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The Show Must Go On

Golf’s merchants get back to business

By Lee Pace

It was the final day of the 2020 PGA Show in Orlando when news hit American shores that the streets of the Chinese city of Wuhan had fallen silent, with some 11 million people put under tight quarantine after a mysterious illness began circulating in a wet market a month earlier. Little did the clubmakers, the apparel vendors, gadget innovators and the 40,000 visitors to the golf industry’s premier trade show realize their world would come to a screeching halt in six weeks as COVID-19 gripped the globe.

The PGA Show was canceled in 2021, ending a streak of conclaves dating to 1954, when vendors sold wares out of car trunks at a winter PGA golf tournament in Dunedin, Florida. A scaled-down version was held in 2022, with some 15,000 attendees and half the usual number of exhibitors. 

Yet the health of golf remained robust during the pandemic. A foursome in the great out-of-doors was Exhibit A for social distancing. The game has gotten even stronger — witness Pinehurst Resort saying in January that nine golf courses aren’t enough.

And the 2023 PGA Show in Orlando in late January reflected that with a remarkable rebound of its own. The Orange County Convention Center was back to near-full capacity, and the golf industry flocked en masse and sans masks to another edition of old home week. 

After two days of trekking the aisles and wagging the chin, I came away with some ideas on swinging faster, practicing more effectively and walking more comfortably.

Swing Hard: Marty Jertson is a club designer for the PING manufacturing company based in Phoenix, a PGA of America member and an occasional qualifier for PGA Tour events and major championships. He missed the cut in the 2018 PGA Championship at Bellerive Country Club and was frustrated by seeing other pros bomb tee shots a half-wedge shot farther than him. 

“I packed my bag that Friday feeling debilitated,” Jertson says. “My life’s goal was to play the weekend in a major. I knew then I didn’t stand a chance if I didn’t get some distance — a lot of distance.”

Through his work designing more than 100 clubs and balls for PING, Jertson was friends with Sasho MacKenzie, an authority in golf instruction and the biomechanics of speed generation. MacKenzie had been compiling data over several years on overspeed training (swinging a headless golf club as hard as possible) and overload training (swinging a headless club that weighs more than your driver).

They combined Jertson’s clubmaking acumen with MacKenzie’s science and created the prototype for a product that would be launched in February 2021 as The Stack System. Jertson did the work over 2018-19, qualified for the PGA at Bethpage Black in 2019, and made the cut with his newfound length.

“A year later at the PGA, I had tons of speed,” he says. “I was hitting it 30 yards longer. That was the key to me making the cut and having a dream week. It was borne out of personal frustration. Sasho had all the research, the algorithms, the data, the exercise science behind it.”

The device they have created features a training club and five weights that enable 30 unique weight combinations. The accompanying iPhone app sets up your program according to your needs and guides you through setting the club and workouts with the proper weights. Three times a week, you go through a training regimen swinging the club and training your body and mind to generate speed.

“We took my own frustration and passed it on to the market,” Jertson says. “We’ve literally helped thousands of golfers.”

Lean Left: Have trouble keeping your weight on your left side (for a right-handed golfer) on chip and pitch shots? The Chipping Plate from Why Golf is a foolproof antidote. You simply stand on the bright orange plate and address your shot with your weight on your left side. If you move off the ball, the base of the plate will tilt to the right. Instant feedback.

Why Golf is headquartered in Escondido, California, and pledges with its golf training aids to “make the hardest sport less hard.” The company’s display booth featured one sign saying, “Suck less at golf.”

“To stop chunking the s**t out of your chips, keep at least 2/3 of your weight on your front foot throughout the swing,” reads the descriptive passage on the company order page. “When you do that on the Chipping Plate, it’ll stay flat. If you don’t, it will tilt back. If you still aren’t getting it, you’d best consider taking up a different sport.”

The company’s Pressure Plate works on the same concept with the full swing and helps you transfer your weight to your left side early in the downswing. Why Golf also introduced at the PGA Show the Arm Alarm, which uses wristbands and an attached cord to give real-time feedback on arm structure while helping golfers keep their elbows close to each other throughout the swing.

Tread Lightly: True Linkswear is the Cadillac golf shoe for the walking golfer.

The company set out in 2009 with Ryan Moore (the PGA Tour golfer) and brother Jason to make the consummate golf shoe for walkers, with Jason saying that traditional golf shoe manufacturers built “the equivalent of dress shoes — over-engineered, techy-looking foot cages.” They have built a business around selling shoes that look and feel more like an athletic shoe with outsoles designed and built so a golfer can better feel the terrain with his feet. The shoes arrive in a brown box with the words “Enjoy the Walk” printed on the top. 

“Ever had that sensation you can read the greens under your feet?” Jason asks. “These shoes allow the player to feel the course like never before.”

I met Moore at the PGA Show in 2018 while writing Good Walks and came away with a pair of the company’s headliner Knit I shoe, an ultra-lightweight shoe that the company touted as feeling like you were wearing a sock. Now the Knit III has been introduced. An enhanced midsole keeps your feet more secure during the swing, and the reinforced heel pad makes it impossible to get a blister.

“We took everything that worked in the early shoe and made it a little better,” says company executive Brandon Wallach. “There is slightly more athletic shaping. There is a new compound midsole that gives you more stability in your swing. And we’ve eliminated the chance of a slight rubbing on the heel. Thirty-six holes — no problem with this shoe.” 

The only downside of the Knit models are they are not waterproof. So if you’re playing on a Southern summer morning with the Bermuda rough heavy with dew, True’s waterproof models are a better fit. The Lux Hybrid was introduced in Orlando and is made with the same knit material so it breathes and lets air in, but it’s waterproof so it keeps the moisture out. It features a stylish leather saddle on either side of the uppers.

It’s just a slightly better mousetrap. The Orange County Convention Center was full of those at the PGA Show. It had to be to keep up with the appetite of a hearty golf market.  PS

Lee Pace has written Golftown Journal since 2008. Contact him at leepace7@gmail.com and follow him on Instagram at @leepaceunc and on Twitter @leepacetweet.

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Pick Your Poison

Everyone needs a go-to

By Lee Pace

Pick one: Beach or mountains? Charcoal or gas? Dog or cat? Coke or Pepsi? Thin crust or thick? Sweet tea or unsweet? Forged or cast? Draw or fade? I lean toward the former in each pair but admit to some negotiating room when Linville beckons in the heat of August. But certainly cast in stone are charcoal, dogs and the idea that a golf ball hit with a slight right-to-left flight pattern for a right-handed golfer is by far the Rolls-Royce of golf shots.

“You only hit a straight ball by accident,” the great Ben Hogan once proffered. “The ball is going to move right or left every time you hit it, so you had better make it go one way or the other.”

History and the Hall of Fame can present arguments on both sides of the issue, but without question many of the finest players in the game have preferred the fade, among them Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods. Perhaps it was not as much liking the left-to-right shape as it was abhorring the extreme version of the opposite curve — the snap hook.

“I hate a hook,” Hogan said. “It nauseates me. I could vomit when I see one. It’s like a rattlesnake in your pocket.”

Davis Love Jr. taught his son Davis III an upright swing, “and you’ll never have to worry about a hook,” he said. Bruce Lietzke won 13 times on the pro tour wielding a power fade that earned him the nickname “Leaky.” Lietzke prided himself on saying, “I play one shot. That’s all I need.”

Lex Alexander played collegiately at Wake Forest University in the mid-1970s and made friends with Lietzke, a University of Houston golfer. Alexander was a young assistant pro to Claude Harmon at Winged Foot Golf Club in the late 1970s when Lietzke would come through when the PGA Tour was in the New York area.

“The 17th at Winged Foot is a long par-4, dogleg right,” Alexander says. “I would give him the line and he would then unleash one of his long towering fades to that exact target, and I will never forget how far his ball went. With a good drive, I’d have 200 yards into the green. Bruce started his tee shot toward the left rough, it curved right-center and left him an 8-iron.”

In Pinehurst, for many years one of the great ambassadors of the fade was Harvie Ward, the two-time U.S. Amateur champion from Tarboro who spent the last 15 years of his life living in the village of Pinehurst and playing a lot of golf at Forest Creek Golf Club.

“One of the nicknames we gave Harvie was ‘Carvie Ward,’” says Chuck Cordell, one of Ward’s best friends and a frequent golf companion. “He had a very weak left-hand grip, and his duck hooks were in the left side of the fairway. Most of the time he hit it straight down the middle with just a whisper of fade. He had a very compact swing, but pound-for-pound he could hit it as far as anyone, only straighter.”

Ward began working with Payne Stewart in 1985, and they had a productive four years, but in 1989 Stewart said he wanted to master both shapes in the manner of Seve Ballesteros, certainly one of the great shotmakers of all time.

Ward didn’t agree.

“I told him I thought it was good to know how to work the ball, but you still needed to have the one shot that you could depend on,” Ward said. “I told him you don’t want to go around the golf course hitting one left-to-right and the next one right-to-left. You go down that road and one day you’ll come to the last hole and not have anything to depend on, that it would jump up and get you.”

To my personal sense of feel and style, there’s nothing like a draw. There’s nothing as mouth-watering as a left-side hole location or a dogleg left hole. There’s nothing like the crisp slice of turf and the tiny speck flying high against the blue sky, turning ever so lovingly and gently from right to left. A 3-wood picked off the ground is perhaps the litmus test of a well-oiled and precise swing, and a 3-wood cleanly struck with a gentle draw is golf’s utopia. Real men hit a draw. Drawers of the ball eat steak, faders get quiche.

A draw is the offspring of a good grip, an athletic address, an on-plane path, the proper closing of the clubface at impact and extension down the line afterward. Gads, man, but you’re standing inside your swing, so how else can you hit the ball?

Hank Haney, who began his golf instruction career at Pinehurst in the late 1970s and later acquired clients as diverse as Woods and Charles Barkley, says a perfectly on-plane swing can do nothing but produce a draw for that every reason.

“You want to contact the inside part of the ball with the clubface closing as it comes through in order to start your little draw to the right of the target,” Haney says. “This is a fact. I’ve never heard a teacher dispute this point.”

John Gerring won the Atlantic Coast Conference golf title in 1957 for Wake Forest and went on to become a longtime club pro in Atlanta, Detroit, Asheville and Spartanburg, and a well-respected golf teacher. He carried the nickname “Dr. Hook,” borne of his proclivity to play and teach a right-to-left ball flight.

“The hook has two advantages,” says Gerring. “It’s longer and it’s more forgiving. It’s more forgiving because the angle of approach is shallower.”

Jack Burke Sr. used to teach that “you only own the inside half of the ball,” that you had to find a swing that let you come from inside to square to the target. Harvey Penick once told Don Wade of Golf Digest that he thought it was a myth that a draw would not stop as quickly as a fade if — and it’s a big if — the ball was struck cleanly and properly and not pulled.

Of course, many will argue these points, mainly because if you over-cook a draw, you’re left with a screaming hook that is bereft of backspin and any sense of direction. Have more careers been sidetracked over too much Old Crow or too many duck hooks? It’s probably a dead heat.

“You can talk to a fade, but a hook won’t listen,” Lee Trevino once famously observed.

Trevino was haunted as a young man on the hardscrabble Texas public courses by an out-of-control hook, and he marveled one day in 1963 when he was invited to Shady Oaks Country Club in Fort Worth while watching Hogan hit practice balls. Hogan had exorcised the demon hook in the mid-1940s by finding what he called “the secret.” The essence of that mystical panacea has been debated for decades, but two elements certainly were a grip adjustment and the cupping motion Hogan developed with his left wrist, an action that put the brake on his lightning quick hand action that earlier produced so many hooks.

Trevino, a driving range attendant at the time and still four years removed from his first foray onto the PGA Tour, didn’t dare approach Hogan that day at Shady Oaks. But what he saw stayed with him for life, and he took the image of Hogan’s soft fades back to the practice tee.

“The only way I could figure out was just to grab the club and hold on for dear life,” Trevino says, inferring that the extra grip pressure from the middle two fingers of his left hand helped keep the clubface open at impact.

So there you have it, proof positive that either way works. It’s all a matter of taste. Meanwhile, I’ll look forward to pulling my 5-wood on a 185-yard par-3 with the pin hugging the left.  PS

Lee Pace has written Golftown Journal since 2008. Contact him at leepace7@gmail.com and follow him on Instagram at @leepaceunc and on Twitter @leepacetweet.

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Strange Magic

Doubling your Sandhills pleasure

By Lee Pace

Photograph: Curtis (left) & Allan (right)

Whether it was Curtis in the 1970s winning the North & South Amateur or Allan today tootling around the village of Pinehurst, for nearly half a century the Sandhills have been close to the hearts of the Strange brothers.

“Pinehurst was just a place you fell in love with,” says Curtis Strange, the two-time U.S. Open champion. “Some of my proudest moments were some of the scores I shot on Pinehurst No. 2 back in college.”

“It’s just a great place to get away to,” adds identical twin Allan, a financial adviser living in Richmond, Virginia. “At first I knew Pinehurst just for the golf. But the more I got to know the village and the people, the stronger the draw became.”

Curtis and Allan were born in 1955 in Virginia Beach and were introduced to golf at 7 years of age by their father, Tom, a club professional and owner of White Sands Country Club. Tom also found time to play in six U.S. Opens, his best finish a tie for 48th in 1967 at Baltusrol.

“In our house, the U.S. Open always meant a great deal,” Curtis says. “Arnold Palmer told me a long time ago the Open is the hardest test in golf, and it should be, because it’s our national championship.”

Curtis joined coach Jesse Haddock’s juggernaut program at Wake Forest University, and Allan played at East Tennessee State. Curtis was a three-time All-American from 1973-75, won the 1974 NCAA individual title, and teamed with Jay Haas to lead the Deacons to team titles in 1974 and ’75.

With legendary caddie Fletcher Gaines at his side, Strange won the 1975 North & South Amateur by shaving defending champion George Burns, then followed with the 1976 crown by handily ousting Fred Ridley, now the chairman of Augusta National Golf Club.

“Fletcher and I had a lot of fun,” Strange says. “He was a great help. I really got to know No. 2 with Fletcher. Playing those greens requires a lot of local knowledge. Back then, I was just kind of booming it. I didn’t have much management or strategy on the golf course. I would hit it long and go chase it. Fletcher tried to condense that strength and manage me around. He did a great job. He read all my putts.

“I shot some really good scores and hit a lot of good shots there. When you go to a place like Pinehurst and do well, it means so much more than winning on a golf course no one’s ever heard of. My name will be on that plaque in the clubhouse for a long time.”

Strange exploded on the PGA Tour in the mid-to-late 1980s, winning back-to-back U.S. Opens in 1988-89 and eight events total from 1987-89, and his $1.1 million prize winnings in 1988 marked the first time a pro golfer had topped the $1 million mark for a single season. He played on five Ryder Cup teams and captained the 2002 United States team. In the twilight of his career, he has worked as a TV commentator and now spends considerable time fishing from his homes in Morehead City, North Carolina, and Naples, Florida, and pursuing various philanthropic endeavors. 

He’s made periodic trips to Pinehurst over the years, and in August 2022 he got a look at the construction site for the USGA’s new Golf House Pinehurst between the club and Carolina Hotel. On the second floor of that facility, the USGA is designating space for the World Golf Hall of Fame — Curtis was inducted in 2007 — which will move from St. Augustine, Florida.

“I’m so happy and thrilled with what the USGA is doing, building kind of a home away from home in Pinehurst,” Curtis says. “Add to that, the Hall of Fame is coming back to where it started. Everyone has their golf mecca. Ours is Pinehurst. The USGA . . . the Hall of Fame . . . Pinehurst No. 2 . . . it seems like a perfect fit.”

Allan, meanwhile, has taken a more circuitous route to find his own golf nirvana in the Sandhills.

He, too, played in the North & South in the 1970s, in the Pinehurst Intercollegiate with East Tennessee State, and then in the Hall of Fame Classic on the PGA Tour in the early 1980s. Then he entered private business in wealth management and eventually got his amateur status back. Throughout his working career in Richmond, he’d visit Pinehurst every half-dozen years or so.

“My wife and I had a place at Smith Mountain Lake, and after 10 or 12 years, that was kind of getting old,” he says. “We started looking at places within easy driving distance. I said, ‘Let’s go visit Pinehurst.’ She just loved the small town look and feel of the village. So did I. We came a second time. And third. The pull was pretty strong.”

Allan was also a friend of Ziggy Zalzneck, a longtime member at the Country Club of North Carolina and former club president. Over frequent visits to the Zalzneck residence at CCNC, he seriously considered joining the club. It came together about a decade ago with the Stranges buying the Liscombe Lodge on Linden Road, the winter home years ago for Gen. George Marshall, the U.S. Army’s chief of staff during World War II and later the secretary of defense and secretary of state.

“So it just kind of evolved — a home in the village and a membership at CCNC,” Allan says. “I have loved being here. The glue, of course, is the golf, but if I got old enough where I couldn’t play anymore, I’d still enjoy the village.”

Allan is a regular at CCNC and various restaurants around town, and often draws a double take, just as he did around airports in the 1980s and early ’90s when Curtis was at the height of his popularity. The twins have long shared similar body compositions, salt-and-pepper hair and facial features.

“More than a few times I’ve been asked, ‘That’s Curtis Strange, isn’t it?’” longtime CCNC Director of Golf Jeff Dotson says of Allan’s visits to the club.

“I’ve signed plenty of autographs when it’s a kid who might be disappointed if I told him I wasn’t actually the U.S. Open champion,” Allan says. “It was probably more than you could imagine. But I was fine with it. It meant Curtis was playing well and winning.”

The Strange brothers talk by phone almost daily and participated in the Patriot Foundation Pro-Am at CCNC in August 2022. They played golf with veterans and service personnel, drank a few beers and raised money for scholarships for children of parents who had lost their lives in service. Allan came away impressed with his brother’s demeanor and station in life.

“We spent two days together and I saw firsthand that Curtis was more relaxed than he’s ever been,” Allan says. “He’s enjoying life as much as he ever did, but in a totally different way. The enjoyment he had in the ’80s was pressure packed, it was climbing the mountain. Now it’s totally different, now he’s coming down the other side. I didn’t really know what this side would be like for him. He enjoys his family; he enjoys getting on the water every day that he can. He’s philanthropic in a private, quiet way. And he still pays very close attention to what is going on in golf.

“I wasn’t sure if he could enjoy this as much as he does. It makes me feel good.”

The Strange brothers will turn 68 in late January 2023. Look for them in body and spirit around the village — Curtis in name among the champions displayed in Heritage Hall at Pinehurst and perhaps even in person visiting his brother.

“I’ve seen Curtis more now because I’ve had a place in Pinehurst for eight or nine years, which is a nice unintended consequence,” Allan says. “It’s interesting how it all fell into place, starting with Curtis’ love of Pinehurst and success here. “I don’t think I’ll ever not have a second home in Pinehurst.”  PS

Lee Pace is a Chapel Hill-based golf writer and a long-time contributor to PineStraw magazine. His latest book is Good Walks—Rediscovering the Soul of Golf at 18 Top Carolinas Courses, published by UNC Press.

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That Sinking Feeling

When your world goes sideways

By Lee Pace

It’s a golf shot, as Ebenezer Scrooge might say apropos of the holiday season, that reeks of an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato.

All is right with the world — the sun is warm, the sky is crystalline, the perfume of freshly mown grass permeates the air. The foursome’s in high gear — the bets are made, the jabs are flying, the competitive juices flowing. One-fifty to the green, nice lie, pull the 7-iron, imagine crisp contact and visualize a perfect ball flight, a waggle, a trigger, good extension, sweet tempo . . .

And then a nauseating clunk.

Instead of boring high into the wild blue yonder, the ball flies out of the right corner of your field of vision, into oblivion and certain death.

Silence from the guys.

Golf’s version of Armageddon: the shank.

It happens to the best of them.

Webb Simpson was on the eighth hole at Medinah on the final day of the 2012 Ryder Cup. He needed to hit what he termed would be a “smash 8,” got a little ahead of the ball and shanked it way right, in the direction of the fourth hole.

“I did the math and figured out that was about where Tiger was,” Simpson says. “I thought they’d have to move all those people and make a big scene. It would make no sense to Tiger, and he’d have this on me for the rest of my life. We were in the locker room afterward and Tiger came up to me and said he had a question.

“He said, ‘The wind was tricky today. Where was it blowing on eight?’ He was smiling. I knew he had me. We still talk about that.”

Ian Poulter has hit more shanks than he cares to remember, many of them on the biggest stages in golf. There was the el hosel while in contention at the 2015 Honda Classic, the duck slice at the 2017 Players Championship and the wide right in front of an unforgiving gallery at the 2018 Waste Management Phoenix Open. You can find them on YouTube if you care to venture into that cauldron of horrors.

“I’ve had a number of them at inopportune times,” says Poulter, who’s actually a good sport in talking about a shot that many golfers refuse to address by the s-word name. “I’ve hit a shank on almost every par-3 at Augusta. I tend to move my head slightly forward and my weight gets a little too close to the ball.”

Jack Nicklaus hit a shank on the 12th hole in the 1964 Masters that flew so far right, it didn’t even get wet in Rae’s Creek as it crossed the fairway.

“I’ll never forget the tension in my right arm,” Nicklaus says. “When I swung, my right arm just dominated. It never broke down.”

Johnny Miller hit a shank in the 1972 Crosby Clambake and it haunted him for years. When he won the U.S. Open at Oakmont the following year, he played the back nine while shooting a 63 with one swing thought, “Don’t shank it.”

Miller says the hardest shot in golf is the one after a shank.

“The clubface looks the size of a pea while the hosel looks as big as an elephant,” Miller says. “I contended in tournaments probably 50 times after that, and every time I was worried about shanking.”

Tommy Bolt was once playing in a pro-am with a man who was very nervous on the first tee. He managed to get his first drive in play, but he shanked his second shot. Bolt gave him a word of advice, but he shanked his next shot as well. Bolt gave him something else to try, but the result was yet another shank.

“Tommy, what should I do?” the man wailed.

“Pards, just aim to the left and allow for it,” Bolt said.

Charles Smith was warming up on the practice tee before his semifinal match in the 1960 North and South Amateur at Pinehurst. He hit a shank with his wedge. Then another. Then another.

“Your hands start to sweat and you get that awful feeling in your stomach,” Smith says.

Smith refused to pull the wedge out of the bag the rest of the day. From a hundred yards in, he either hit a choke-down 9-iron or a hooded sand wedge all day. He won the match and went on to collect the title the next day.

“I wasn’t going to risk hitting a shank,” Smith says. “God, what an awful feeling.”

Former PGA champion Jerry Barber designed and manufactured a line of irons that were supposedly shank-proof. Instead of having a round hosel connecting the clubface and shaft, the front of the hosel was flattened. So even if you connected hosel-to-ball, the ball presumably would go forward instead of sideways. The company is now out of business, but the 800 number used two decades ago still gets calls from the afflicted.

Purvis Ferree, the longtime head professional at Old Town Club in Winston-Salem, was hounded by the shanks in older age as his swing flattened with the inevitable rounding of the body and lessening of flexibility. He eventually played with two of Barber’s “Golden Touch” wedges, a no-shank 7-iron for chipping, and a bag full of fairway woods.

“Father was such a wonderful teacher, but the shank almost reduced him to a spectator,” says son Jim, himself a club professional and tour pro on the PGA Tour and Champions Tour. “There were times he could not hit a solid golf shot. One day at Roaring Gap, he gave his irons away to a caddie when he got to shanking.”

In one celebrated story they still tell around Old Town, Purvis went out for a regular match with Malcolm McLean, the trucking magnate and owner of Pinehurst Resort for a decade in the 1970s. The bet was that if McLean could win any one hole, he won the match. On the first hole, Ferree shanked several shots around the green and wound up in the very divot he made with his first shank. He picked up and conceded the hole and the match to McLean.

Jim Ferree was a club professional in Pittsburgh in the 1980s when one of his members, a doctor, saved his golf game by acquiring a set of the Barber irons. When the member read in Golf World that Barber’s company was going out of business, Ferree helped him acquire a backup set in case something happened to the original clubs. Several months later, Ferree was at the doctor’s home for a cocktail party and wondered if the man still had the irons. The doctor led Ferree into a walk-in vault in his bedroom, where the irons were tucked away along with his wife’s jewels and furs.

Just goes to show you the lengths a man will go to protect his cure to the abominable shank. If you’ve never hit one, count your blessings. If you have, please don’t let this harmless little narrative pollute your mind the next time you address a 100-yard approach.  PS

Lee Pace has written about golf in the Sandhills for three decades. His newest book, Good Walks — Rediscovering the Soul of Golf at 18 Top Carolinas Courses, is available at area bookstores and through UNC Press.

Golftown Journal

It’s a Beautiful Day

Hot or cold, rain or shine

By Lee Pace

At the opposite end of the phone line, there is flesh and blood. There is a real person — not a computer navigated by a series of keyboard punches.

It’s a beautiful day in Pinehurst.

Ring the main number at The Carolina Hotel and Pinehurst Resort since the mid-1980s and you have found someone like Dib Taylor, Gloria Spencer, Art Roper or one of their fellow phone operators. Dial out to Bandon Dunes or Pebble Beach and you get a recording inviting you to hack your way through the maze.

A Pinehurst member might be calling from McKenzie Road and know for a fact it’s raining cats and dogs, but since the 1980s they would get the “beautiful day” greeting followed by the phone operator’s first name.

“I love to say it,” Dib Taylor once said. “Does it show? I have fun with it. People will tease me. Rain or shine, to me it’s always beautiful in Pinehurst. But if people ask, I’ll tell them the truth.”

“People say I make their day, pump them up a little bit,” added Spencer, who worked the resort phone lines from 1985 through her retirement about a decade ago. “It makes me feel good to say it. Rain or snow, it doesn’t matter, people call and say, ‘I called just to hear you say that.’ It’s a personal touch that’s important.”

Pat Corso was a hotel executive with Club Corporation of America when he was dispatched to Pinehurst in 1987 to run the resort and club. Phone operators at a resort on the Florida Panhandle that was in Corso’s regional domain answered with, “It’s a beautiful day at Sandestin,” and Corso thought that would work well at Pinehurst, too. Ever since, the Pinehurst staff has worked the phones 24/7 and presented a subliminal message to callers that Pinehurst is a better place than any they might be calling from.

“Pinehurst to me means serenity, it’s peace, it’s the people,” Spencer said. “When I first came to work here, I thought I was going on a picnic, it’s such a place of beauty. Pinehurst is such a peaceful, calming place.”

Another signature greeting of Pinehurst is the 300 yards of Carolina Vista, the lane that runs from Highway 2 north to The Carolina Hotel. The stately white building sits grandly in the distance with its copper roof and signature cupola, framed by a canopy of hollies and pines and hundreds of flowers nestled along the street. Travelers often have driven from distant parts or ridden for 90 minutes from the airport in Raleigh and are taken aback as they pass from the here-and-now into antique nirvana.

Jack Kennally worked on the transportation staff at Pinehurst for more than a decade and sometimes heard first-time visitors grouse about the long drive from Raleigh-Durham International.

“They ask, ‘Why’d they build it so far from the airport?’” said Kennally, who then told them Pinehurst was built before the airport. That gives them some perspective and puts them in the proper frame of mind when his shuttle turned off the round-about and wound its way up the Vista.

“They love the architecture of the houses along the lane,” Kennally said. “They say, ‘Oh, it’s lovely.’ They imagine what it looked like back in the ’30s, that kind of thing. The big dome, the copper cupola, are very striking. The drive up the Vista sets a nice tone for the visit.”

During his tenure as Carolina Hotel general manager from 2004-2020, Scott Brewton would drive out of his way each day going to work — eschewing a more direct route into the employee parking lot in back of the hotel in favor of entering via Highway 2 and Carolina Vista and passing by the old world grandeur of Ailsa House, Beacon House, Heartpine House and Little House.

“You swing off the traffic circle and there’s a gentle rise, and it’s like the hotel comes out of the ground,” Brewton said. “There are flowers on your left and right, people walking dogs or carrying tennis rackets. It’s a nice visual to start every day.”

May Wood, a golfer at Vanderbilt University in 2002 and the winner that year of the Women’s North and South Amateur, remembered her first drive along Carolina Vista.

“It was electrifying,” she said. “I almost teared up the first time I saw it. It was the most beautiful place I’d ever been.”

The “beautiful day” theme carries over from the hotel into the village of Pinehurst and, of course, onto the five golf courses emanating from the main clubhouse. Kaye Pierson has worked part time on the Pinehurst golf course maintenance crew since 2008 and, as the quality of cellphone cameras improved, began looking for good images as she mowed grass on the golf courses at dawn each morning. One morning in January 2013, she came to work and told the guys in the maintenance shop, “Watch the sky show this morning.”

She snapped a photo of the Putter Boy statue, the practice putting green, the Padgett Learning Center building and the red, gold and blue palette of the sky in the distance, all of it accented with the early morning mist hanging low to the ground. Nine years later, she captured a shot on the third green of No. 2 looking east along the fifth hole, the sky in a similar dazzling arrangement. Both images were dispensed worldwide via Pinehurst Resort’s social media channels and now are available on prints in gift shops around the resort.

“It’s just magical at that hour,” she says. “For anyone who works on a golf course early in the morning, that’s it. That’s why we’re out there. We are fortunate to be on the course that time of day to see the quiet and the mist and how it changes. Everything just kind of stops for a few seconds and you realize how lucky you are.”

In the village there are no right angles in the roads and no large signs on the shops and you half expect to see Beaver Cleaver or Barney Fife walking down the sidewalk. James Tufts’ New England roots dominate the architecture — the arched doorways, the Colonial Revival façades, the sharply pitched roofs and the gables, the cedar and redwood trim, the white picket fences, the cabins built of juniper logs, the original heart pine columns of the Casino building (now a real-estate agent’s office). Pinehurst has no drive-up windows, but one bank has a “Walk-Up Garden.” And then there are the colors, the two best being the forest green throughout the village and the sepia on the old photographs preserving the history — from the halls of the Carolina Hotel to the file books in the Tufts Archives.

“Each day you spend in Pinehurst, you escape the real world,” said clothier Chris Dalrymple, who owns Gentleman’s Corner. “You mark it off as a day you succeeded.”

Scott Straight has visited Pinehurst frequently from his home in French Lick, Indiana, sometimes as a guest of the gathering hosted each fall by Fluor Corporation and others on a spring golf outing with friends and family. When he first came in the early 2000s, cellular service was spotty in the Sandhills.

“It’s like going back in time, back to a much simpler time,” Straight said. “I couldn’t believe it when I first visited. Here I was in this little village, this golf resort, with no cell service, no email, totally removed from the world.”

He smiled, noting the evolution of technology.

“Unfortunately, somebody went and put a cell tower nearby,” he said.

Pinehurst isn’t immune from technological innovation, but it’s still old school with a voice reminding you it’s in a beautiful world of its own.  PS

Lee Pace’s first book about Pinehurst and its history, Pinehurst Stories—A Celebration of Great Golf and Good Times, was published 30 years ago.

Golftown Journal

Porking Out

A tradition like no other

By Lee Pace

Among the much-revered culinary traditions in golf are the pimento cheese sandwiches at The Masters, the “burgerdog” at The Olympic Club (essentially an elongated hamburger served in a toasted hot dog bun), the snapper soup at Pine Valley (thick with nuggets of turtle and finished with a dollop of sherry), and the peanut butter and bacon sandwiches at the halfway house at Mountain Lake in Florida.

And then you have the pork chop at the Pine Crest Inn in the village of Pinehurst.

“The pork chop is as much a rite of passage of visiting Pinehurst as four-putting one of the greens on Pinehurst No. 2,” says Steven Lilly, an annual visitor along with up to 28 fellow Davidson College graduates.

“At the ’99 U.S. Open, we had 1,600 pork chops go through that kitchen. That’s a lot of pork,” adds Marie Hartsell, a longtime cook at Pine Crest, which opened in 1913.

The 22-ounce porterhouse pork chop is among the “classic entrees” listed on the menu of the Pine Crest, which was owned in the early days by golf architect Donald Ross and has been in the Barrett family for six decades.

“Fork-tender served with mashed potatoes, fresh vegetables and natural pan gravy. A Pine Crest Inn tradition for over 60 years!” the menu reads.

The pork chop was the creation of longtime chef Carl Jackson, who started in the kitchen as a boy in the 1930s, worked his way up to chef, and was an institution at the inn until his death in 1998 at the age of 77. Nephew Peter Jackson took over for Carl, and Carl’s grandson Kiyatta Jackson works in the Pine Crest kitchen today.

“The pork chop has been a leader on the menu all these years,” says Peter Barrett, son of Bob Barrett, the Ohio newspaperman who bought the inn in 1961. “Carl had a special pot, and he braised them in an old pizza oven big enough to hold the pan. He’d get about 24 in a pan.”

Lilly has ordered the pork chop three nights in a row for 30 years during his annual trip to Pinehurst. He estimates one-third of their group will order the pork chop every night at dinner.

“Over the years, we have noticed the presentation changes,” Lilly says.  “Sometimes a plate, sometimes a shallow bowl, perhaps differing ingredients in the au-jus vegetable medley. But the tender, slow-roasted chop, which seems to fall from the bone moments before the fork (never the knife!) even makes contact, remains a constant.” 

Pedro Martinez-Fonts is one of a dozen close friends originally from Cuba who migrated to the United States in the early 1960s to get away from the Castro communist regime. They have been meeting at the Pine Crest Inn every May for more than two decades.

“The pork chop reminds me of when we used to roast a pig, covered with banana leaves, on my grandfather’s farm in Cuba,” he says. “Not only is it a generous cut that can feed more than one Cuban, but it is also tender and full of flavor. Of all the times we have stayed at the Pine Crest, I have seen only one Cuban, the late Bobby Perkins, who could handle one of these pork chops by himself.”

Harman Switzer was part of a group of a dozen golfers based in Princeton Junction, New Jersey, who visited the Pine Crest annually from 1974 through 2019 until age got the better of them. “The people, the porch and the pork chop kept drawing us back,” he says. “And I haven’t missed a chop in that time. I must admit, at 78 years of age, one 22-ounce serving is sufficient for the week. But there was a time when one was not enough.”

On one occasion one of their members brought his wife to experience the pork chop.

“She was so rightfully impressed with chef Carl’s creation that she asked to speak with him, unashamedly in search of the recipe,” Switzer says. “Chef Carl immediately appeared from the kitchen and delightfully began to expound on the hours of marinade and slow cooking. Whereupon the lady politely inquired about the sauce ingredients. To which chef Carl also politely responded, ‘Oh sorry, that’s a secret sauce.’ Which, to my knowledge, remains a Jackson family secret today.”

Indeed it does, though snippets of the presentation have emerged over the years.

Jackson used to buy all his meat from a butcher shop in Boston, but now the chops come from an institutional distributor. They used to come with a layer of fat that’s now trimmed off. Barrett says Jackson cooked them at 225 degrees all day, but now they’re braised at 350 degrees for a slightly shorter period. The corn, okra, onions and carrots are visible dancing around the meat on the shallow serving bowl, but the broth is the finishing touch. Insiders will admit to there being salt, pepper and paprika, but no one is certain whether V8 Juice, tomato juice and/or Campbell’s tomato soup are part of the elixir.

In June 2022 I visited the Pine Crest for three nights with a group from Chapel Hill and mentioned to the guys as we sat down for dinner that the pork chop was the specialty of the house. All six of us ordered the pork chop, and an hour later were wheeled out to our beds, sated and happy. One in our group commandeered the meager leftovers (six bones with a little meat hanging about) to take home to his 75-pound dog, Ernie.

“Ernie was joyously grateful, especially to those who’d left a little meat on theirs,” Steve reported.

Kiyatta Jackson, known as “Yacht” and now a breakfast cook at the Pine Crest, says he’ll honor his grandfather’s wishes that his recipe remain a secret. But at least someone knows the ingredients and the process for generating the Pine Crest’s signature dish and, when a new chef comes through, they’re given chapter and verse about the most popular choice on the menu.

“We might have made our last visit as a group, but I’ve been back myself twice in the last year,” says Switzer, who lives on Callawassie Island near Hilton Head. “It’s always good for a special occasion — a birthday, anniversary, wedding. Or sometimes seeking sanctuary from a low country storm.

“There are lots of excuses for visiting the Pine Crest and enjoying a drink on the porch and savoring the pork chop — the latter being the celebratory culmination of the journey.”  PS

Lee Pace has written about the Pinehurst experience for more than three decades from his home in Chapel Hill. Write him at leepace7@gmail.com and follow him @LeePaceTweet.

Golftown Journal

Dare to Dream

The message of the U.S. Adaptive Open

By Lee Pace

Mike Whan, the chief executive officer of the USGA, was talking one morning in late July about the decision to recruit the World Golf Hall of Fame in St. Augustine and move it into 9,000 square feet on the second floor of Golf House Pinehurst, the USGA’s new facility under construction and set to open in 2023.

“It was the right thing to do, the right thing for golf,” said Whan.

Then he quickly drew a parallel with the just-completed U.S. Adaptive Open, which the USGA had conducted the week before on Pinehurst’s No. 6 course. Ninety-six players aged 15 to 80 from around the world played 54 holes of golf. Some played with one leg or no legs. Some with one arm. They played despite having cerebral palsy and muscular dystrophy. They found a way to aim and fire even though some were legally blind.

“The Adaptive Open is the same,” Whan continued. “Certain things you do because it’s the right thing to do. That is one of them. I cannot tell you how much money we lost. It’s a staggering number. But I could not feel better about it because it was the right thing to do for the game.”

Whan said he asked a fellow USGA official for the one word that would best describe the week at No. 6, and the word was “joy.”

“I thought he meant the athletes,” Whan said. “I knew they’d appreciate it and enjoy it. But he actually meant the joy of our own team. This was a 25-year employee of the USGA and he said, ‘Mike, this is a top-two experience.’ I said, ‘What’s the other one?’ He said, ‘Give me a minute. There has to be something.’”

The U.S. Adaptive Open came to fruition after decades of the USGA taking incremental steps to provide more opportunity and awareness for golfers with some degree of disability. In 1991 it announced a grant program for golfers with disabilities. In 1997 it published some modifications to the Rules of Golf to accommodate some of the challenges disabled golfers might encounter. To promote opportunities for golfers with disabilities, the USGA in 1999 partnered with trick-shot artist Dennis Walters, sponsoring his golf exhibitions and elevating the message that having a disability should not keep people from achieving their golf dreams. 

And in 2017, the USGA pledged its intent to stage a national championship for disabled golfers. The vision was delayed by COVID-19 until it was announced in late 2021 that the inaugural championship would be held at Pinehurst No. 6 the following July.

“Players in the adaptive space just want to be like everyone else — they just want to be golfers,” said John Bodenheimer, the chief championships officer for the USGA. “We are proud to give them that opportunity. We hope it inspires others in the industry to make the game and its competitions more welcoming to all.”

The golfers came from as far away as Korea, Ireland, Sweden, Belgium, Japan, South Africa, England, and Argentina. Allowances were made for challenges the golfers might have faced. Seated players got four club-length drops from penalty areas and could move the ball 6 inches in bunkers because it could be difficult to find the desired address position in a mechanized scooter. Double par was the max score on any hole.

“When I found out about this, I was intrigued,” Walters said. “It’s a historical event. It’s like 1895 and you’re Horace Rawlins. You’re the first one. That’s why I wanted to be here.”

They were uniformly amazed at the sophistication of the organizational structure — from the bunting and signage around the facility to the volunteer support to a press facility that hosted writers from all the major golf publications.

“This is big time, this is just like the U.S. Open, only smaller,” said Eli Villanueva, a retired Army sergeant from Fort Bragg who plays with a 2-handicap despite an arm impairment. A radial head fracture of his left elbow 30 years ago has left him with limited use of his left arm. Looking around at other competitors, Villanueva marveled at the more severe challenges many have overcome to play golf.

“This is a U.S. Open atmosphere,” he said. “I hope this inspires others. All over the country they’ll see what golfers here have overcome and say, ‘I can do that, too.’ Hopefully it will be the start of more good things to come. An Adaptive British Open? Sounds good to me.”

Two former professional golfers were in the field. Walters was 24 years old and playing the mini tours in 1974 when a golf cart he was driving down a steep incline had brake failure and crashed, leaving him as a T-12 level paraplegic. Ken Green, a five-time winner on the PGA Tour in the 1980s and ’90s, had his lower right leg amputated following a highway crash in 2009. Walters started a traveling trick-shot show that he presents with his dog, Gus, and Green has relearned the game and competed on a sponsor’s exemption in one PGA Tour Champions event and teed it up in the 2019 Senior PGA Championship.

“I am completely captivated and absolutely amazed at what I see,” Walters said. “This is phenomenal. Every one of these people can play golf. They are proving what I have been trying to say for 45 years. I’ve been trying to show, with every swing I make, that golf can be a game for all. This proves it.”

“This is competitive and we’re grinding our tails off,” said Green. “But this is the first event you’ll ever play that if you finish second, fifth or seventh, you’re still walking away smiling. You’ve got an edge in life and that’s what life is about. This is a home run.”

Simon Seungmin Lee, a 25-year-old Korean who was born with congenital autism, won the men’s title with a trilogy of 71s. Kim Moore, a 41-year-old from Michigan who was born without a right foot, a severely clubbed left foot and a slight case of spina bifida, collected the women’s trophy by carding 76-80-76.

“I think what has been seen this week around the world, around the country, is going to elevate the amputee community, the adaptive community, and it’s pretty cool to see,” said Moore.

After the complications arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, Whan said the USGA considered holding off a year or two to give the logistics and protocols more study, but he’s delighted the organization went ahead as scheduled in 2022.

“Sometimes you have to jump off the cliff and not worry about how you splash at the bottom,” he said.

The championship will return to No. 6 again in 2023. After that, the USGA has to decide whether it wants to move it around or establish a permanent home in the Sandhills. No matter, it will have plenty of entries and attention.

“I tell people, have a dream, and if it doesn’t work out, that’s OK. Get another dream,” Walters said.

Green has faced a marriage breakup, clinical depression, financial woes and a son who died of a drug and alcohol overdose. He was driving an RV in rural Mississippi in 2009 when a tire blew, careening the vehicle off the road and killing his brother, girlfriend and dog. He survived but hasn’t had two legs since. The significance of a week in Pinehurst playing in the inaugural U.S. Adaptive Open with 95 other golfers who’d also been dealt a tough hand was huge indeed.

His message to his fellow competitors: Take a bow.

“You were able to pull yourself out of that hole that life gave you,” Green said. “And then you went on to do something really good. You can’t ask for anything more than that. You won both sides of the game — life and golf.”  PS

Lee Pace has written for Pinestraw Magazine since 2008 and is the author of eight books about Sandhills golf history and the people who’ve made it special. Write him at leepace7@gmail.com and follow him @LeePaceTweet. 

Golftown Journal

All in Good Time

The pause at the top

By Lee Pace

“Beware the fury of a patient man.”   — John Dryden

Over a lifetime I have collected baseball cards, vintage postcards, spy novels, golf headcovers, Matchbox cars and bottles of hot sauce. Now I’m into collecting Instagram posts, most notably those portending to help with the golf swing and within that subculture those addressing the transition at the top of the backswing.

There’s a post with a collage of Fred Couples swings, one per annum over three decades in rapid fire, his buttery move sending balls flying the nation over. Couples has talked over his illustrious career of “gathering” and “buying time” at the top. “One drill I have done is take a 9-iron, hold it at the top for a split second and then go ahead and hit it,” Couples says. “I think slow and lazy swing.”

In another post, Michael Mitnick, an Ohio college student and aspiring club professional, executes this very drill, what he calls “The Pause Drill.” He addresses a ball, takes the club back, holds it at the top about a one-Mississippi breath, then delivers his blow and launches the ball high into the sky. “Having a deliberate pause will help you not rush your swing and develop a fluid tempo,” he offers.

And one I really like is a snippet of Justin Thomas hitting a half-wedge over a bunker and stopping it inches from the cup. “The patience in transition is enviable,” PGA Tour golfer Parker McLachlin says in his Instagram feed, adding a pair of salivating emojis. “There’s not a rush to hit the ball.”

Indeed, in this world rife with kryptonite-laced golf balls and nuclear-tipped driver heads, where college players get home in two with a driver and a 6-iron, where swing speeds are measured on Ferrari dashboards, there remains one corner of the world for calm and quiet.

The top of the backswing.

That’s right. After all, if you’re going one way and then want to go in reverse 180 degrees, you have to stop. It’s science. So what’s your hurry?

The great Bobby Jones once remarked, “No one ever swung a golf club too slowly.” Another talented golfer by the name of Julius Boros, who as a young man married into the Mid Pines Inn and Golf Club ownership family, was nicknamed “Old Man River” for his sweet tempo and even wrote a book titled Swing Easy, Hit Hard.

Renowned instructor Bob Toski tells his students to use the “Coca-Cola Swing,” employing a “pause that refreshes” at the top of the backswing.

“There should be no flash of speed at the top of your swing,” Toski told Golf Digest years ago. “The club should be quiet and not bouncing. This gives you a chance to move the lower body down into the swing. You want to feel that you push the club back and pull it through. Think push, pause, pull.’”

Englishman Justin Rose has fought the tendency to get tense at the top and to rush his transition, so he thinks of “collecting” himself at the top and simply letting his arms “fall from the top, rather than jerking the club down,” he says.

“The transition in the full swing is what separates the good player from the bad player,” says David Orr, the Pine Needles-based instructor who has Rose among his clients.

The famous “secret” espoused by Hall of Famer Ben Hogan has been parsed to a fare-thee-well by golfers, instructors, commentators and biographers. One theory is that the secret was a cupping motion of the left wrist at the top. Another school of thought has that Hogan’s key to the golf kingdom was the way he braced his right knee to initiate the swing, followed by his inward push toward the ball of his knee on the downswing.

A friend and fellow competitor from the mid-20th century pro tour, Tommy Bolt, says Hogan’s secret was actually a trigger he found at the top of his backswing. Bolt went through a period in the late 1950s of hitting everything with a pronounced right-to-left pattern, and Hogan, who battled an incessant hook himself for many years, told him, “Tommy, you’re not going to last long fighting that hook.”

Hogan invited Bolt to visit him at his home in Fort Worth and promised to help Bolt work the hook out of his game. First Hogan weakened Bolt’s grip to take the left side out of play. The second instruction Hogan gave him was to feel both hands secure on the club at the top of the swing.

“It will put your club in great position at the top of the swing,” Hogan said. “It will shorten your swing and allow you to have an accelerated motion coming into the ball.”

After several days of hitting balls and playing the course at Shady Oaks Country Club, Bolt felt he had made progress and prepared to go back out on tour.

“Ben, what do I owe you?” Bolt asked.

“Nothing,” Hogan said. “Well, you owe me one thing. If someone asks you what we worked on, you can tell them I weakened your grip. But as a favor, don’t tell them about keeping both your hands on the club at the top. Tommy, that’s the ‘secret.’ That stays between us.”

Bolt’s face would brighten as he told the story many years later.

“So when they talk about Ben Hogan’s secret,” Bolt said, “I’m the only one who knows what that secret is. At the top of the swing, you make sure you feel both hands secure on that golf club.”

I was reminded of the value of this pause that refreshes during the recent U.S. Women’s Open at Pine Needles. Golfers on the women’s circuit wield silk and syrup as their stocks in trade. Watch Michelle Wie West. She’ll take three beats to the top of her backswing, then one beat to impact. Three-to-one, over and over and over again. Woe to the golfer, particularly the Type-A male, who can’t benefit from a half hour watching these symphonic swings on the practice range.

“Men walk fast, eat fast, drive fast, think fast,” says Ed Ibarguen, a longtime teaching pro at Duke University Golf Club in Durham. “They have very active minds. In the golf swing, that often translates to active hands. They can certainly benefit by watching the elite female player.”

All of these collected perspectives on the transition from backswing to downswing came to mind recently after I’d turned a 1-over through eight holes start into hash with a succession of pull-hooks I instinctively knew had occurred because I didn’t finish my backswing and was rushing to hit the confounded ball.

I took a deep breath hitting three from the fairway on the 15th hole after jacking my tee shot into a lake. Exaggerate your pause at the top on your practice swing. Feel your hands on the club at the top. Push, pause, pull. Collect yourself at the top.

I played the last three holes even par and took my dear sweet time along the way.  PS

Lee Pace has written “Golftown Journal” since 2008. Contact him at leepace7@gmail.com and follow him on Instagram at @leepaceunc.

Golftown Journal

The Pinehurst Look

The natural treasure of the Sandhills

By Lee Pace

Three years into the Robert Dedman and ClubCorp era of Pinehurst Resort and Country Club in 1987, green fees to play Pinehurst No. 2 were $24 with a $15 surcharge for hotel guests. That year Don Padgett Sr. joined the staff as director of golf, and the former PGA of America president and long-time golf industry insider immediately moved to double the base fee to $48.

“It was not as if we were trying to make more money,” remembers Pat Corso, the resort CEO from 1987-2004 who hired Padgett. “Don said if our value is that low, people will perceive us to be that low. We had to do better than that.”

Today most rounds of golf on No. 2 are factored into a golfer’s membership at the private country club or a visitor’s hotel package, but the rack rate is upward of $500 in high season.

Talk about inflation — not only in dollars but prestige.

The 2022 U.S. Women’s Open was held recently at Pine Needles Lodge and Golf Club, unofficially launching the next high-water mark in the Sandhills’ visibility in the national golf scene.

The day following the Women’s Open, the USGA broke ground for its $25 million Golf House Pinehurst, the equipment-testing facility, innovation hub, museum/visitor center and offices on ground adjacent to the Pinehurst member and resort clubhouses.

Later this month, the USGA launches the inaugural U.S. Adaptive Open, to be held at Pinehurst No. 6 and contested by players with physical, visual and intellectual impairments.

And in two years, the U.S. Open returns to No. 2 for its fourth rendition and the first of five Opens it has secured within the framework of having been designated in 2021 as an “anchor site” for the American national championship (the others coming in 2029, 2035, 2041 and 2047).

“It’s more than just a championship for us here in the Sandhills,” says John Bodenhamer, the USGA’s director of championships. “The players can speak to it. They love a golf course like Pine Needles. Great golf courses produce great champions. How do you argue what’s come about here?”

Michelle Wie West, who won the 2014 Women’s Open on No. 2, and Lydia Ko, who finished sixth at Pine Needles, were among the players who soaked up the Sandhills vibe.

“There’s so much history around this place,” Wie West said of a morning stroll through the village of Pinehurst. “Just to be walking here and playing, it’s a huge honor.”

“This is a huge golfing community,” added Ko. “It’s actually nice to go to places where people love it, people are excited about women’s golf being here, people are excited about golf in general.” 

The 2014 USGA doubleheader on No. 2 with the men’s and women’s national championships just after the Coore and Crenshaw 2010-11 course restoration combined with the recent event on a Pine Needles course similarly renovated by Kyle Franz have cemented what has evolved into “The Pinehurst Look” — a distinctive array of sandscapes, wispy grasses, jagged edges and towering pines that reflect the native environment.

That’s as it should be and is a style to be embraced by the Sandhills golf community. Televisions at various corporate entertainment venues at Pine Needles through the weekend showed simultaneous coverage of the golf at Pine Needles and from the Memorial Tournament at Muirfield Village on the PGA Tour.

Visuals from the Memorial screamed of green, green and more green in an organized and seamless fashion. Golfers missing fairways and greens bent over and peered into the lush rough to figure out how much of their ball was accessible.

In contrast, the views from Pine Needles reflected haphazard displays of Mother Nature doing her Sandhills thing — random and arbitrary plant growth, and fairway edges and tinges of brown in the bouncy fairways. Franz in his restoration of the 1928 Donald Ross design over 2017-20 removed 11 acres of Bermuda rough, leaving wayward shots finding an infinite array of lies and challenges amid the wiregrass and volunteer vegetation.

“This look brings out the architectural features that Donald Ross envisioned before irrigation and takes much less water to maintain,” says Jim Hyler, the 2010-11 USGA president and a part-time resident of Pinehurst. “It emphasizes the ground game, which places a different set of demands on the player than a green, lush course.”

Elsewhere around the Pine Needles campus, the USGA erected large banners heralding future Women’s Open venues. Each golf course reflected its essential nature and calling card — the ocean at Pebble Beach, the fescue roughs and treeless landscape of Erin Hills, the eucalyptus trees and kikuyu rough of Riviera, the notorious bunkers of Oakmont.

There was a time when Sandhills golf courses had lost their way, when the 2005 Open was played at No. 2 and the 2007 Women’s Open at Pine Needles and the visuals were dominated by narrow, bowling-alley fairways, layers of different mowing heights for roughs, and a misguided effort to look like Augusta National North.

“You could have been anywhere in the southeast United States where there is Bermuda grass and pine trees,” says Ran Morrissett, a Southern Pines resident and curator of the Golf Club Atlas website. “Pinehurst No. 2 no longer reflected that it was in the Sandhills of North Carolina. The golden age fairways typically were 42 to 47 yards wide. At one point before the Coore and Crenshaw restoration, I paced off the first fairway at 24 yards and at one point on the seventh fairway — I think the crook of the dogleg — it might have been 12 yards wide.

“That’s not how Donald Ross defended par. He defended it at the greens. But what happened was some guy plays it for the first time and you ask, ‘What did you think of 13?’ and he says, ‘Well, which hole was that?’ The holes were no longer distinctive.”

Minjee Lee, who won the Women’s Open with a four-shot margin and a 13-under-par total, certainly understood the distinctiveness of these Ross-designed courses through her final round. On the sixth hole, she missed the fairway left and had to thwack her ball through a tuft of wiregrass. On seven, she was wayward right, her ball sitting clean on the hardpan sand, but at address her clubshaft was swallowed by a willowy wiregrass plant. And on the par-5 10th, her second shot missed the green left and came to rest within a nesty enclave of dead grass.

So what if the scores were relatively low and Lee won with a 271 total, the lowest in the history of the Women’s Open? You had good weather and little wind. 

“All great architecture is prone to players playing really well on it,” Franz said. “The conditions are right, and that’s the greatness of Ross’s style.”

Low scores and the pure Sandhills look beat higher scores artificially promulgated by fertilizer and irrigation. The template has been properly reinstituted, these Donald Ross treasures coming full circle to when the young man from Dornoch embraced the similarity of the Pinehurst ground to that of his homeland in Scotland. 

It’s a look of its own and one that prompted USGA President Mike Whan to remark in lengthening shadows of the 18th green Sunday evening at Pine Needles, “You feel like you’re at the home of golf in America.”

Treasure that and lock it down. PS

Lee Pace has written about the Pinehurst-area golf scene for more than 30 years, including authoring Sandhills Classics — The Stories of Mid Pines & Pine Needles. Write him at leepace7@gmail.com and follow him @LeePaceTweet.

Golftown Journal

Full Circle — Almost

Sometimes dreams have to wait

By Lee Pace

What a story it would have been — Rachel Kuehn, gestating in the womb of her mother, Brenda, as Brenda played the first two rounds of the 2001 U.S. Women’s Open at Pine Needles, growing up to become a crack golfer and qualifying herself for the 2022 return engagement of the Open at the same venue.

“I joked many times over the years to Rachel that she’s already ‘played’ in a U.S. Open,” Brenda says. “Maybe one day she’ll play in one on her own.”

Brenda and Rachel enjoyed one Sandhills golf déjà vu moment in 2020 when Rachel won the Women’s North & South Amateur at Pinehurst No. 2, a quarter-century after Brenda finished runner-up.

“I joke with my mom because she had a great finish years ago and has been holding that over my head,” Rachel said after the win. “I’m glad I could top her a little bit, but to add my name to the list of winners here is an unbelievable feeling.”

Sadly, adding to the legacy was not meant to be — at least not yet, and at least not this year at Pine Needles.

Playing in sectional qualifying at Shannopin Country Club in Pittsburgh on May 3-4, Rachel shot rounds of 74-70 for a 144 total and was tabbed second alternate for the 2022 championship, set June 2-5 at Pine Needles. A double bogey on the 13th hole in the first round and six putts that “were hard lip-outs,” in Brenda’s words, were her downfall. Though it’s not impossible, the odds of a second alternate slipping into the field are long.

Still, it’s a remarkable and evolving story of the Kuehn family of Asheville, a prominent and popular family at Biltmore Forest Country Club — dad Eric, a radiation oncologist; mom Brenda, a former Wake Forest University golfer and accomplished mid-amateur golfer; son Corrie, a former varsity golfer at Rhodes College in Memphis; Rachel, who’s just finished her junior year at Wake Forest; and son Taylor, a rising senior at Christ School in Asheville who’s committed to play golf at Samford University. 

“We’re a competitive family,” Brenda says. “Corrie was maybe 2, 3 years old and he was shooting baskets on a little goal in our living room. If he made it, I went, ‘Yay!’ If he missed it, I went, ‘Boooo.’ One day a friend was over with her little boy. She was horrified. She said, ‘You’re booing your child?’ I said, ‘Of course, it was a bad shot. How else are you going to differentiate good and bad?’”

Adds Rachel, “There’s a hole in the wall next to our ping-pong table. All I’ll say is, I didn’t put it there.”

Brenda Kuehn developed her love of sports and competition playing golf and tennis in her native Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. She particularly loved golf as her father, Jack, was a Dominican Sports Hall of Fame member and an avid golfer.

“My most precious memories with my dad were walking nine holes of golf at 5 o’clock, walking and talking, the talking more important than the golf,” she says. “I cherish those moments and the lessons I took from them.”

Brenda wanted to attend college in the United States, but the Northeast was too cold and Florida felt too much like her homeland. So she targeted the Carolinas and the smaller, private universities, and investigated Duke and Wake Forest. She fell in love with Wake Forest immediately, entered in 1983 and, as a senior in 1986, won two individual titles, was medalist in the ACC Women’s Golf Championship, and made first-team All-America. She had no grand designs on playing professional golf, but Wake Forest men’s team members and friends like Billy Andrade, Len Mattice and Jerry Haas encouraged her to give it a shot.

“I came close — I made it twice to final round of Q-school,” Brenda says. “I played the Futures Tour for two years, but I didn’t enjoy it. Playing for money changed it for me. There wasn’t the kind of camaraderie I’d known and enjoyed. Travel was hard. I was lugging one suitcase and a golf bag around and staying in stinky motels. It wasn’t the life for me.”

She then married college sweetheart Eric, and after he finished med school in 1995, they settled in Asheville. Brenda regained her amateur status and had a whirlwind decade playing amateur golf, with nine U.S. Women’s Open appearances and two Curtis Cup berths in 1996 and ’98. Corrie was 4 years old and Brenda was eight months pregnant with Rachel when the Women’s Open was held at Pine Needles May 31-June 3, 2001.

She played 36 holes with sore feet and hips, and at least twice she hit a drive and doubled over in pain from a contraction. Her hip action was limited by the size of the child she was carrying, “so it was pretty much an arms-only swing,” she says. No wonder she posted rounds of 79 and 84 to miss the cut. But the pregnant lady was great media fodder. Brenda was featured on ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings and interviewed by Katie Couric on The Today Show. She occasionally runs across photos from those two rounds, with Eric caddying.

“Why I wore horizontal stripes when I was so pregnant, I have no idea,” she says today. “I was wearing Eric’s size-XX shirts. I looked like a balloon. I look back and say, ‘Oh my God.’ I was so big. I cringed later when I saw a picture of me using my stomach as a table to write my score on the scorecard.”

But she had fun with it all and brought a jovial sense of humor to post-round interview sessions.

“I’m trying to save as many clips as I can to put in the baby book,” she said. “It will be a great thing for the baby to see what happened when it was moving around in here.”

Rachel was born one week after Karrie Webb was crowned Open champion and is certainly putting her own scrapbook together through her high school career and three years at Wake Forest. Biltmore Forest CC head pro Jon Rector cites times he’s started a round of golf with Rachel on the practice green and, four hours later when he’s coming up 18, she’s still there.

“She is the most intense, disciplined golfer I have ever seen,” Rector says. “She’s a sweet spirit liked by everyone. But she’s a fierce competitor and is out to shred you on the golf course.”

Just as Brenda treasured her twilights playing golf with her father, the Kuehns played together on the 1922 Donald Ross-designed course at Biltmore Forest. 

“I remember our family playing as a fivesome,” Rachel says. “I remember the Monday shootouts, walking nine holes late in the day. It was such a special place to grow up and have your first memories of golf.”

Brenda won the 1998 and 2001 Carolinas Women’s Amateur, and Rachel added her name to the trophy in 2017. Rachel won the first college tournament she participated in (the ANNIKA Intercollegiate) and, as a junior in 2021-22, she scorched the UNC Finley Golf Course with a women’s course-record 63 in winning the individual title of the Ruth’s Chris Tar Heel Invitational.

The highlight so far was last summer’s trip to Wales to participate in the Curtis Cup. Rachel was certainly well-versed in the event’s prestige. Brenda secured the clinching point in the 1998 matches at The Minikahda Club in Minnesota.

“It was the 17th hole and I had a left-to-right 4-footer,” Brenda says. “I didn’t want to hit it, but I knew I didn’t want to play the 18th hole. I’ve shared my entire Curtis Cup experience with her since she was young. Rachel definitely ‘got it’ when she was named to the team. You have arrived in golf if you make the Curtis Cup.”

Rachel lost her match in opening-day foursomes with partner Emilia Migliaccio. But then that pair won on Friday and Rachel partnered with Jen Castle to win a Friday four-ball match. Rachel won 2-up in her singles match against Louise Duncan, and her point proved the clincher in the Americans collecting a 12 1/2 – 7 1/2 victory.

“The Curtis Cup was everything I was told it would be and more,” Rachel says. “It was weird traveling with COVID. Our team was kind of in its own bubble over there. But to represent the United States, I can’t think of any greater honor.”

While Rachel might not be playing in her second Open at Pine Needles this time, there will certainly be more opportunities — for the Kuehns and the Women’s Open. PS

Lee Pace has written about golf in the Sandhills since the late 1980s and has covered three U.S. Women’s Opens at Pine Needles—1996, 2001 and 2007.