Golftown Journal

Splendid Isolation

Finding time to find the game

By Lee Pace

Long before COVID-, social distancing, tissue-hoarding and obsessive hand-washing gripped our very existences across America and beyond, I enjoyed a week of a self-imposed quarantine, specifically, the Thomas Wolfe Room at the Weymouth Center in Southern Pines.

In June 2019 I was fortunate enough to secure a week’s stay at the Weymouth Writers-In-Residence program, which has been running since 1979, when Sam Ragan, the center’s director, conceived the program. Given that Weymouth was once owned by novelist James Boyd, Ragan thought the rambling old mansion would be an ideal venue for North Carolina writers to hole up and work on their novels, poems, short stories, screenplays, what have you.

There should be muse in abundance amid these rooms and acres “where sparks of creativity could be struck,” in the words of Katharine Boyd, James’ wife.

After all, in this house Boyd conceived and wrote his acclaimed and best-selling book, Drums, a Revolutionary War saga published in 1925, and others like Marching On. Curiously, he didn’t type them or scribble them by longhand; he dictated them at a stand-up desk in a study that now serves as the N.C. Literary Hall of Fame room. And on this sprawling estate he and Katharine entertained literary giants like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Paul Green and Wolfe, who came for three days in January 1937. 

I had two golf books going at the time, so what better venue to percolate my thoughts? Five miles to the west was the first tee of Pinehurst No. 2, Donald Ross’ tour de force that has hosted three U.S. Opens, one Ryder Cup and a PGA Championship. One mile to the south was Southern Pines Golf Club, another Ross design with more than a century of history. Within a half-hour radius were nearly three dozen courses, from upscale private clubs designed by Tom Fazio at Forest Creek to idiosyncratic daily-fee designs like Mike Strantz’s Tobacco Road.

And just out my window was the land where over a century ago a nine-hole course called Weymouth Woods had been laid out.

“One of the finest private golf courses to be found in the state — perhaps the South,” it was described in 1910. “It is conveniently and beautifully located, a little east of the house, has a good turf and is as handsome as a framed picture.”

James Boyd was a noted Pennsylvania industrialist who bought the land in the early 1900s and created a 1,200-acre estate, naming it Weymouth in tribute to the seaside village in England. He commissioned the construction of the golf course (details on builder, designer and time frame are sketchy), but it eventually took second fiddle in town to Southern Pines GC, which was formed in 1906. In time the property passed to Boyd’s grandsons, Jackson and James, and James in the 1920s retreated to Weymouth and expanded the original home into the grand manor house that exists today.

The latter James Boyd was not a golfer, preferring equestrian and hunting sports, and founding Moore County Hounds, which exists today. He let the course go to seed.

“Golf is merely the most expensive and depressing form of pedestrianism,” Boyd wrote. “I know of no other practice, except the purchase and consumption of bad liquor, wherein good money can be spent for so pitiable a result.”

I beg to disagree, certainly, and spent my week at Weymouth reveling in the game to varying degrees, from spending the days with my fingers splayed across my laptop keyboard, and early mornings and evenings wrapped in this convergence of history, ambience and the spirit of golf. I brought plenty of reading material as well as a curious strap to work on keeping my arms and elbows connected should I hit some practice shots.

Early one morning I ventured down to Southern Pines GC with the idea of playing a quick nine before hitting the grind. I schlepped my bag on my shoulder and took off on the course completed by Ross in 1923, then remembered that the ninth hole doesn’t return to the clubhouse, a sure sign that the routing’s as pure as the land and architect’s eye would allow. No telling how many bad holes have been forced the last century by the purely American contrivance of returning the front nine back to the clubhouse.

It’s a brisk walk, the numerous inclines in the ground challenging my stamina, but the short distances from greens to tees of the vintage course giving some energy back. My game is properly tasked — trying to nail a draw on the par-5 fifth hole for extra carry, for example, and dial in short irons on the par-4 eighth and 10th. Nearly every green requires precision to imagine and execute a recovery if you’re off to the sides. The lake serving as anchor on the eighth through the 11th hole glistens in the early morning light.

At twilight several evenings I took a couple of golf clubs and balls out to the acreage where the golf course once existed, trying to imagine where the holes might have run, being mindful to hit away from the dog-walkers. Ah, that notch in the trees in the distance — what a nice spot for a putting green. Maybe a century ago that patch was covered with sand and clay before they learned to grow grass greens in the South.

And late into the evening I tucked into my copy of Michael Murphy’s 1972 cult classic, Golf in the Kingdom. The thesis of one of my writing projects was that golf is a game best played and enjoyed by walking, and though I’ve read the book a couple of times before, I wanted to re-read it with an eye toward catching snippets that might support my view.

I found this rant by Dr. Julian Laing, the town doctor in the fictional Scottish village of Burningbush: “For every theory ye propose about the improvement o’ the game, I’ll show ye how the game is fadin’ away, losin’ its old charm, becomin’ mechanized by the Americans and the rest o’ the world that blindly follows them . . .  I see the distorted swings, the hurried rounds, and now the electric carts tha ruin the courses and rob us of our exercise.”

And I uncovered these morsels from Shivas Irons talking about Seamus McDuff, the mythical figure lurking in the shadows along the Burningbush golf course. 

“Ye’re makin’ a great mistake if ye think the gemme is meant for the shots. The gemme is meant for walkin’.”

And, “‘Twas said tha he sometimes forgot his shots, the walkin’ got to be so good. Had to be reminded by his caddy to hit the ball.”

And finally, “If ye can enjoy the walkin’, ye can probably enjoy the other times in yer life when ye’re in between. And that’s most o’ the time; wouldn’t ye say?”

It was near midnight one evening when I turned off the lights in one of the upstairs rooms at the front of the house and made my way back to my bedroom, taking care that the old floorboards didn’t creak and disturb my fellow residents.

It was quite a splendid week, a couple of lunch appointments and evening rounds of golf with old friends, but it was mostly seven days of writing golf, reading golf and thinking golf. No news, limited outside engagement. Very quaint, indeed.

I was looking forward to returning to Weymouth in May, but sadly, the program has been suspended in the wake of the virus lockdown.

We’re certainly between shots at the moment.  PS

Chapel Hill-based writer Lee Pace has written the histories of Pinehurst Resort, Mid Pines and Pine Needles, and has authored a centennial book for the Carolinas Golf Association.

Golftown Journal

Out of the Box

A new teacher, and concept, in town

By Lee Pace

Jim Nelford grew up in Vancouver in the 1960s and, as the youngest of four kids, developed a keen competitive spirit and an abiding love for all sports. He played baseball, hockey and basketball among them. He learned golf on summer visits to an uncle’s cabin, where the family had access to a rudimentary course with sand greens. “I loved to cross-train,” he says. “I loved to play basketball, I loved to play hockey, skiing, anything that was fun. One of my goals growing up was certainly to be a professional athlete, but if that ended, I wanted to own a sporting goods store. I could be around games and the coolest equipment all day, every day.”

Which is why this former PGA Tour golfer and golf instructor, today ensconced at Mid Pines Inn and Golf Club in Southern Pines, brings a different approach to playing and teaching the game. A lesson with Nelford will be built around references to key motions in other sports — throwing a football, shooting a basketball, hitting and pitching a baseball, executing a slap shot in hockey. The bedrock fundamental will not be making a full turn or releasing the club through impact or keeping a still head. 

It will be about using the lower body. 

“Golf Digest once said, ‘Jim Nelford, pound-for-pound, is the longest hitter on the PGA Tour,’” says Nelford, who turns 65 in June. “They first started testing how fast you could swing a golf club in the early ’80s. We were at the Buick Open and just hitting balls into a net. My average speed was 116, 117, which is what Justin Thomas is today. They said, ‘Can you swing faster?’ I said, ‘Of course I can, that was just my Tour swing, get it in the fairway.’ So I hit 123. They said, ‘The fastest we have is Jim Dent. He’s 123 also.’

“I was 5-9 and 155 pounds. As a smaller guy, I had to use my body better. I had to be more athletically inclined and use my whole body to be able to get it up with the big guys. And I was able to do that.”

Nelford played golf at Brigham Young University and in his senior year made All-American, won two Canadian Amateurs in 1975-76 and the Western Amateur in 1977. He earned his Tour card and began hitting the Monday qualifying circuit in 1978. By 1982, he was making cuts consistently and in 1984 was tagged by Golf Digest as a “guy to look out for.” His best money-winning year was 1983, when he won $110,000 and had three top-10 finishes.

Nelford was on the cusp of his first Tour win at the Bing Crosby Pro-Am at Pebble Beach in 1984 and in the clubhouse with a one-shot lead over Hale Irwin. Irwin came to the tee of the par-5 18th and yanked his drive to the left, over the Carmel Bay coastline, rocks and sand. He flailed his arms in horror. 

But the ball miraculously hit a rock and bounced into the fairway. Irwin birdied the hole to tie Nelford and won a playoff on the second hole.

“That shaped Jim Nelford’s whole life,” said Ben Wright, a CBS golf commentator of that era. “If he had gone on to win a tournament he flatly deserved to win, his whole career might have taken off.”

A more critical juncture in Nelford’s life followed one afternoon in September 1985 when a freak boating accident while water-skiing on a lake outside Scottsdale ripped his right arm to shreds. Doctors considered amputating the arm. They told him he’d never play golf again. But Nelford and his parents implored the doctors to put his arm back together and give him the chance at a full recovery.

Nelford told his friend Lorne Rubinstein, the Toronto-based sportswriter, “There hasn’t been a Ben Hogan story recently.”

Nelford made his way back to the Tour, essentially playing “with half a right arm,” and by 1988 had made 16 more cuts to reach the Tour-mandated 150 to secure his pension. But his days competing at the highest level were essentially over.

In the ensuing three decades, Nelford has worked in broadcasting — even getting a brief gig with CBS on Masters telecasts — but his niche and passion today is teaching the golf swing. And his approach to teaching is built around the tenets he learned playing all sports as a kid.

“What do you do in other sports and what is similar — is there a similar move in every sport?” Nelford says. “I didn’t swing it the way everyone else did, and I knew that. But there was no teaching on that side of it, of the athletic side of the game. It was basically square lines golf, which I call ‘golf in a box.’”

Nelford and his fiancée, Paula Allen, had been living in Florida when he reconnected with former BYU teammate and tour traveling companion Pat McGowan, the son-in-law of the late Peggy Kirk Bell and a longtime instructor at Pine Needles. Nelford worked with McGowan’s son Michael and helped him shore up his ball-striking enough to finish 13th in the Latin America Tour Q-School and shoot 64-65 en route to a tie for second in an early 2020 Golden State Tour event. Nelford has relocated to the Sandhills and is working to establish a teaching practice at Mid Pines. 

“It’s stunning how well Michael’s hitting it,” Pat said in late February. “What Jim has brought to his game is so refreshing. I thought Michael needed a fresh set of eyes. He is now bombing it with effortless power and a controlled trajectory.

“I think Jim’s on to something with his approach. He’s seen about 25 people and helped all 25.”

Nelford has a sharp intellect and a deep reservoir of stories and comparisons to great golfers and athletes across all sports. He might talk of Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson learning to connect on the deep ball by perfecting his footwork. He’ll cite Rod Carew as a great singles hitter but a lousy power hitter because he didn’t use his lower body well. He’ll draw on an adult golfer’s memories of playing American Legion baseball and how the lower body and instinctive rocking motion are paramount to making solid contact at the plate.

“Shoot a basketball? You’d better use your legs,” Nelford says. “Does a pitcher sway? Of course he does. Does a hockey player move? Of course he does. Nobody’s trying to keep their head steady. Your engine is always your lower body, and it’s dynamic. We do move it because we need momentum. It’s why a pitcher goes back and forth, they have momentum.”

Exhibit A in golf is Jack Nicklaus, who in his prime would gird up over a shot with his lower body while letting his arms hang loose.

“Jack comes in with soft hands and arms, which obviously means he’s not fighting where the club is going,” Nelford says. “He’s letting it go. Where is he operating from? That big ass and legs, and he loads them up. That left heel comes off the ground, and he fires his legs hard. We do that in every sport.”

Nelford rails against standard teaching protocol built on perfect alignment and bromides like “turning in a barrel.” He’ll cite elite golfers who tell him they’ve gone an entire career with no one teaching them to use their legs. He’s evangelical talking about the need for innovation in golf instruction, and how the “glacial pace of learning the game” restricts its growth. Don’t bother with parallel alignment sticks on the tee with Nelford; his ideal stance is slightly closed to the target line to allow more room to turn off the ball. He emphasizes rotation of the hips, not of the shoulders.

“Focus on the lower body, and the upper body will go where it needs to,” he says. 

It adds up to being an athlete, not just being a golfer. Nelford knows of what he speaks from six-plus decades of doing both: “I am giving you permission to get out of the box, permission to act like an athlete.”  PS

Lee Pace hit a two-run, last-inning double in Little League but it was downhill from there. He hopes to reclaim his limited athleticism on the golf course soon. Meanwhile, contact Jim Nelford at jimnelfordgolf@gmail.com to learn more of his approach.

Golftown Journal

Whip It

Discovering tempo at the end of a stick

By Lee Pace

Jim Hackenburg punches a few keys into his cellphone and waits for a video clip on YouTube to pop up. Seconds later, he’s showing John Candy in the movie The Blues Brothers sitting down in a bar with two prison guards and ordering drinks. He points at his two companions and asks: “Orange Whip? Orange Whip?” Then he looks at the waiter: “Three Orange Whips.”

Hackenburg smiles.

“That very instant, I knew I had the name,” he says. “Orange is a vibrant color. There was a whipping motion to the device. It was perfect.”

That was in 2007, when Hackenberg, a former collegiate golfer, mini-tour player, PGA Tour caddie and at the time a club pro and swing coach, was trying to generate some momentum for a new golf training aid he was launching — a rubber ball on the end of a flexible shaft that was designed to help golfers feel the proper motion, sequence and tempo of the golf swing.

Hackenberg looks around him at the massive PGA Merchandise Show in Orlando in late January 2020 and reflects back to the beginning.

“My first show 12 years ago, it was just me in a 5- by 10-foot booth, 10 hours a day for three straight days,” he says. “It was tough.”

A dozen years later, the Easley, South Carolina-based company brought a dozen people to Orlando and rented six times the exhibit space over his initial foray into the trade show business. The Golf Channel dropped by and did a spot with anchor personality Kira Dixon demonstrating an Orange Whip device. And in addition to peddling and promoting the original Orange Whip trainer and knock-offs developed for putting and wedge play, Hackenberg has partnered with golf fitness specialist Brian Newman of Elk River Club in Banner Elk, North Carolina, on a new product line and streaming training service for golf fitness. There is a shorter, heavier version of the Orange Whip called the LightSpeed, designed for “speed training”; and a series of resistance bands and a concave hitting platform that addresses the basic swing skills of posture, rotation, weight shift and balance and swing plane.

“The Orange Whip has always been about tempo and feel with a small physical component to it,” Hackenberg says. “But I never really had a fitness program. There are certain parts of the swing that can’t be taught unless you have flexibility, balance and mobility. Brian has brought those puzzle pieces to complete the Orange Whip.”

Hackenberg grew up in North Dakota, played college golf at Arizona State and Oregon State, and by the 2003-05 era was spending his winters and springs caddying on the PGA Tour and his summers teaching at a club on Martha’s Vineyard. The contrasts struck him between the fluid, athletic swings of players like Geoff Ogilvy and Ernie Els, and the lunging and jabbing motions of many middle-aged club golfers.

“I was attracted to the pros’ balance and rhythm,” says Hackenberg, a PGA Class A pro since 2003. “These guys made it look almost too easy, like they can do it in their sleep. Their motion was so effortless. It was like they’d been holding the club their whole life.

“Then I’d be giving a lesson, and people were so tense and their only goal was to hit the ball, and when you try to hit at something it’s much different than swinging through it. I had a difficult time conveying that message. I couldn’t get them to feel the motion that came so naturally to the tour guys. I got tired of watching people chop at the ball.”

It occurred to Hackenberg that the proper visual was to swing a ball on the end of a rope or a chain. Any motion at all herky-jerky was doomed to failure.

“The concept that slowly evolved to me was that the golf club was no longer a golf club, but it was a ball on the end of a chain,” he says. “If you hold that chain and move the ball slowly back and forth on the end of the chain, your hands and arms and body would develop a more fluid motion, an athletic motion.”

Hackenberg dusted off his club-making skills in 2006 and concocted a crude apparatus out of a fiberglass rod with a metal weight at the end.

“There was a lot of trial-and-error and trips to Home Depot,” he says. He soon refined it with an orange rubber ball at one end and a golf club grip at the other. The key element is a patented steel weight at the grip end that “counterbalances” the device and works in tandem with the ball at the opposite end to promote good rhythm. Hackenberg took the device to the lesson tee on Martha’s Vineyard and demonstrated the motion to a golfer named Burke Ross, and then put the device in Ross’ hands.

“Within five minutes, you could see the light bulb go off in his head,” Hackenberg says. “He wanted to buy my prototype. Sadly, it was the only one I had. He had to wait another month until I made another quality one. That was my ‘ah-ha’ moment that maybe I can start a business around this idea.”

Hackenberg figured that since the device helped one golfer, maybe it would work magic for others. Within two years the idea had morphed from his garage on Martha’s Vineyard to a manufacturing facility near Greenville, South Carolina. Hackenberg’s brother lived in Greenville, so he hoped that cheap labor from nieces and nephews might come in handy, but more important was the location — within a half-day’s drive from Greenville you can find a lot of golfers.

“I knew the job would involve going around in my Toyota 4Runner carrying Orange Whips as a traveling salesman,” he says. “Within a 300-mile radius of Greenville, there are a ton of golfers. I can get to the coast easily, up to Virginia, Georgia, north Florida, to Pinehurst. Greenville gave me good proximity to a lot of golfers.”

The company sold 4,000 Orange Whips in 2008, quadrupled that to 16,000 in 2010, and had more than doubled that by 2014 with 36,000 devices sold. That growth continued with more than 60,000 units sold in 2019. Orange Whip has moved twice into bigger manufacturing and fulfillment facilities and now has 16 full-time employees.

You can see the orange ball protruding from the bags of hundreds of touring pros if you count the PGA Tour, Champions Tour and LPGA Tour. Hackenberg remembers one early seminal moment when TV cameras showed Retief Goosen getting a ruling and multiple camera shots showing that orange orb protruding from his bag. Graeme McDowell is a big fan, and Greg Norman insisted on paying for his Orange Whip despite Hackenberg’s efforts to give him one, saying the Whip was the “best thing for timing and release” he’d ever seen.

Hackenberg also touts the Whip’s value in improving flexibility and strength, and serving as an anchor for off-season practice.

“I grew up in North Dakota and had to re-learn my golf swing every year,” he says. “If you swing this club regularly through the winter, this athletic motion will become second nature, and you’ll be in playing shape for spring.”

By sheer coincidence, Hackenberg was paired with Newman in a Carolinas PGA competition at Hilton Head in 2018. Newman is director of golf and fitness at Elk River, and over the course of 18 holes the two men found common ground with Newman’s ability to teach golf fitness and Hackenberg’s manufacturing and technology expertise.

Over the next 18 months, they developed an online workout/drill program, teaching pro certification and physical tools to help golfers develop their strength, flexibility, balance and swing skills. They were heartened at the PGA Show not only from the response from rank-and-file attendees, but by the fact some of the top instructors in golf sought them out to see what they were doing.

“Golf fitness is now mainstream,” says Newman. “PGA Tour players look super-buffed. Guys today are pure athletes. They work really hard on their bodies, not only to hit the ball farther and swing harder, but for longevity and overall well-being.”

“I think this is going to be a big hit,” Hackenberg says. “It’s the next step in the evolution of the Orange Whip. And to think, this all came about because I was tired of watching people chop at the ball and was desperate to find a way to help them.”  PS

PineStraw golf columnist Lee Pace acknowledged having to move up a set of tees in the October 2014 issue (“Travails of a Short-Knocker”) and welcomes any life preserver from The Orange Whip.

 

Golftown Journal

Sixty-Eight and Counting

Age just a number for Carolinas Hall of Famer

By Lee Pace

Thirty years ago, Paul Simson showed up at the Carolinas Mid-Amateur Championship at Yeamans Hall outside Charleston and realized he forgot to pack his putter before the drive down from his home in Raleigh. He was lamenting that fact in the parking lot when fellow competitor Vic Long said he had an extra Ping Zing putter that Simson could use.

“I shot a career round — a 62 with two eagles and a hole-in-one,” Simson says. “Obviously I asked Vic if I could keep the putter. I gave him a couple dozen balls and we called it square. If a putter feels good and you win with it, how am I going to change?”

Today that putter sits in the Zan Law Hall of History at the Carolinas Golf Association headquarters in Southern Pines, the club having drained scores of birdies and eagles as Simson stormed his way through dozens of amateur golf titles on statewide, regional, national and international levels. Simson retired the club in 2012 in favor of a newer version of the same putter — updated design, tweaked with improved balance and metallurgy qualities.

And the newer Ping Zing Redwood performs quite well, thank you.

“My game is still competitive,” says the 68-year-old Simson. “I’ve had a handful of high finishes and am very competitive 13 years into senior golf with the guys just turning 55. I’m fairly pleased with the state of affairs.”

On the cusp of 2020, Simson has his schedule mapped for a full slate of regional events as well as the British Senior Amateur at Royal Cinque Ports on the Southeast coast of England, the U.S. Senior Am at the Country Club of Detroit, and the Canadian Senior Am at Pleasant Glen Golf Resort outside Vancouver. This year’s N.C. Senior Four-Ball will be contested at Mid Pines in August.

“Some of the travel logistics will be challenging,” he says. “But I’m looking forward to another year. I had some successes in 2019 but some disappointments as well. I look back on 2019 with mixed emotions.”

The highlight of 2019 was teaming with Don Detweiler, a fellow Raleigh resident and Northridge Country Club member, to win three CGA senior four-ball tournaments and give them nine team titles together. One of the victories was by 10 shots when they teamed for 63-62 scores in lapping the field in the Carolinas Super Senior Four-Ball in October at Mount Vintage Golf Club in North Augusta, South Carolina.

“We’ve really been able to shoot some spectacular numbers,” says Simson. “It’s kinda fun to get that far ahead and just cruise along and enjoy yourself. Don is such a good partner and such a good friend, and our partnership has been a very special part of my golf career.”

The burr in his saddle, though, was not winning an individual title and in fact shooting an uncharacteristic 77 in the final round of the Carolinas Super Senior at Green Valley Country Club in Greenville, South Carolina, in August. Simson led after the first round with a 65, but stumbled and allowed Russ Perry of Winston-Salem a window for a five-shot win.

“You would think after as many competitive situations I’ve been in over the years, I wouldn’t still have to work on patience,” Simson says. “But you know how golf is. Somehow it will get under your skin, and you become frustrated and try to force things. You can’t force a golf game. Frustration is what will compromise a good golf score. In two or three events, I made a few mistakes, and rather than focus harder on the upcoming holes, I focused too much on the mistakes I made. Once you hit a golf shot, there’s not a whole lot you can do about it.

“I’m just disappointed I have to keep learning the same axioms. Everyone knows you have to be patient, just like everyone knows that hard swings don’t produce good shots. But guess what — we swing hard all the time.”

Simson’s day job is vice president at Towne Insurance Agency in Raleigh, a career that gives him freedom to travel for lots of golf. He has played in 64 USGA competitions, including the 1998 U.S. Open at The Olympic Club in San Francisco, and 2020 will mark the 36th straight year he’s played in a USGA event. He has won two U.S. Senior Amateur titles (2010 and ’12) and three British Senior Ams. Simson is in the Carolinas Golf Hall of Fame and has collected 38 CGA titles — the most in history. Among his highlights in the Sandhills was winning back-to-back North & South Amateurs at Pinehurst No. 2 in 1995-96, and teaming with son Phillip to win three Carolinas Father-Son titles (2002 at Foxfire Golf & Country Club, 2013 at Seven Lakes Country Club and 2014 at Pinewild Country Club).

And to think — it all started with that Carolinas Mid-Am victory 30 years ago, followed by a breakout three-win summer in 1991.

Simson was fighting a nasty hook in June of 1991 when the N.C. Amateur was played at Alamance C.C. in Burlington. John Maginnes, a young player just out of East Carolina University, had his eyes on the pro tour, but before turning pro shot 65-65 in the first two rounds to take a seven-shot lead. One of his distant pursuers was Simson, who Maginnes says at the time was “some insurance salesman from Raleigh no one had ever heard of.”

Simson opened with a 73 at Alamance and was trying to find something that worked in his warm-up session the next morning.

“Paul, you’re taking the club back way inside.”

Simson looked up and saw friend and fellow competitor Mac McLendon of Lenior standing behind him.

“Really?” Simson responded.

The light bulb popped on.

“At the time we were still playing balata balls, so any imperfection in your swing made the ball really curve,” Simson says. “I was having a terrible time fighting the hook. Sure enough, I started taking the club back on a straight line and started hitting the nicest draw. That put me on plane.”

Simson shot a 65 that day but was still eight shots behind Maginnes at the halfway mark. But that swing tweak wasn’t a one-day wonder. He followed with another 65 on Saturday while Maginnes played well but hardly lights-out, posting a 70. Still, Simson was down by three entering the final round.

A theme emerged that weekend that would wreak havoc in the Carolinas golf community for years to come: working man with a few less hairs and a couple extra belt notches vs. 20-something with a limber back and unlimited hours to play golf. Simson shot a 69 on Sunday and Maginnes a 73, with Simson making a clutch 8-footer to save par on the last hole and win the title by one stroke.

“So Paul Simson wins his first-ever championship in the state of North Carolina and now has set so many records they’ll never be broken — never be broken,” marvels Maginnes, who did play the pro tour but now is a full-time golf broadcaster.

“That was a real thrill,” Simson says. “I went from relative anonymity to being on the front pages in the golf community. That win gave me a little momentum. I had finished second in 10 or 12 CGA events before winning in 1990. I knew then I could win. Winning the State Am the next near kind of opened the floodgates.”

Indeed, Simson followed the victory in Burlington with championships in the Carolinas Am at Pinewild C. C. in Pinehurst in July and then in the Carolinas Mid-Am at Treyburn C. C. in Durham in October. He beat Kelly Mitchum 3 and 1 for the Carolinas Am title, and nudged Larry Boswell by three shots in the Mid-Am.

“Ninety-one was a very good year,” Simson says. “I have very fond memories. That year really propelled me into a situation where I could step up my game and compete on more of a national level.”

For three decades in the Carolinas, Simson’s trademarks have been a straw fedora, an arsenal of greenside recovery tricks, and an easygoing demeanor effectively countered with an intense zeal to win.

“I think as you get older, you mellow out a bit,” Simson says. “I just love to play, and I love the competition. I get a charge particularly out of playing the college kids I don’t know that well. You beat some of these guys and they say, ‘How’d he beat me? He’s not as good as I am.’

“But in the end, this is a game you play for fun. It’s a lot easier to play for fun than to take it so seriously you make yourself miserable.”  PS

Chapel Hill-based writer Lee Pace has written about great golfers of the Sandhills and Carolinas for more than three decades. Write him at leepace7@gmail.com and follow him at @LeePaceTweet.

Golftown Journal

The Boss

The wit and wisdom of Claude Harmon

By Lee Pace

Every morning in the late 1970s at Winged Foot Golf Club, Lex Alexander had three jobs: Make the toast, pour the coffee, and sit down with Claude Harmon and review Harmon’s lesson schedule for the day. From there, who knows?

Alexander, the young assistant professional, was ready for anything tagging along with the 1948 Masters champion and renowned head pro at the venerable club in Mamaroneck, New York. He would certainly be entertained, educated and regaled with insights and stories from Harmon’s lively career in golf. He’d do some physical labor, e.g., teeing balls up for the older members as Harmon tried to eke out a hair more clubhead release through their impact position. To be Harmon’s right-hand man at one of America’s finest clubs was high cotton for a boy from Charlotte.

“For four years, I had the best job in golf,” Alexander says. “You hung around ‘The Boss’ and listened to him tell stories, you watched him teach, you gave your own lessons and then you played or practiced. You got to play a lot of golf. He wanted you to be a good player. He said, ‘Don’t be going out there and shooting 78.’ He said, ‘You don’t have to answer the phone and sell gloves. I can hire other people to do that.’

“He was such a character. Boy, was he funny.”

Harmon was just 33 years old and working at Winged Foot when he won the Masters, beating Cary Middlecoff by five shots. The club pro business was better suited to Harmon during that era given he would have six children (with sons Butch, Craig, Claude II and Billy following him into the golf business), and there was meager money on the pro tour. So he served more than three decades at Winged Foot with winters spent at Seminole Golf Club in Palm Beach, Florida, and later at Thunderbird Country Club in Palm Springs, California.

Alexander fell into Harmon’s sphere of orbit in 1975 at the suggestion of John Buczek, a fellow Wake Forest University golfer who had worked at Winged Foot, and Davis Love Jr., who’d taught Alexander the game at Charlotte Country Club in the 1960s and was friends with Harmon. Lex played golf at Wake Forest in the early 1970s on teams that featured Lanny Wadkins, Curtis Strange, Jim Simons and Eddie Pearce, among others. He caddied on the PGA Tour for a couple of seasons out of college, then decided to test the golf instruction waters at Love’s suggestion.

Looking back four decades later, Alexander chafes that Harmon didn’t get the recognition and respect that Alexander feels he deserved. Harmon gave lessons to presidents Kennedy, Nixon and Ford, and the Moroccan king, Hassan II. He nurtured an impressive list of young pros like Mike Souchak, Dave Marr, Rod Funseth, Dick Mayer and Jackie Burke, in addition to his own sons.

“I would submit that Claude Harmon was a golfing genius,” says Alexander, who lives in Durham and is a regular at Duke University Golf Club. “Every lesson was awe-inspiring. His eyes were blue with a definite twinkle. With each shot, his eyes would dart from the set-up to the club as it swung back, then he took a mental photograph of the clubface position at the top. He had a keen sense of sound as well and would listen intently for clues when club impacted ball. Then he would pick up the flight of the ball and watch until it fell to the ground. He always said, ‘Lex, watch the ball. The ball doesn’t lie.’”

Harmon was famous for executing and teaching bunker shots and was pictured on the cover of Golf Digest in 1972 saying, “Get Out of Sand With One Hand!” 

“The Boss would do a clinic or an outing of some kind,” Alexander says. “He would say, ‘OK, here’s the deal! I’m going to explain the fundamentals of playing a bunker shot, then I’m going to hit a few, but once I make my first one, we are out of here!’

“I remember there was one night that he made the first shot, and, true to his word, he climbed out of the bunker and bid the crowd farewell.”

Harmon once had Alexander break a branch of about 4 feet in length from a nearby hedge and then swing the branch as if he were swinging a golf club. Harmon watched and turned to his pupil.

“Do you hear that noise?” Harmon asked, then gave the branch to the golfer and implored him to swing the branch and “Let me hear some noise!” Soon enough, the older fellow was cracking pure 5-iron shots.

“As we rode back to the clubhouse, the Boss said to me, ‘I hope you learned something here this morning because you just witnessed a miracle,’” Alexander says.

On more than one occasion Alexander can remember Harmon taking umbrage when a member told him he was flying to Florida and taking a lesson from Bob Toski, another prominent teacher of the era. After one such trip, Harmon queried the man about his session with Toski.

“What did Mr. Toski teach you?” Claude asked.

“He strengthened my left-hand grip,” the member answered.

Harmon didn’t flinch. “Did he teach you how to chip out of the woods?”

Harmon thumbed his nose at much of the convention in the golf instruction business. Among his pet peeves were articles and advice telling golfers to “Take it back low and slow” or “You need to slow your swing down.” He also took no truck in instructors who couldn’t play a lick themselves.

“The Boss used to say, ‘Teachers who never had any success playing, why would you listen to them? If they knew what they were talking about, they would make themselves a good player,’” Alexander says.

The rotund Harmon loved to eat and was at his best holding court at the dinner table with a cocktail and big piece of meat. Alexander laughs at a standard line when Harmon perused the menu in a new restaurant.

“Let’s get one thing straight,” he would tell the waiter. “I don’t want anything swimming or flying. Four legs on the ground for me.”

Harmon loved pork chops and eggs for breakfast and hated turkey at Thanksgiving. “If those Pilgrims had a taste of a nice rib eye, we wouldn’t have to eat this dry turkey every Thanksgiving,” Harmon said every November.

Overweight and ridden with high cholesterol, Harmon spent time in a cardiac program at a Houston clinic near where son Dickie lived and worked at River Oaks Country Club. Miserable at being starved and fed healthy food, Harmon one day paid a window washer $100 to bring him a meatball sub.

“It took him two hours to remove all the evidence,” Alexander says. “He had sauce all over his face and gown. He told the guy, ‘I don’t know where you’re washing windows tomorrow, but there is another $100 where that came from!’”

Harmon didn’t suffer fools well, and one of Alexander’s favorite stories involves a member at River Oaks who was struggling with his bunker play and came to Dick Harmon for help. Dick hit a wall in helping the guy and brought his dad in for a consultation. The Boss worked with the man for half an hour, then told him to adjust his hands on the club. 

“Pro, you want me to change my grip?” the man exclaimed. “I just won a toon-a-mint in Abilene! I can’t change my grip.”

The Boss said, “Dickie, what’s the soup in the grill room today? I’m all done!”

Alexander left the golf business when Harmon exited Winged Foot in 1979, and he his wife, Ann, moved to Durham, where they opened a health food store and later sold it to a burgeoning young company out of Austin, Texas, called Whole Foods. He stayed on as a consultant for many years with the flexibility to pursue interests in classical music, art, wine, gourmet cooking and playing golf with the guys at Duke and his summer club in the mountains, Blowing Rock Country Club.

The guys in Lex Alexander’s gang have had a steady diet of Claude Harmon stories for many years.  PS

Longtime PineStraw golf columnist Lee Pace remembers Lex Alexander’s rhythmic and flowing golf swing from covering the Durham Amateur in the early 1980s for the Durham Morning Herald.

Golftown Journal

Payne’s Last Stand

A look back at Stewart and the ’99 U.S. Open

By Lee Pace

In 2004, I wrote just under 10,000 words on Payne Stewart’s triumph in the 1999 U.S. Open at Pinehurst for one of the foundation chapters in a book commissioned by Pinehurst Resort titled The Spirit of Pinehurst.

I told the story of his evolution as an individual over the decade of the 1990s before that fateful 1999, with his emotional triumph in June and tragic death in a plane crash in October. Stewart morphed from a man who snickered at one vanquished opponent early in his career but had the grace after beating Phil Mickelson at Pinehurst to congratulate Mickelson on the impending birth of his first child.

The chapter chronicled his equipment overhaul beginning in 1998 and how his new clubs and his right-brained constitution were an ideal mesh of feel and style on a golf course dialed in for players who were artists and not scientists. 

It detailed how missing the cut in Memphis the week before the Open allowed Stewart to arrive in Pinehurst early, put in four focused and productive practice days, and be honed to a razor’s edge when the championship began. 

How landing in a sand-filled divot was part of his downfall at the 1998 Open at Olympic but how he’d learned to hit out of them a year later — and did so with aplomb in that final round, most notably on his third shot on the fourth hole, when he surgically picked a wedge shot out of a pit and safely onto the green. 

How he connected with the townsfolk around Pinehurst, joked with them in the grocery store, dined at the Pine Crest Inn and had a heartfelt reunion with former instructor Harvie Ward before the final round. 

And how his impromptu scissor job on a long-sleeve rain jacket on a misty and drizzly Sunday ignited a fashion trend.

Thus I wondered what I might glean from reading Kevin Robbins’ book The Last Stand of Payne Stewart — The Year that Golf Changed Forever. The book was released in October, two decades after Stewart was killed when the plane he was taking from Orlando to Dallas malfunctioned and sent six people to their death. 

The answer was, quite a lot.

Robbins does an excellent job chronicling Stewart’s upbringing in Missouri in the 1960s and early ’70s and how he developed his game under the tutelage of his father, Bill, and Sam Reynolds, the club professional at Hickory Hills Country Club in Springfield. Stewart was weaned on steel shafts, persimmon-wood heads, forged-blade irons and balls wound with rubber bands inside covers of balata rubber.

Stewart “churned a lot of dirt” as a youth and learned to develop “a sense of the shot through the soles of his shoes and a clear, crisp picture of the way he wanted the shot to look and feel off the club,” Robbins writes. “He learned to visualize shots before hitting them, to develop rhythm through his feet.”

The book traces how Stewart found his niche on the PGA Tour in the 1980s but became an outlier because of an attitude that could be “prickly, cocky, arrogant and brash,” as his sports psychologist described him in the early days. 

“He was a peacock, a Missouri showman, someone who wanted to be heard and noticed and remembered and admired,” writes Robbins, a longtime golf writer with the Austin Statesman-American. “He was loud in a sport that valued silence. He was cocksure in a game that promoted humility and modesty. He was too much for some of his peers who preferred less.”

The book traces in intricate detail Stewart’s maturation over the 1990s, when he struggled professionally and personally but began laying the groundwork for his Pinehurst triumph by challenging for the win the previous year at Olympic, then finally breaking a long victory drought at Pebble Beach in early 1999. 

“Payne went off into the wilderness in 1991,” Robbins says. “He was searching. When he emerged in 1998, he didn’t just talk like a different man, he showed people he was a different man.”

That point was poignantly made in September that year when Stewart conceded a putt and a victory to Colin Montgomerie on the final day of the Ryder Cup at Brookline after the United States’ victory had been assured. Robbins captures the night before in the U.S. team room when Stewart spoke movingly of the pain he’d felt since 1985 following the death of his father to cancer.

“Sitting nearby, O’Meara, Tom Lehman and Hal Sutton — the last of their generation preparing for their last singles Sunday of their Ryder Cup careers — were moved by Payne in a way they never had been before or even thought possible,” Robbins writes. 

That capsule sets the stage for what to me was the most interesting angle of the book — how 1999 was the unofficial passing of the torch with players like Stewart, Lehman, Sutton and O’Meara, all in their 40s, taking a back seat to a younger generation of players and a new frontier of technology. The new guys played with graphite and titanium shafts and the Titleist Pro V1 and spent their spare time pounding dumbbells rather than Michelobs.

“From a commercial standpoint, there was a lot to like about the state of golf in the summer of 1998,” Robbins writes. “The new balls were designed to make shots more predictable, especially in the wind. Graphite shafts and metal woods rendered long holes simpler to manage. The blocky, cavity-backed irons were less demanding of a perfect strike. Golf was getting easier for a greater number of people. But that welcome development robbed the ancient game of some of its art. Payne, Lehman, and their generation didn’t need technology to make shots. They made their own. They were the last true shot-makers of the millennium.”

Players like Mickelson, Tiger Woods and Sergio Garcia were playing a different game. Soon to follow were Bubba Watson, Rory McIlroy, Jordan Spieth, Dustin Johnson and, most recently, Brooks Koepka. 

“Golf came easier to the new guys because the game was easier,” Robbins says today. “This was the emergence of athletes on the golf course. They hit the ball a long way. They didn’t really care if the ball rolled into the rough. Everything was different — the equipment, the ball, the diet, fitness, the psychologists. There was a confluence of forces that came together in 1999.”

Not a day goes by at Pinehurst two decades later that a resort guest doesn’t have a photo taken while making the “Payne pose” alongside his statue beside the 18th green of No. 2. Stewart’s photos and his autograph are still displayed in the lobby of the Pine Crest Inn. The USGA used the occasion of the 2014 U.S. Open at Pinehurst to posthumously honor Stewart with the Bob Jones Award, and golfer Rickie Fowler was resplendent that week wearing plus-four trousers, Stewart’s trademark.

Some of those things, I’d forgotten. The year 2019 is a nice round milestone to reflect on 1999.

“The passage of time — in this case, 20 years — allows us to see that year and Stewart’s comeback in a sharper perspective,” says Robbins. “We didn’t know at the time how golf was shifting. The emergence of a 23-year-old Tiger Woods and players of his generation, who played the game with power and athleticism, essentially was making obsolete the kind of finesse game that Stewart and his generation played. I also was interested in portraying Stewart’s maturation — we might call it redemption — on a personal level. He was showing us something: his growth.”  PS

Chapel Hill-based writer Lee Pace has written about Payne Stewart and dozens of memorable golfers in Pinehurst over some three decades. Write him at leepace7@gmail.com.

Golftown Journal

Seventies Shooter

When the pros returned to No. 2

By Lee Pace

The decade of the ’70s was marked by oil shocks, stagflation, bell-bottoms, hot pants, flower prints, sideburns, disco music, geometric architecture, lava lamps and round multi-purpose sports stadiums. It was a decade of transition from the turbulent ’60s to a softer decade of the ’80s when the baby boomers moved into their peak earning years and the “Me Generation” emerged.

And the ’70s marked quite the era of transition for Pinehurst.

From 75 years of ownership by the Tufts family to a modern resort/residential developer named Diamondhead.

From closed during the summer to round-the-year operation with air-conditioning.

From a golf-only environment to one more inclusive of the family with a new tennis facility and lake/beach club.

The 1970s also marked the return of professional golf to Pinehurst after a two-decade hiatus, which seems hard to fathom given No. 2’s firm spot in the modern USGA rota of major championship sites. The North and South Open was an anchor on the pro golf tour from its inception in 1902 until it was discontinued by owner Richard Tufts in 1951 over a dispute with golfers over the tournament purse. Then, after Diamondhead bought the resort and country club on Dec. 31, 1970, company president Bill Maurer believed Pinehurst should be back on golf’s center stage.

“We’re always talking about Pinehurst being the golf capital of the world, so you could have the ‘World Championship’ at Pinehurst,” Maurer said.

He sold Joe Dey, commissioner of the Tournament Players Division of the PGA of America, on the idea of a “World Open” at Pinehurst — eight rounds over two weeks for the astronomical purse of half a million dollars and $100,000 to the winner. The dates were blocked for November 1973.

A field of 240 players, including a sizable international contingent, convened in Pinehurst Nov. 8-17 for the World Open, played on courses 2 and 4. Miller Barber collected the title and the hundred grand prize, totaling 570 over eight rounds to edge tour rookie Ben Crenshaw by three shots. The veteran and youngster were tied through 13 holes on the final day, but Barber birdied 14 and 18, and Crenshaw bogeyed 16 after a wild drive to provide the final chapter.

Pinehurst was back in the professional golf business and would be for exactly one decade. The finest golfers of the era would win at Pinehurst and place their stamps on the Pinehurst history scroll — Johnny Miller, Hale Irwin, Tom Watson and Raymond Floyd were among the victors on Pinehurst No. 2. Jack Nicklaus added to his North and South Amateur win in 1959 with a professional triumph in 1975. But it was also a star-crossed decade with a soft golf course played at bad times of the year, and events with shaky financial underpinnings throughout.

The 1974 World Open, contested Sept. 12-15, coincided with the opening of the new World Golf Hall of Fame, a $2.5 million structure built behind the fourth green and fifth tee of No. 2. President Gerald Ford presided over the ceremony to induct the 13 charter members of the Hall of Fame — eight of them living (Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, Byron Nelson, Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, Gene Sarazen, Patty Berg and Nicklaus); and five inducted posthumously (Bobby Jones, Walter Hagen, Francis Ouimet, Harry Vardon and Babe Zaharias).

The Hall of Fame was certainly a good idea, as the game of golf, for all of its rich history, had nothing along the lines of baseball’s Cooperstown or football’s Canton. Diamondhead funded the brainchild of Maurer, who was understandably sensitive to cynics who didn’t like the Hall of Fame funded by a company in the business of selling real estate and hotel rooms.

“Everybody else had a shot at doing it for 600 years, and nobody did,” Maurer said. “If somebody else wants to build another one, fine. But I like the score I’m in the clubhouse with.”

The 1974 tournament was a success, with warm weather, good galleries and Miller beating Nicklaus, Frank Beard and Bob Murphy in a playoff on the second extra hole. Miller laced a 3-wood second shot on the par-5 16th hole for a two-putt birdie and the victory.

“So I lost another golf tournament,” Nicklaus said, “but I never enjoyed playing a golf course more. Pinehurst No. 2 is fabulous. I learned about five things about design this week — on a course 50 years old.”

Tour dates in August and September the rest of the decade proved a wicked time to compete on a golf course that Donald Ross designed to run firm and fast. Course maintenance staff had to keep the greens, converted from Bermuda to bent in the summer of 1972, well-hydrated in the Southern heat and humidity; their softness allowed golfers to aim at flagsticks with abandon. For much of the 1970s, Diamondhead’s maintenance staff allowed the rough to grow thick around the putting surfaces, never understanding the concept of the Ross chipping areas.

“Get rid of the rough and return the greens to Bermuda, and I’ll put No. 2 back in my top five in the world,” Tom Watson said after winning in 1978.

Pinehurst officials did exactly that, but when Colgate departed as the headline sponsor following the 1979 tournament, financial problems suffocated the event. The Hall of Fame Classic lasted three more years but was gripped in a downward spiral of momentum. There wasn’t a big enough purse to attract the best players. Without the best players, the gate dwindled. And the purse got smaller. Diamondhead itself was in major arrears with its creditors as the early 1980s evolved; the company had lost Pinehurst, and the resort was in the hands of a consortium of banks when the last Hall of Fame Classic was held in September, 1982.

It was during the 1970s as well that Pinehurst officials first reached out to the USGA with the idea of hosting the U.S. Open on No. 2. Those talks never went very far, however, as USGA executive director for rules and competitions P.J. Boatwright knew the course intimately from having lived in Pinehurst from 1955-59 while running the Carolinas Golf Association and was not happy with Diamondhead’s stewardship.

But things changed over the 1980s: Robert Dedman Sr. bought the resort and club in 1984, restored its financial stability, and funded a total golf course and infrastructure expansion and overhaul. Penn G-2 grass was developed to allow golf greens to play firm and fast in the summer, and the greens were converted in 1996. The Open finally came to Pinehurst for successful runs in 1999, 2005 and 2014 with a one-off pairing that final year with the Women’s Open the next week.

And now the clock’s been turned back to before that decade of the ’70s, with No. 2 reliving its earlier golden era of closely mown chipping areas, wide and firm fairways and sandy wastelands beyond the fairways. The changes came under the auspices of architects Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw and were executed over two years from 2010-12.

“P.J. talked so lovingly about what No. 2 had been years ago,” says David Fay, who began his USGA career under Boatwright in the 1970s and retired in 2010 as its executive director. “That picture he painted of No. 2 has always remained in my mind.

“Yes, P.J. would love the changes.”

One of those winners from the ’70s had a local perspective, with Floyd having grown up in Fayetteville and getting the occasional opportunity to play at Pinehurst with friends of his father, who ran the Fort Bragg golf course, or in junior competitions.

“I remember my first trip was in the winter and the grass was dormant,” says Floyd, today retired from competitive golf and living in South Florida. “And I remember how tough it played, especially the front nine. I was excited because it was a treat to be leaving town to play another golf course, but I wasn’t even aware of the history or tradition. Back then, there was no such thing as rough. There was sand and pine straw and the natural environment was the rough.”

Floyd beat Jerry McGee in a playoff for the 1976 Colgate championship. His last competitive rounds on No. 2 were played in the 1994 Senior Open there.

“I was really impressed with the course that week because it was in such great condition,” Floyd says. “Among the players, No. 2 was known as a great golf course, maybe top five or top 10 in the world, but that wasn’t for its conditioning. It was just such a great layout.

“Pinehurst is a golf mecca now with all the history and the great people of golf who have been there and won there. And Donald Ross was such a great architect. It’s definitely one of the world’s top golf destinations and there’s a lot of history there. Pinehurst No. 2 is one of great golf courses in the world and it’s always fun to play it.”

And thankfully no one plays it today wearing bell-bottoms and Nehru jackets. PS

Chapel Hill writer Lee Pace has written about Pinehurst, its golf courses and its personalities for more than three decades and has never sported the “full Cleveland look” on any of the resort golf courses.

Golftown Journal

Finding Peace

The many pleasures of walking a golf course

By Lee Pace

During the last week of August, I turned over to the editors at UNC Press my manuscript of 60,000 words and flash drive of several hundred photographs assembled during a two-year period for a book about walking some of the top golf venues in the Carolinas. The idea was to find 18 courses crossing dimensions from private to resort to municipal that offered outstanding golf and fostered a culture of walking — by lugging, pulling a trolley or taking a caddie. 

And find a good story at every juncture.

I am delighted to report there are legions of golfers across the Carolinas who think of motorized carts as the scourge of the Earth. Herewith is a sampling of the golfers I met and the passion I found.

From Croft Thomas, an Asheville physician and member at Biltmore Forest Country Club: 

“I think it’s presence, honestly. One of the things everyone looks for in life is being purely in the moment, absolutely present. I think some would call it nirvana. Golf is something where you’re 100 percent fully present for it. When you’re hitting your shot, you think of absolutely nothing else. When you walk, I think it prolongs that and allows you to have that presence over three-and-a-half hours. I don’t think I’d feel that with a golf cart. All you’re thinking about is your shot. It’s complete presence and it’s extended by walking.”

From Bill Coore, whose golf design partnership with Ben Crenshaw produced the restoration of Pinehurst No. 2 and the Dormie Club:

“Golf is a game born of nature. I rather doubt that the originators of golf in whatever form ever envisioned the day people would ride around and play the game. Just like sand has been a link throughout golf architecture for 500 years, walking has been a link throughout the history of golf for more than 500 years.”

From Gil Hanse, the architect who designed the new Pinehurst No. 4 and The Cradle short course and says he “absolutely abhors” having to build cart paths:

“What makes golf the greatest game is that our playing fields are so drastically different from one to the other; there is no standardization. Whatever nature and the mind of the architect produce, that’s what we play on. To experience that as you move through a landscape on foot opens you up to seeing so much more. You see the nuances of the design, the subtleties, feel the topography. You can’t experience that in a cart. Your feet aren’t in contact with the ground and you’re moving at a fast speed. When you’re sitting in a cart, your focus is all about, where is my ball?”

From Paul Zizzi, an Atlanta anesthesiologist who’s a member at Grandfather Golf and Country Club in Linville: 

“Golf is such a nice reprieve from the environment I spend most of my time. It’s all about moving your body and breathing good air and getting sunlight. If you understand how the body works and what it needs, walking becomes much more attractive. For me it’s stress relief, it’s visual stimulation as you see a lot of beautiful sights. And it’s getting sunlight. I love the game of golf, but that’s almost secondary to getting outside and moving my body.”

From Tommy Brittain, a trial attorney and member at The Dunes Golf and Beach Club in Myrtle Beach: 

“Those old gnarly Scots on those moors and heaths before there were any motors were, of course, walking. On the true Scottish links courses, they understand your feet on those fairways and in the rough are part of the story. It’s inexplicably a part of the experience. We’ve lost that in America. It’s typical of us to take over a situation and put some sort of convenience or ease to it. Sadly, that’s part of our culture. But fortunately, we have little pockets of people who have glimpsed why walking is part of the game.”

From John Farrell, director of golf at Sea Pines Plantation on Hilton Head Island:

“We have kind of a heightened sense of awareness as we’ve seen the other side to it. (Mandatory carts) is just not the way to do it. If you’re physically able, the way to play is to walk. It’s the easy way to roll. Here we’re at sea level, the proximity greens to tees is good, it’s better socially, and obviously it’s better physically. There are so many benefits to walking I can’t see why you wouldn’t.”

From Kitty Garner, a member at Charlotte Country Club who with four young children in the 1990s would play quick morning rounds alone once the kids were off to school:

“Coming out early and walking was like finding peace for me. I’d get to the first tee time and walk really fast. I’d finish in a couple of hours and be ready for the next carpool. I didn’t have four hours to play. But I needed that quiet time.”

From Jeff Loh, a regular at Mid Pines Inn and Golf Club as he stands on the 15th tee of the 1921 Donald Ross-designed course: 

“Your heart rate picks up a beat or two on this part of the course. This routing is ludicrously good. They say good wine has a sense of place — terroir. This course has quite the sense of place. It’s unique to the Sandhills. When it was all Bermuda (before Kyle Franz restored the native areas in 2012-13), it could have been in Connecticut, it could have been anywhere. And to appreciate it more, you walk.”

From Dr. John Ellis, an orthopedic surgeon and former president at the Country Club of North Carolina who helped draft an initiative encouraging walking: 

“We developed a policy that said we think walking is a part of the game and should be allowed. You can really enjoy the game walking. As a doctor, obviously it’s the right thing to do for your health. We realized we would lose some income on the carts but felt it was the right thing to do. Allowing walking better met the needs of our members, which is what a private club is supposed to do anyway.”

From Joe McCullough, who joined Pinehurst Country Club in 2012 after hearing about the “Walking Club” that allowed members to walk the resort’s nine golf courses during certain times while restrictions were placed on resort guests:

“Our first month in town, the club had an orientation meeting and one of the pros said the Walking Club no longer existed. I panicked. I thought I’d made the biggest mistake in my life. The young man quickly said not to worry, they now allowed unrestricted walking. I thought, ‘Man, I’ve just won the lottery.’”

From Hayes Holderness, who lives in Greensboro and travels the world walking courses as a member of the Golf magazine rating panel, on the yin and yang between walkers and riders on the first tee: 

“Someone might say, ‘Oh, you’re going to be anti-social and walk. I say, ‘You’re the one being anti-social. You’re welcome to join me walking.’ It’s good-natured kidding, no one gets upset about it. But the truth is, we can talk a lot more if we’re walking. The entire foursome can talk. If everyone’s in carts, you mainly talk to your cart mate.”

From Dick Deal, former president at Secession Golf Club in Beaufort, South Carolina, an all-walking club: 

“I used to ski a lot in the winter and would walk my home course at Fairfax Country Club to get my legs in shape for the winter. We had a large cadre of walkers. Another group was the big, fat guys who sat on their rears, rode carts and had heart attacks. When you walk, you get a sense of the wind and the firmness of the ground. All the elements play into your mind. You’re at one with the golf course; you’re not separated by some noisy mechanical device.”

And from Dr. Julian Laing, the town doctor in the fictional Scottish village of Burningbush in Michael Murphy’s 1972 book Golf in the Kingdom: 

“For every theory ye propose about the improvement o’ the game, I’ll show ye how the game is fadin’ away, losin’ its old charm, becomin’ mechanized by the Americans and the rest o’ the world that blindly follows them. Look at the crowded links , the lack o’ leisure , the hurried startin’ times, the ruination o’ the old clubs where ye could gather with your friends and enjoy some good conversation. I see the distorted swings, the hurried rounds, and now the electric carts tae ruin the courses and rob us of our exercise.” PS

Lee Pace’s book tentatively titled Good Walks will be published in 2020 by the University of North Carolina Press.

Golftown Journal

In the Loop

No Pinehurst but plenty of character

By Lee Pace

Had the producers of the new film Loopers: The Caddie’s Long Walk been able to get to Pinehurst to interview some of the men who have toted golf bags on the venerable No. 2 course, they could have heard Thomas Trinchitella speak of working for former President George H.W. Bush for two days in 2003, or carrying for Tiger Woods for two rounds prior to the 2005 U.S. Open.

“This was the week before the Open,” Trinchitella, who has been caddying at Pinehurst since 2001 and is one of 18 members of the Pinehurst Caddie Hall of Fame, would have told them. “Tiger gave (regular caddie) Steve Williams the week off. We go off at 7 a.m. and the fog’s so thick I can’t tell where the flag is on the first green. I knew it was middle or back. So I give him the back yardage.

“I’m sweating walking up to the green. We get there and I see his ball 20 feet left of the flag. It was the right yardage, just left. That just determines whether he’s going to believe what you say or whether you’re just the bag-toter. He just went by my yardage the rest of the day. It was a great experience. He talked about anything and everything. Couldn’t have been nicer.”

Had they gotten to Willie McRae before his death in October 2018, McRae could have regaled them with stories of 75 years of caddying and strolling the fairways with five presidents, baseball great Mickey Mantle, basketball icon Michael Jordan, and golf hall of famers Gene Sarazen and Sam Snead. He could have shared some of his favorite one-liners, like the one when a putt had a chance to fall but veered off at the end.

“That was a mother-in-law. It looked good leaving,” McRae liked to say to guffaws all around.

Alas, the producers made it to Scotland and Ireland, to Pebble Beach, Bandon Dunes and Augusta National. But not to Pinehurst, where men carrying golf bags have been part of the landscape since the late 1880s.

“It would have been great to get to Pinehurst,” says Ward Clayton, one of the producers. “But in the end, we could only get to so many people. There are so many great stories about caddies all over the country.”

The Loopers documentary opened in early 2019 and by early summer had been seen in 30 states across the country and in the United Kingdom. The one-hour, 20-minute film will be out on DVD in late August and is available for golf clubs to rent for private showings. Actor and comedian Bill Murray, who starred in the 1980 movie Caddyshack and caddied as a boy in Illinois, narrates the lively film that traces the history of the caddie and his evolution through centuries of the game.

“What a great tribute to a profession that is so important to the game of golf,” Pinehurst President Tom Pashley told a group of resort caddies after a showing in June at the Sunrise Theater in Southern Pines. “We absolutely recognize how important the four or five hours you spend with a player is to their overall experience at Pinehurst. We celebrate the tradition of the player-caddie relationship.”

The film is the union of ideas and passions from two golfers from opposite sides of the country.

Jim Packer had spent 25 years making movies in Hollywood (Jersey Boys, Winter’s Tale of recent note) and in his spare time playing golf at Bel-Air Country Club in Los Angeles and developing a close relationship with his regular caddie.

Clayton, a native of Durham who has spent his career in golf journalism and public relations, developed a reservoir of stories about old-time Augusta caddies and the Masters Tournament when he was sports editor of The Augusta Chronicle from 1991-2000. He turned those tales of colorful characters with nicknames like Iron Man, Pappy, Cemetery and Stovepipe into a 2004 book, Men on the Bag: The Caddies of Augusta National.

Packer thought there was a story to tell, that caddies had never been properly saluted in a quality, full-length documentary. Reading Clayton’s book helped further develop the idea.

“Jim always thought that caddies got the short straw — what they do, how they deal with people in guiding them around the golf course and interacting with them psychologically — he felt that story needed more depth and could be told,” Clayton says. “The intention of this was not only for the people that are golfers, but for people who are outside of golf, to understand what role the caddie has and what they do. If you think of any sport, it’s the only one where you have somebody standing right beside you when you hit your shot.”

They hired a team of directors, cameramen, writers and editors to produce the film, Packer as executive producer and Clayton a producer.

“The essential message of the film is this: If you’ve never played a round of golf with a caddie, you’re missing out,” says Clayton, today a PR and communications consultant in Jacksonville, Florida. “I don’t know what percentage of golfers have ever played with a caddie. I was 17 or 18 when I first had a caddie. I was with some friends from Durham in Pinehurst and we got on No. 2 and took caddies. It was an awesome experience.”

The film tells the story of loopers at esteemed clubs like St. Andrews, Carnoustie and Prestwick in Scotland, and Ballybunion and Lahinch in Ireland. It tells of Arnold Palmer’s relationship with Augusta caddie Nathaniel “Iron Man” Avery and interviews Fuzzy Zoeller about how he won the 1979 Masters playing at Augusta for the first time with the help of a local caddie named Jariah “Jerry” Beard.

It explores Ben Crenshaw’s relationship with Augusta caddie Carl Jackson, Nick Faldo’s with Fanny Sunesson and Tom Watson’s with Bruce Edwards. Other professional caddies interviewed include Williams (Woods’ former caddie), Pete Bender (Greg Norman and others) and Michael Greller (Jordan Spieth).

The movie traces the evolution of the Evans Scholars Program, in which high school caddies can earn college scholarships, and ferrets out lesser-known tales like that of Greg Puga, who grew up in East Los Angeles, learned to caddie at Bel-Air, and rode the passion he developed for golf into eventually qualifying as an amateur to play in the Masters.

Clayton says one of the most gratifying elements of working on the film was taking the sad tale of a long-deceased Augusta caddie and doing him a good turn.

“Iron Man” Avery caddied for Palmer at Augusta until the late 1960s and was on the bag for all four of Palmer’s Masters wins (1958, ‘60, ‘62, 64). But in later years, Avery had a difficult life, died in 1985 at the age of 46, and was buried in Augusta in an unmarked grave. Through the process of making the film, Clayton was able to find a donor who contributed funds to have a grave marker produced and placed on Avery’s grave. 

“For 37 years his grave went unmarked,” Clayton says. “Now it has a headstone with his name and lists his Masters wins with Arnold Palmer. It’s the coolest thing.”

The film makes a concerted effort to challenge the old saw that a caddie’s job is to “Show up, shut up and keep up.” Michael Collins, a former PGA Tour caddie now an ESPN reporter, says, “If that’s all a player sees in his caddie, he’s not winning today.” By probing under the surface of the relationships of top professionals and their caddies, the message comes across loudly that the caddie is so much more at the top level of the game — part psychologist, friend, servant, conversationalist and swing coach.

Of course, it’s a little more basic on the one-off resort level like Pinehurst.

“That’s the old standard, right?” says Trinchitella of that simplistic definition of a caddie’s job. “It’s not a bad policy until you figure out what your player wants. The first thing you do is help them relax and feel comfortable. On No. 2, everyone’s nervous on the first tee. First, it’s a famous golf course. And second, you’ve got someone else watching your golf game. A lot of people aren’t used to that if they’re a 20 or 25 handicapper.

“You just try to get them to relax. There’s nothing I haven’t seen and nowhere I haven’t been.”  PS

Lee Pace has written about the Pinehurst golf scene for more than 30 years. For more information on the movie and its availability in theaters, go to loopersmovie.com. Clubs and golf associations can set up private showings by clicking loopersmovie.com/request-a-screening. 

Golftown Journal

The Game of the People

Build it and they will come

By Lee Pace

Hugh MacRae stood before the Wilmington City Council in the early 1920s with a bold proposal to build a municipal golf course on land his family owned several miles east of the city. MacRae was going to retain the services of Donald Ross, the noted golf architect from Pinehurst, to design the course, but the idea was falling on deaf ears with the city fathers, who would pay for the construction of the course.

“Mr. MacRae, you’re talking pipe dreams,” the mayor told him. “Golf will never be available to the average man. It’s a rich man’s sport.”

MacRae, whose family traces its roots to the Isle of Skye in Scotland, was quick with a rebuttal.

“No, Mr. Mayor, it’s not,” MacRae answered. “I’ve seen golf in Scotland. Almost every course there is a city-owned course. Everyone in the town of St. Andrews plays golf.”

MacRae’s argument worked. The mayor and council conceded his point, approved the plan, and in 1926 Wilmington began construction on its new public layout.

Some 80 years later, MacRae’s grandson smiled considering the story he heard often many years ago.

“Today that golf course plays more than 70,000 rounds a year,” Hugh MacRae II said in 2007. “You can’t have a golf course with much more history than that — ties to St. Andrews and Donald Ross. My father and grandfather were very familiar with golf in Scotland. They foresaw golf becoming very important to the average man, not just the wealthy man.”

Ross’ early ties in American golf were with the affluent — his first job was in 1899 at Oakley Country Club in the Boston suburbs, and a year later he established a base at Pinehurst Country Club — but his Scottish roots allowed him to stay anchored in the idea that anyone could and should have access to quality golf.

“There is no good reason why the label ‘rich man’s game’ should be hung on golf,” Ross wrote at some point before 1914 in a manuscript that was later published in the book Golf Has Never Failed Me. “The development of municipal golf courses is the outstanding feature of the game in America today. It is the greatest step ever taken to make it the game of the people, as it should be. The municipal courses are all moneymakers and big moneymakers. I am naturally conservative, yet I am certain that in a few years we will see golf played much more generally than is even played now.”

Municipal and daily-fee golf courses are important cogs to the golf machinery in the Carolinas. According to the National Golf Foundation, the two Carolinas had 923 regulation courses at the end of 2018, and 659 of them were daily fee or municipal courses. That is just over 70 percent of courses being “public” versus those owned by a private club.

One of the oldest public courses in the Carolinas is Aiken Golf Club, which opened in 1912. The Highland Park Hotel opened in Aiken in the late 1860s, and the golf course was in its amenity package. The course was sold to the town in 1939 when the hotel company encountered financial ruin, and today is run by Jim McNair Jr., son of the noted amateur player James McNair, the winner of the Carolinas Amateur in 1946 and ’48.

The town of Southern Pines commissioned Ross to build a course on ground just south of Morganton Road and east of Broad Street that would be owned and operated by the town, and the original 18 opened in 1913, with nine more following a decade later. The town struggled to maintain the course during the Depression and World War II, and sold the course in the mid-1940s to a Connecticut businessman named Mike Sherman, who dispatched a young accountant and aspiring golfer named Julius Boros to town to keep the books and hone his golf game in his spare time.

Sherman sold the course in 1951 to the Benevolent & Protective Order of Elks, which remains the owner today. The greens were rebuilt by architect John LaFoy in 1998 to accommodate faster putting surfaces, and he added a tee on the 15th hole to lengthen it from a par-4 to a par-5. The course plays 6,354 yards to a par of 71.

“What struck me most about Southern Pines was that you had a really fine layout,” LaFoy says. “It’s just a really, really good layout. It’s outstanding. That’s what Donald Ross did so well — his routings. He used the topography very well.”

Charleston businessman Claudius Bissell Jenkins donated 112 acres to the city of Charleston in the late 1920s to be used for a public golf course. Jenkins and his sons were developing the Riverland Terrace suburb on James Island, just west of the Country Club of Charleston, and saw the civic and commercial appeal of having accessible golf nearby. The Charleston City Golf Course opened in 1929 and has been the site annually for the Charleston City Amateur.

“Its rates are such that young people from families of modest resources, working folk and retirees have access to the game of golf,” Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. said in 2004. “The city’s commitment is that it will always be an affordable and accessible golf course, and I think it’s a very valuable asset.”

The course is set for a $3 million renovation that will begin in December 2019 and encompass fixing drainage problems, reshaping tees, fairways and greens, and removing some trees to promote healthy turf growth. The work will be done nine holes at a time, and the city will pay for it half with recreation bond funds and half with a private fundraising drive.

Ross visited the mountains on the opposite side of the Carolinas to survey the site for a new municipal course east of Asheville in the mid-1920s, and The Asheville Citizen noted the occasion with a large headline: “Municipally Owned Golf Courses Needed Here Says Donald Ross On Arrival.”

“It is the consensus of opinion of almost all that a municipal course will go a long way toward drawing winter and summer tourists,” the story said, then quoted Ross that a new course would “prove one of the chief assets in advertising for visitors.”

Asheville Municipal Golf Course opened a year later and was dedicated on May 21, 1927, and an exhibition four-ball featured trick-shot artist Joe Kirkwood and head pro Ray Cole against the pros at the other two Asheville clubs — Frank Clark of the Country Club of Asheville and George Ayton of Biltmore Forest. It was the state’s first publicly owned golf course.

“The course places Asheville in the ranks of other Southern cities which have provided a modern up-to-date course open to the general public,” The Citizen remarked. “The course is expected to add fully fifty percent to Asheville’s golf population, opening the game to hundreds who know of golf only through the newspaper accounts.”

“It cost one dollar to play golf back then,” says Billy Gardenheight, a caddie at all of the Asheville private clubs in mid-century and an avid golfer himself at the muni. “Guys would come from all over and stay in rooming houses and play golf.”

Today seniors with knee replacements and heart problems show up at 7:30 a.m., five days a week, and walk the front nine, routed in a valley with little topographic undulation. Others go a full 18 and venture onto the back nine, which winds its way up and back down the Beverly Hills subdivision.

“A lot of people come by even though they don’t play golf,” says Cortez Baxter, who has been a starter at the course since 1967. “They play cards, watch TV, tell lies. It’s just a big family. Sometimes you get older and don’t have anywhere regular to go.”

Meanwhile, back in Wilmington, golfers today are enjoying the results of a major renovation that is now five years old. Wilmington Municipal head pro and general manager David Donovan realized that Ross’ original greens had never actually been built, that to save money the town had merely built round circles of sand and clay that were eventually covered with Bermuda grass. He convinced the city to hire architect John Fought to build the green to Ross’ specifications, and that happened in 2014. The $1.4 million project includes new greens complexes, bunkers and putting surfaces on all 18 holes, 24 new/rebuilt tees, some tree removal to improve sunlight and air flow, and the removal/repositioning of cart paths in some areas.

Heralding the results of the project are new tee signs that read at the bottom: A Donald Ross Tradition.

“Now, that fits,” Donovan says. “What we have now I think is true to what Donald Ross envisioned at the beginning.

“I think this has put us on the map now. On Mondays, when the private clubs are closed, we’re getting players from Porter’s Neck, Landfall and Cape Fear. This meets their standards now. That’s a big deal.”  PS

Lee Pace has written about the Pinehurst area golf scene for more than 30 years. Write him at leepace7@gmail.com.