Tag: Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

The U.S. Kids Catapult

A stepping stone to the top

By Lee Pace

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

And if not this year, another, perhaps.

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

2009 — Ninth place in the age 13 division.

2010 — First place in the 14 division.

2011 — First place in the 15-18 division.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

History and Hospitality

A perfect partner for Mid Pines and Pine Needles

By Lee Pace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2025 Department Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

Coore & Crenshaw Redux

Back in the sandmines again

By Lee Pace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That time has come.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2025 Department Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

Bedtime Stories

When the day turns into night

By Lee Pace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2025 Department Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

Talk the Talk

And put on the headphones

By Lee Pace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2025 Department Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

Calling Cards

The business of keeping score

By Lee Pace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The acorn was hatched.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2025 Department Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

Two for Pinehurst No. 2

Visionaries join Carolinas Golf Hall of Fame

By Lee Pace

On the fourth Saturday in March, a banquet will be held in a room at the Pinehurst Resort to inaugurate two new members of the Carolinas Golf Hall of Fame: David Eger and Don Padgett II. The venue is appropriate to the honorees because it’s just a quick stroll down the weathered steps of the clubhouse to the first tee of the No. 2 course, where Eger won the Donald Ross Junior as a 17-year-old and the North & South Amateur as a 38-year-old, and where Padgett competed in the PGA Tour’s one-and-done 144-hole World Open in 1973.

It’s also a golf course on which both left an indelible administrative imprint — Eger in helping reintroduce No. 2 to the world of competitive golf in the 1990s, and Padgett for his vision to suggest and then oversee the Coore & Crenshaw renovation in 2010-11.

“David was a key voice in the USGA’s decision to take the 1999 U.S. Open to Pinehurst,” says David Fay, the USGA executive director from 1989-2010. “He is someone whose opinions on golf courses were taken most seriously by me and others at the USGA.”

“Don created the vision for restoring No. 2 to is original state, an incredibly gutsy undertaking for a course that had hosted two very successful U.S. Opens,” says Mac Everett, the chairman of the Presidents Council that led corporate sales efforts for the 2014 U.S. Open and U.S. Women’s Open at Pinehurst. “But his vision was only a start. There remained the planning, execution and completion of the project. This is where Don excelled.”

The Carolinas Golf Hall of Fame is an august body comprised of crack golfers from the South Carolina coast (Beth Daniel) to the North Carolina mountains (Billy Joe Patton) to the Sandhills (Peggy Kirk Bell). There are professionals (Raymond Floyd to Betsy Rawls), amateurs (Harvie Ward to Estelle Lawson Page), architects (from Donald Ross to Tom Fazio), club professionals (Dugan Aycock to Gary Schaal) and administrators (Richard Tufts to Hale Van Hoy). In general, two to three new honorees are recognized every other year.

It’s not at all by design but rather providential timing that two with such deep connections to Pinehurst should be recognized one year after Pinehurst staged its fourth U.S. Open, and its first with the sparkling new USGA Golf House Pinehurst and World Golf Hall of Fame buildings sitting in the backdrop.

When Pinehurst and its owner Bob Dedman Sr. were digging their way out of the Diamondhead bankruptcy messiness in the 1980s, Eger remembers the resort presenting itself to the PGA Tour, hat in hand. He was five years into his career with the tour, running tournaments and serving as a rules official, and two of his mentors had deep Pinehurst roots — P.J. Boatwright, who ran USGA competitions, and Clyde Mangum, who lived in Pinehurst in the mid-1900s while running the CGA as executive director.

One day in 1987, Eger got a call from Ron Coffman, the longtime managing editor of Golf World magazine (published in Southern Pines at the time) who was also friends with Don Padgett Sr., who had just been appointed director of golf at Pinehurst.

“Ron invited me to come up and play No. 2 with him and Padge,” Eger says. “I had always thought of Pinehurst as a wonderful, wonderful place, but obviously it fell on hard times for a while. We were playing the course and Padge assured me if the Tour was interested, they would bend over backward to do anything within reason to have another event. Lo and behold, we were looking down the road for a new spot for our Tour Championship. Pinehurst in late October, after it had cooled off and the bent was healthy and firmed up, would be a perfect spot.”

Eger was impressed with everything he saw and heard and reported back to PGA Tour Commissioner Deane Beman. That’s how the 1991 Tour Championship came to be, with Craig Stadler beating Russ Cochran in a playoff for the title. Eger looked at the leaderboard during the final round and noted that only Stadler and Cochran were in red numbers.

“Two players under par,” he mused. “That looks like a U.S. Open.”

A portend of things to come, no doubt.

Fay was in Pinehurst that week, closely inspecting the logistics, the course, the accommodations, the traffic, the galleries and the overall ambience. He came away with a thumbs-up. He believed a U.S. Open at Pinehurst could be “Tracy-and-Hepburnesque, a match made in heaven.” That week led to the announcement less than two years later that the USGA would stage the 1999 U.S. Open at Pinehurst.

“The players loved Pinehurst, but not all of them loved the golf course,” Eger says of that first Tour Championship. “So many didn’t understand this was a golf course where you did not necessarily shoot right at the pin to get the ball close. You had to play these undulations and angles. The sooner they understood that the better. If they refused to buy into that philosophy, they were not going to score well. It was a difficult thing for players accustomed to taking dead aim at a pin to have to aim 30 feet away.”

Padgett II watched all of this from a distance as he was running the golf operation and later the entire resort at Firestone Country Club through the early 2000s. His father retired at Pinehurst in 2002, and two years later longtime CEO Pat Corso left to establish a club management firm. Padgett II became Pinehurst’s new CEO. He kept a low profile during the 2005 Open, all the prep work having been done before his arrival, but he watched and listened closely.

Padgett, a man who had played three years on the PGA Tour, shot a 66 in the third round of a U.S. Open and kept close ties with current players, had quite the sharp eye. He was struck by how much the buzz about the golf course seemed to have quieted between Pinehurst’s first and second U.S. Opens.

“The difference between ’99 and ’05 was amazing,” Padgett says. “So much of what you read and heard in ’99 was how great the golf course was. But in ’05, you didn’t hear that.”

Over the next three years, Padgett came to believe that narrowing the fairways of No. 2 and allowing the rough to grow had stripped the course of the essence of the Sandhills and obscured the similarities in the landscape that architect Donald Ross had drawn to his homeland in Scotland. The final nail was playing No. 2 with Lanny Wadkins in June 2008 and Wadkins ripping the course as being a shell of what it was during its so-called “golden era” of the mid-1900s.

That gave Padgett the confidence to suggest to owner Bob Dedman Jr. they flip the palette from the lush green look everyone coveted in golf to a haphazard display of hardpan sand and wire grass, gnarly edged bunkers and fairways watered only with a single-row irrigation system. The work by Coore & Crenshaw began in February 2010 and was complete 13 months later.

Eger, who left golf administration in the late 1990s to play the PGA Champions Tour — collecting four tournament wins there — was among the first golfers to play No. 2 in March 2011 after the course had been closed all winter

“The distinction between grass and the sand is wonderful,” he said. “It’s the way golf courses from the golden age looked. Pinehurst had that distinctive look of the scrub rough areas and wire grass. Putting it back took a lot of courage, but ultimately it was the right thing to do.”

The modern age of Pinehurst No. 2 is 40 years in the making. The Carolinas Golf Hall of Fame is properly saluting two of its major protagonists.

2025 Department Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

The Babe

And the overlooked Slam Bang

By Lee Pace

Golf history is full of memorable win streaks — Bobby Jones and the original “Grand Slam” in 1930, Byron Nelson and his 11 straight PGA Tour wins in 1945, and of course the “Tiger Slam” accomplished over the 2000-01 major championship seasons by Tiger Woods.

Not as well known, however, is the “Slam Bang” that Babe Didrikson Zaharias compiled in 1946-47 by winning 17 consecutive golf competitions, from Texas to Pinehurst, from Miami to the nation’s capital. In fact, perhaps no source other than The Pinehurst Outlook referred to Zaharias’ unprecedented run of domination in such cutesy fashion. Run an internet search on the phrase in that context and you’ll come up dry.

But there it is in one of the Outlook’s weekly editions in early April 1947 as it chronicles the Babe “winning everything in sight on the winter and spring tour” and being “under unusual strain as she wanted to complete the most remarkable sequence of victories ever accomplished in women’s golf.”

After winning two gold medals and one silver in track and field in the 1932 Olympics, taking up golf in 1935 and playing in 1938 in a men’s pro golf tournament, the Los Angeles Open, Zaharias had regained her amateur status in golf in 1942 and was at the top of the game’s talent pyramid as World War II came to an end. She channeled her immense athletic skills into golf by hitting a thousand balls a day. Her strength and power off the tee gave her a huge edge on the field — she amazed sportswriter Grantland Rice by hitting two shots to the edge of the 523-yard seventh green at Brentwood Country Club in Los Angeles. And her confident (some would say cocky) personality augmented her aggressive, go-for-broke style on the course.

Peggy Kirk Bell, the matriarch of Pine Needles Lodge & Golf Club in Southern Pines from 1953 through her death in 2016, first met Zaharias in the mid-1940s on the women’s amateur circuit and one day got an invitation to be Zaharias’ partner in the Women’s International Four-Ball in Hollywood, Florida.

“Babe said, ‘I need a partner, and you might as well win a tournament,’” Peggy said. “That’s how confident she was. I was really nervous the day of the first round. She could sense that I was on edge, and she told me to relax. ‘I can beat any two of them without you,’ she said. ‘I’ll let you know if I need you.’ Of course, we won the tournament.”

The Babe’s winning streak started in the summer of 1946 in the Trans-Mississippi in Denver and continued with the Broadmoor Invitation and All-American Championship, and then Zaharias’ one and only victory in the U.S. Women’s Amateur, that coming at Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa. She won the Texas Women’s Open in the fall of 1946 and took the rest of the year off, relaxing at home in Denver with her husband, George.

“I was ready to take a long layoff from golf competition and just enjoy my home for a while,” Zaharias said. “But George had other ideas. He said, ‘Honey, you’ve got something going here. You’ve won five straight tournaments. You want to build that streak up into a record they’ll never forget. There are some women’s tournaments in Florida at the start of the winter. I think you should go down there.’”

So Babe opened 1947 with wins in Tampa, Miami, Orlando and Palm Beach, then teamed with Peggy Kirk (who would marry hometown sweetheart Warren Bell in 1953) in the International Four-Ball. The tour moved northward to Ormond Beach, St. Augustine and then The Titleholders in Augusta, Georgia, victories all. She had won 13 straight when the Women’s North and South opened on Pinehurst No. 2 the second week of April.

The Outlook noted that Babe was “getting even odds” versus the entire field, and the implication was that a bet could be placed at the Pinehurst clubhouse. It reported that in an early match Zaharias “hit a screaming brassie that left the gallery gasping” and counted the spectators for the championship match featuring Zaharias against Louise Suggs at approximately 2,500 — “the largest gallery ever.”

Suggs was a 23-year-old golfer from Atlanta who had won two North and South Amateurs in 1942 and ’46 and would later become a heated rival with Zaharias on the LPGA Tour that was founded in 1950. The Outlook noted that Suggs seemed to garner the sympathy of the gallery and that it was only human nature as the fans “wanted to see the little one beat the strong one.” Suggs conceded an early putt to Zaharias and soon after Zaharias refused the same courtesy toward Suggs, who then missed the short putt.

“After this incident, the match became a real fight,” the newspaper noted.

Babe was 1-up going to the 18th hole, but her approach shot flew to the right and landed against a tree. She tried a bank shot against the tree that didn’t work out and lost the hole, extending the match.

“That almost killed me,” Babe said. “George was just going crazy. He later said, ‘I thought for sure you were going to lose one and break the string.’”

Suggs flew the green with her approach on the second extra hole, made bogey, and Zaharias left Pinehurst with victory No. 14 secure. From there she won the women’s division of an event called the National Celebrities Tournament in Washington, D.C., traveled to Scotland to win the Women’s British Amateur, and returned home to win the Broadmoor Invitation again. Her streak of 17 ended when she lost in October in the Texas Women’s Open. Soon after, Babe accepted $300,000 from a Hollywood film maker for a series of golf instructional films and turned pro.

The name Babe Didrikson Zaharias occupies a mere one line on the champions board in the Pinehurst clubhouse, but when you probe beneath the surface, it was an important win and a neat part of golf history.

2025 Department Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

Buck and a Quarter

Celebrating the Queen of the South

By Lee Pace

The first day of 2025 represents the launch of year number 125 in the existence of the Carolina Hotel, the grand and glorious structure commissioned by Pinehurst founder James W. Tufts to serve as the centerpiece for his fledgling wintertime resort.

The hotel was built with four stories in a T-shape, “thus all the rooms are open to sunlight and air,” noted The Pinehurst Outlook. It had 250 individual rooms and 49 suites, each with telephones, fireplaces, electric lights, steam heat and velvet carpets. The east wing featured a music room where the Pinehurst orchestra played nightly.

“It is painted in colonial colors, yellow with white trimmings,” said the Outlook in early January 1901. “It commands a view of the whole village and the surrounding country in all directions. The grounds appropriated exclusively to the hotel are extensive and laid out in walks, bordered with trees, shrubbery and flowers. Roses, pansies, pinks and English violets are still in bloom.”

And most notably, it was located just a short stroll or trolley ride from “the most extensive and diversified golf ground in this country.”

The Carolina has been building on that legacy ever since.

The most famous names in golf have spent the night at The Carolina. Golf administrators and rules officials from the USGA and the R&A have checked in. Writers from Golf Digest and commentators from NBC Sports have been guests.

“Staying at The Carolina is like going back in time, to a much simpler time,” says Scott Straight, a frequent guest from French Lick, Indiana. “The history of this place is amazing. It’s like going to Yankee Stadium.”

“Looking at all the old photos on the walls, it’s amazing what it looked like 80 years ago and thinking, wow, all the greats of golf have come through here,” adds Charlotte’s David Williams, also a long-time regular at The Carolina.

The hotel, christened the “Queen of the South” upon its opening, has been a bucket list destination around the world of golf. It’s never looked and functioned better than it does today after an extensive renovation and upfitting that ran from November 2021 through the spring of 2024, when changes were completed in time for the U.S. Open Golf Championship.

The guest rooms have been renovated and are brighter, featuring new fixtures, finishes and custom-built furniture. The bathrooms have been expanded and upgraded with improved lighting and soundproofing. There are espresso machines on desks beneath wide-screen televisions. The previous guest rooms included large closets built originally to store the bulky trunks that travelers took by train and steamship on two- and three-week excursions. Now golfers pop in for a weekend, carry compact synthetic clothing and need only a wardrobe to hang their bags.

The lobby features new furnishings, comfortable seating areas and brighter, modern lighting fixtures that create a warm and welcoming atmosphere. The public spaces are accented by the return of notable touches from the past, such as the arched windows framing the exterior. The new design also includes updated check-in and concierge desks. There is a new coffee shop and just on the outside of the structure is an expansive patio and fire pit.

Construction workers addressing changes to the hallway ceiling as you walk from the central lobby toward the east wing discovered that some 40 feet of original arched ceiling and dormer windows had been covered up years ago. In the spring of 2024, they knocked out the drywall ceiling and removed decades’ worth of the accumulation of asbestos, sprinklers and wiring. Calvin Burkley, Pinehurst’s director of projects and planning, contacted the resort’s consultant, Glave & Holmes Architecture, for ideas on how to restore the old look.

Now as guests meander down the hall, looking at photos of Ben Hogan from the ’40s and Jack Nicklaus from the ’70s, they’ll bathe in natural light beneath a grand curved ceiling and dormer windows.

“It’s just lighter and brighter and brings a whole new look and feel to the hallway,” Burkley says. “Guests who’ve been coming here for 20 or 30 years walk through here and are just astounded. They love it. It’s such a majestic look.”

Burkley joined the Pinehurst staff in 2018 and is in charge of all construction that is “not green” i.e., those projects away from the golf courses and landscaping.

“We want to make sure this is the best place for people to come for a long time,” he says. “We want to make sure we protect the history of it; that it’s timeless, historic, relevant and forward thinking.”

The Ryder Cup Lounge was a mainstay of the lobby for years and paid tribute to Pinehurst having been the venue for the 1951 competition between the American side and the Great Britain and Ireland team. But since hosting the 1999 U.S. Open, with three more to follow over a quarter-century, Pinehurst has developed a close kinship with the USGA, rendering its interest and chance of hosting another PGA of America owned-and-operated Ryder Cup null and void.

The Carolina Vista Lounge resides where the Ryder Cup Lounge once sat and is built around an expansive, rectangular bar. Specialty cocktails salute the game of golf. “The November Nine” is fashioned after the nine points the Americans won in winning that 1951 Ryder Cup by fusing bourbon and Carolina pecans. “The Amateur” is made of mezcal, lime and pomegranate juices and chipotle syrup to salute the North & South Championship — an event open to amateur men, women and seniors that began in 1900 as a means to draw golfers to Pinehurst and publicity to the resort.

All the improvements aside, the rambling hotel has preserved one of its charms. The floors in places still squeak. And not every golf ball struck with a putter on a late-night putting session before lights-out rolls perfectly straight. May those things never change.

2025 Department Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

Halfway Home

A nosh after nine

By Lee Pace

In the 1800s, David “Old Da” Anderson, at various times a caddie and greenskeeper on the links at St. Andrews Golf Club in Scotland, wheeled a wooden cart to the fourth green and sold ginger beer as golfers played the outward nine and then returned on the neighboring 15th hole. It was golf’s first refreshment stand.

Today golfers in the Auld Grey Toon get their sustenance from a small building behind the ninth green of the Old Course. The most popular item is a pork and haggis sausage roll — a secret mix of sausage meat and haggis, baked in puff pastry topped with poppy seeds. There’s no ginger beer, but the best-seller is the club’s very own Tom Morris 1821 Lager, which is brewed and canned nearby.

Elsewhere in Great Britain, golfers at Royal Dornoch warm themselves from the bracing North Sea with a stop at the halfway house by the ninth green for hot chocolate laced with Bailey’s Irish Creme. Nairn Golf Club is known for its stone cottage dating to 1877 — The Bothy was originally a storehouse for freshly caught salmon, and today golfers warm their hands by the fire and grab a bowl of fish chowder for the back nine.

Back on the near side of the pond, Pine Valley Golf Club in New Jersey is known for its turtle soup, Winged Foot Golf Club outside New York City for its peanut butter cookies, and Fishers Island Club on Long Island for its peanut butter, jelly and bacon sandwiches. Moving westward, Butler National outside Chicago is quite proud of its fish tacos (grouper, mahi or cod), and Castle Pines outside Denver for those thick and rich milkshakes made with Häagen-Dazs ice cream that collectively expanded the entire PGA Tour waistline during the days of The International from 1986-2006. The Olympic Club in San Francisco has one of America’s most iconic halfway house offerings — the Burger Dog features 4 ounces of beef shaped like a wiener and served on a freshly baked sourdough bun.

Closer to home in the Carolinas, Caledonia Golf & Fish Club in Pawleys Island serves a cup of spicy clam chowder made with a Manhattan-style, tomato-based broth from a cauldron by the ninth green. Beef sliders and chocolate chip cookies are the specialties at Wade Hampton Golf Club in Cashiers. Golfers at Old Chatham Golf Club just south of Durham barely break stride reaching into the refrigerator at the turn for one of longtime cook Chenille Pennix’s chicken wraps (BBQ, Caesar and ranch among the best-sellers), and the favorite at Old Town Club in Winston-Salem is chicken salad in a foam cup with a spoon.

Anyone who has visited a Discovery Land golf community is mesmerized and gluttonized by the opulent “comfort stations” manned by a chef and positioned on each nine. Mountaintop in Cashiers is one such Discovery property, and its signature treat is beef jerky, which starts with locally sourced beef and is pulled, seasoned and dried on-site. Other standards include a frozen margarita machine, help-yourself beer fridge, cured duck, warmed nuts, Kobe beef sliders and a sundae bar.

Forest Creek Golf Club has one of the top halfway house menus in the Sandhills. Golfers enjoy homemade cookies at the turn on its North and South courses, and during the winter a pot of chili is kept simmering. And when golfers get to the 12th hole on each course, they’ll find a barrel of iced-down apples for refreshment.

“No matter whether you’re winning or losing, a crisp, cold apple really hits the spot,” says Waddy Stokes, the club’s head professional from its opening in 1996 through 2011.

There’s also a vintage Cretors Popcorn machine in the men’s locker room — it just so happens one of the company’s founding family members belongs to the club.

The dining scene in the Sandhills has been recently enhanced by a food truck stationed at Pinehurst No. 10, the Tom Doak-designed course that opened in May 2024. Maniac Grill fashions its name from the “Maniac Hill” moniker bestowed on the Pinehurst practice range in the early 1900s. The name on the side of the truck is accented with the slogan “Crazy good food.” For now the Maniac Grill will make its home at No. 10 with appearances around the resort and town on other occasions.

The headliner? A brisket sandwich with freshly smoked beef topped with gruyere cheese and caramelized onions, served on a crispy baguette loaf. And for dessert, peach ice cream ensconced in fresh sugar cookies. Because No. 10 is essentially a walking-only course, Pinehurst chef Thierry Debailleul designed the menu for items to be carried and eaten in one hand.

“The challenge was to create hand-carried, put-in-your-pocket items,” he says. The grill also serves a turkey sandwich with a peach barbecue sauce, hearkening, Debailleul says, to the days in the early 1900s when the land where the golf course sits was a peach orchard.

“I wanted to have a food truck forever,” says Pinehurst owner Bob Dedman Jr. “Now we have one, and it’s phenomenal.”

2024 Department Golftown Journal