Tour Championship was very important,” former USGA Executive Director David Fay says. “David Eger, as a former North & South Junior champion, and an unabashed fan of No. 2, did a masterful job in setting up the golf course. As it had been a few years since the ‘regular tour’ players had competed at No. 2, the Tour Championship confirmed — resoundingly — that No. 2 remained a great championship test.”

And it’s been 25 years.

“Wow — 25 years,” Corso muses today. “Where does the time go?”

I remember a snippet from the twilight hour on Monday, three days before the tournament commenced. The shadows of the towering pine trees were creeping across the fairway and green of the eighth hole as reigning British Open champion Ian Baker-Finch made his way around the course with Corey Pavin. They putted out on the eighth green and walked to the ninth tee. Baker-Finch nodded toward a couple of acquaintances standing nearby.

“This golf course is great,” he said. “I’m only halfway around and it’s one of the five best I’ve seen in this country. Maybe the world.”

Baker-Finch played that evening until it was pitch dark. “I haven’t been this excited since the British Open,” he said.

Stadler shot a 5-under-par score of 279, and only four players broke par for four rounds that week. Eger, a Charlotte native and former PGA Tour player then on the tour’s administrative staff, looked at the leader board on Sunday afternoon and noted that only Stadler and Russ Cochran were in red figures. “Two players under par,” Eger mused. “That looks like a U.S. Open.”

“I admit I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect,” Padgett said years later. “I had some concern that modern equipment and length would render some of the shorter holes defenseless. My son, Don II, told me, ‘Dad, don’t worry. That golf course will hold up fine.’ Don had played several years on the tour in the early 1970s and kept his finger on the pulse of the tour. He also played here frequently on his visits with the family. So I trusted his view and, sure enough, he was right.”

Everything worked well that week in late October and early November of 1991. The galleries were substantial. There was plenty of parking outside the village and a good shuttle system to get people to the golf course. The golf course stood up to the game’s top players, who relished the old-style challenge of Donald Ross’ design. That week led to Pinehurst getting the Tour Championship for the following year, won by Paul Azinger (only six players besting par for the championship). The USGA was watching closely as well, and since the week was an overwhelming success, it soon awarded Pinehurst the U.S. Senior Open for 1994.

“I have talked to every player, and there is nobody disappointed in having Pinehurst No. 2 back in the world of golf in the way it has been through its history,” Beman said. “This is a very special place. It is not going to disappoint anyone. It is an absolute delight to be here.”

The golf media waxed poetically on regional and national levels about the singular atmosphere of Pinehurst, the direction the club seemed to be headed under Dedman’s leadership, and the appeal of championship golf on a classic Ross-designed course. Corso still gets chills 25 years later remembering Jack Whitaker waxing poetically on ABC-TV and saying the golf tour was richer for having been to Pinehurst.

Ron Green Sr. in The Charlotte Observer hooked onto the Friday evening unveiling ceremony of a statue of Donald Ross as a watershed kernel.

“For an old hanger-around who happens to think this village is a little patch of heaven, there was a sense that it was more than an unveiling of the great architect’s likeness, that it was also an unveiling of Pinehurst today,” Green wrote.

Golf Digest’s Jaime Diaz, a New York Times correspondent then but a Moore County resident now, put Pinehurst in perspective in tying up a year in golf that saw the four majors contested on Augusta National, Hazeltine, Royal Birkdale and Crooked Stick, and the Ryder Cup on the Ocean Course at Kiawah.

“If the Tour Championship proved anything definitive, it is that Pinehurst No. 2 was the most evocative tournament arena of the year and should continue to have a major presence in American golf,” Diaz offered.

Throughout the two weeks of the 1991 and ’92 Tour Championships, the themes of introduction and renewal emerged.

Old fans of Pinehurst returned:

“I don’t know how they played this course in the early 1900s with hickory shafts,” said Chip Beck, a Fayetteville native and winner of the Donald Ross Memorial as a teenager. “Donald Ross must have been the toughest, hard-nosed architect in the world, because this course has stood the test of time.

“A course like this puts golf in perspective. It has maintained its history and tradition for so long. It’s like Fenway Park or Wrigley Field. It’s a standard to judge by.”

And new fans were born:

“This is the type golf course I could play every day of my life,” Greg Norman said.

“There is so much emphasis today on hitting balls 250 yards over water,” Baker-Finch said. “But this was how golf was meant to be played, the old style.”

“The whole experience is awesome — the village, the hotel, the golf course,” said Lee Janzen. “This is a golf town, all the way. It’s a great place to come, and I wish we’d play here every year.”

One of the most attentive spectators in 1991 was the USGA’s Fay. In the two years since the USGA had brought its Women’s Amateur to Pinehurst, USGA and Pinehurst officials had begun serious conversations about Pinehurst hosting a U.S. Open at some point in the late 1990s. Pinehurst, in fact, would make an official presentation in June 1992 to the USGA’s Championship Committee. The group voted in that meeting at Pebble Beach that an Open would, in fact, be set for Pinehurst, provided the club would rebuild what were considered substandard greens for elite competition in the summer, and the 1999 Open was announced the following June.

“I was very interested to see how the course would play for the Tour Championship,” Fay said. “I was interested to see if people would get romantic about a course. I was curious to see if time had passed it by. It hadn’t.”

The dominoes have been falling for quarter of a century.  PS

Lee Pace’s first book on Pinehurst, Pinehurst Stories, was released just weeks before the 1991 Tour Championship.

Kidding Around

How U.S. Kids Golf conquered the world

By Lee Pace

Dan Van Horn was coaching his sons’ youth league baseball teams in the mid-1990s when he noticed the quality and variety of baseball bats being manufactured to address the youth market. Versions in aluminum and carbon fiber polymers with narrow barrels, lighter weights and nuanced weight distribution helped kids take a healthy cut and develop their form without being burdened with weights their small limbs and core couldn’t handle.

It occurred to Van Horn, a lifelong golfer, former mini-tour player and a father with an interest in his children learning the game, that the golf industry did a poor job addressing adolescent golfers in a similar fashion.

“You could find junior sets with a 3-wood, 5-, 7- and 9-irons that were essentially adult clubs, sawed off and a ‘junior’ label slapped on,” the Atlanta businessman says of his 1995 “ah-ha” moment. “The clubs were too heavy, the kids didn’t hit many good shots, and they didn’t have any fun. I sensed there was an opportunity there.”

The first domino fell one year later when he incorporated U.S. Kids Golf with the idea of manufacturing “ultra-light” clubs for kids based on their body heights with shaft flexes and swing weights geared to each length. The next domino fell in 1997 when the first club rolled off the assembly line.

“It was all about having fun,” Van Horn says. “If you play well, you’ll have fun. If you’re having fun, you might buy in for a lifetime.”

The dominoes kept falling through the years — establishing competitions for kids on local, regional, national and worldwide stages; setting junior-oriented tee markers so a 9-year-old could hit a driver and 6-iron on a par-4 like his dad does; coming to Pinehurst in 2006 for world championships that have become staples in the local golf scene; and creating coaching programs to help PGA of America members learn how to better teach and connect with kids and sell their memberships on the value of drawing children into golf.

In 2015 one of the most interesting dominoes yet fell: the purchase of a struggling club in the Sandhills, and the establishment of a working “golf laboratory” with a mission of teaching and growing the game among juniors and families. U.S. Kids Golf Foundation, established in 2000 as a supplement to the U.S. Kids equipment business, bought Longleaf Golf & Country Club in April 2015 and renamed it Longleaf Golf & Family Club.

“We’d been coming here for ten years and kept seeing Longleaf slide a little bit,” Van Horn says. “We wanted to have a presence in the community. We felt very welcome here, very supported by the community. The synergies around the Pinehurst/Southern Pines area as a golf capital, a golf mecca, have been important to us. It seemed like a great place to layer in more of the idea of kids golf, family golf.”

Van Horn and his Atlanta-based company knew what it was like to be a vendor to the golf industry. They understood managing and running tournaments. But there was one key perspective they lacked in the daunting task of expanding a game that is difficult to learn, time-consuming to play, requires considerable financial investment and is fraught with timeless traditions and oftentime stodgy attitudes.

“We wanted to experience the ‘other side of the track,’” Van Horn says. “We wanted to see the challenges in the golf shop on a real-time basis, understand the hindrances in running kids’ golf. We wanted a working laboratory where we could practice our vision of growing the game among kids and families while not disrupting traditional men’s play and club play.”

Van Horn smiles and acknowledges there is a certain dog-catches-the-car-now-what element to the foundation’s fourteen months running Longleaf, a Dan Maples-designed course that opened in the late-1980s golf boom but has struggled amid the early 2000s recession and 2008 financial collapse. Eighty of the course’s sprinklers quit working last summer, and the new owners invested in a new computerized switching and monitoring system to better manage the flow of water around the course. But the sprinklers still didn’t work properly.

“We eventually figured out the original lines ran under Midland Road, and over time the road sank and collapsed the pipes,” Van Horn says. “We wanted to learn the golf operations business. And we’re getting a full education.”

The club facility at Longleaf is teeming this July morning with kids, parents, volunteers and U.S. Kids staff descending here and at Pinehurst Resort & Country Club three miles away for the Red White & Blue Invitational, one of a series of regional competitions leading to the U.S. Kids World Championships spread across ten Sandhills area clubs in early August. This year’s competition is expected to bring nearly 1,600 golfers from more than fifty nations.

The Sandhills wasn’t quite sure what to expect in 2005 when the first U.S. Kids event was held and thousands of visitors from three dozen counties staged a parade through the middle of Pinehurst. All of a sudden, 8-year-olds were playing hide-and-seek in the halls of the venerable Carolina Hotel. Kids hit shots from sand traps by day, sneaked back in to build sand castles by twilight. Kitchen staffs learned to make pigs-in-a-blanket and were ready for French toast orders en masse in the breakfast buffet lines. The 2012 championship was the subject of a 100-minute documentary, The Short Game, that still runs on Netflix and profiles eight youngsters from around the world and their quest to win a world championship.

“I have never seen anything like these kids,” says lifelong Pinehurst resident Marty McKenzie. “These are the highest quality youth on the planet participating in the greatest sport on the planet, and it all takes place in our beloved Pinehurst.”

One initiative from Van Horn and his company that affects not only kids but women, seniors and men whose egos will allow them to stray from the traditional blue-white-red tee system is the implementation of a seven-tee configuration that puts golfers at the correct length of course based on their average driving distance. The practice ground at Longleaf is arrayed with a series of brightly colored stakes numbered one through seven, the closest stake colored blue and located 100 yards away, the middle stake orange at 175 yards and the farthest colored red and set 250 yards off.

A golfer’s average carry dictates which of the seven sets of tees he uses when he gets to the first tee of the course, with the tees at Longleaf ranging from 3,200 to 6,600 yards. The system is clearly explained in colorful signage on the practice tee and first tee. U.S. Kids is working with the American Golf Course Architects Society to educate the industry on setting up courses in this fashion, and the Longleaf staff has entertained emissaries from clubs such as Medinah in Chicago who are interested in making their clubs more welcoming to juniors and newcomers.

“You hear jokes in the industry about three million golfers a year in, three million out,” Van Horn says. “No one has done anything to help people get over what it’s like to be a newcomer in golf. That’s what Longleaf is all about.

“Now we have women playing a course 3,200 yards. It’s faster and more fun. They’re making pars and some birdies. Now they can actually reach a par-4 in regulation. Before they didn’t stand a chance.”

When Pinehurst hosted the 2014 U.S. Open and Women’s Open, Van Horn and his staff counted 26 competitors in the two fields combined who were U.S. Kids alumni, among them Justin Thomas, Patrick Reed, Lexi Thompson, Beau Hossler, Smylie Kaufman and Mariah Stackhouse.

Van Horn is asked if he could ever have envisioned the empire he’s created over two decades when he wanted better junior clubs for his kids.

“I have a lot of dreams, but I try to be faithful to the vision,” he says. “I take dreams one day at a time and try to be the best every day with it. You always can hope and have grandiose plans. I’m honestly frustrated that it’s not bigger than it is. I didn’t get into this for financial gain. I am doing it because I felt called spiritually and I feel like it’s my life’s mission. Maybe my entire life, I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing. Now I do and here I am.”  PS

Chapel Hill-based writer Lee Pace is the author of a dozen books on golf history, including The Golden Age of Pinehurst—The Story of the Rebirth of No. 2.