Golftown Journal

Winter Rules

And the golfers play on

By Lee Pace

“The unkind winds and muddy, plugged lies of April and May, the deepening rough of June, the thronging summer folk of July and August, the obfuscating goose feathers and fallen leaves of autumn are all gone, gone, and golf feels, on the frost-stiffed fairways, reduced to its austere and innocent essence.” — John Updike

In early January 1919, the Pinehurst Outlook celebrated the riches of the local golf experience, writing of the annual Mid-Winter Tournament and of a Tin Whistles competition. It previewed the upcoming St. Valentine’s Day Tournament, listed hundreds of arrivals at the Carolina Hotel, and advertised an antiseptic powder for the feet just used by troops in World War I as perfect for golfers because it “takes the friction from the shoe and freshens the foot.” The newspaper also espoused the appeal of the Sandhills: “As the winter golf centre of the two hemispheres, Pinehurst is now thoroughly established, its unequalled equipment embracing three distinct six-thousand-yard courses and an additional nine-hole course.”

Many of you wearing wool, eating stew and checking the Delta schedule to Palm Beach here in the numb of January have forgotten, or were never even aware, that Pinehurst was created as a wintertime resort. The Carolina Hotel one century ago was open Nov. 10 to May 1, and Richard Tufts of the founding family once noted that the aesthetics of the area soon after being cleared for timber in the late 1890s weren’t very high, but “The one thing Pinehurst had to offer in these early days was its climate.”

Which is all the more reason to celebrate golf in the off-months.

Others across the land do so with imagination and great élan. The Jemsek family, longtime owners of Cog Hill Golf & Country Club in the Chicago suburbs, created the Eskimo Open in 1963, and it’s been played every year since on the first Saturday of January with from two dozen to several hundred players. Golfers bring orange balls (the easier to find them in the snow), hammers (the easier to get your tee in the ground), and an appetite (gallons of chili are downed after the golf). 

“It’s a little bit crazy, just like people who go dip themselves in Lake Michigan every year,” Frank Jemsek says.

Golfers numbering up to 1,700 have flocked to Lake Minnetonka just west of Minneapolis each February for 34 years for the Wayzata Chilly Open, where golf “architects” lay out three nine-hole courses on the frozen lake and participants crack tennis balls with golf clubs — or even hockey sticks. Up in Alaska, golfers afflicted with cabin fever wear ice skates and aim their balls toward holes carved with ice augers into the hardened lake surfaces.

The average daily high in Kansas City is 39 degrees in January and 44 in February, so native Tom Watson was nonplussed during the second round of the 1979 Memorial Tournament in Ohio when he hit 16 greens and shot a 69 while battling 30 mph wind, sideways rain and wind-chill factors of 13 degrees. Some say it’s the finest bad-weather round on American soil in history.

“The key was keeping my hands warm,” Watson said. “I guess I’m used to playing in this kind of weather. It’s good Kansas City weather.”

Before air travel began whisking snowbound New Englanders and Manhattanites to Florida, the Sandhills were a Mecca for cold-weather golf. Golfers in Pinehurst have always had it lucky. So what if it rains in January? The water seeps quickly through the sandy loam.

“They came by train all winter long, from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania — places that had been covered by snow for a month,” remembered the late Peggy Kirk Bell, who bought the Pine Needles golf course with husband, Warren, in 1953. “We’d have short cold snaps but soon it would be warm enough to play. They would ride the train all night on Thursday and we’d pick them up early Friday morning. They played golf all day Friday, Saturday and Sunday, then we’d give them an early dinner and put them back on the train. They were back in New York for work Monday morning.”

Pinehurst was literally turning guests away during the popular winter months in the early 1920s, which is one reason a private club with a lodging component (Mid Pines in 1921), and a resort club with a real estate component (Pine Needles in 1928) were conceived and built. But then came the Depression and the Second World War, turning all the pre-existing travel and leisure trends on their ear. The advent of air conditioning in the mid-1900s opened Pinehurst and all its hotel properties to a 12-month market, and the area had lost its mark as a wintertime resort forever.

Peter deYoung’s roots growing up in Rochester, New York, and living three decades in Chicago adapted him to the ways and means of harsh weather golf. Twenty-five years ago, he suggested to then-Pinehurst CEO Pat Corso that he could put some traffic in empty hotel rooms and on golf courses if Corso would give him a price cut for junior golfers in what deYoung would call the Winternational Junior Series. The program still exists and in 2018-19 will host nine tournaments from late November through early March.

“If I had known it would last 25 years, I’m not sure I would have done it,” deYoung says with a laugh. “But we’ve had a lot of fun with it and brought a lot of kids from the North down here in the winter. We’ve had all kinds of weather stories.

“I remember one year standing on the fifth green watching the first group walk down the fairway. By the time they got to the green, we’d had an inch and a half of snow. Obviously we postponed the round.”

The Donald Ross Memorial Junior Championship has been organized for the week at the end of December every year since 1948 at Pinehurst, with players like Leonard Thompson, David Thore, David Eger and Chip Beck among the winners.

“We see the parents covered in blankets and wearing gloves, but the kids don’t seem to mind the cold,” says tournament director Brian Fahey. “The kids are pretty resilient. They just go play. The cold doesn’t bother them.”

Kelly Mitchum of the Pinehurst teaching staff was pitched on the idea in December of 2017 of playing the resort’s new short course, The Cradle, on the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice of Dec. 21, from sunup to sundown, perhaps as a charity enterprise. Mitchum played 26 rounds from 7:20 a.m. to 5:15 p.m. on something of a lark and a test run for a more organized event in December 2018 to raise money for Young Life of the Sandhills and the Sandhills Food Bank.

“I was pretty sore at the end of it, but it was a lot of fun,” Mitchum says of the 2017 marathon. “It was 50 degrees or so, pretty comfortable. The thing about winter golf is the wind. If the wind blows, it’s tough. But even if it’s 45 degrees and there’s no wind, it’s pretty comfortable.”

Each year I pledge to myself to remain engaged with my golf through the winter. You don’t need a tee time and you can play quickly. Dormant Bermuda is actually a terrific playing surface. Walking and lugging — my preferred style of golf — keeps the inner furnace roaring. The late afternoon winter sun yields a burnish on the sepia fairways you can’t find any other time. You can play winter rules — lift, clean and cheat. And playing the game beats watching it on television.

“As long as golf is an outdoor game, we’re going to play in all kind of conditions,” deYoung says.  PS

Chapel Hill writer Lee Pace has chronicled many winters worth of Pinehurst golf lore in three of his books — Pinehurst Stories (1991), The Spirit of Pinehurst (2004) and The Golden Age of Pinehurst (2012).

Golftown Journal

Miller Time

Pinehurst played a starring role

By Lee Pace

Johnny Miller is perhaps best remembered around Pinehurst for his stirring playoff victory over Jack Nicklaus and Frank Beard for the 1974 World Open title. That was the year the blond bombshell from Northern California scorched the PGA Tour with wins in three straight tournaments to open the season, took first in five others and banked $353,021. He drove the ball long and straight, smothered flagsticks with his irons and seemed to have magnets drawing his putts to the cup.

He’s also known in this golf-happy burg for his insight, candor and color he delivered for some three decades as a golf analyst for NBC. Now 71, Miller announced in October that he’d retire from broadcasting in early 2019 to spend more time with his family, which includes 24 grandchildren. Golfers coming in from their rounds at 4:30 on Sunday afternoon will see and hear Paul Azinger on NBC’s broadcasts instead.

“I’ve had two lives,” Miller said in breaking the news. “The golfing part . . . the younger generation sort of heard about me, but maybe didn’t realize I wasn’t too bad at times. Then the announcing part. But I’ve been on the road for 50 years.”

Still quite significant but virtually forgotten is that Pinehurst, in a sense, gave the world of golf the second coming of Johnny Miller. Four nostalgic days in the Colgate/Hall of Fame Classic in 1979 helped Miller shake a three-year slump and bounced him into a stretch in the early 1980s when he won five tournaments and finished among the Top 30 money earners four times. Miller didn’t win (Tom Watson beat him in a playoff), but he left town a champion in his own mind.

“That tournament single-handedly got me out of my slump,” Miller reflected years later. “It was like signaling to the rest of the PGA Tour that Johnny Miller could play golf again. It was a weight off my shoulders. Pinehurst’s been very good to me. I haven’t played it that many times, but it’s the kind of course I wish we played every week on the tour if I was still active.”

Miller was the incumbent U.S. Open champion with his mind-boggling 63 at Oakmont when the PGA Tour came to Pinehurst in November 1973 after a 22-year hiatus. Richard Tufts of the founding family discontinued the North and South Open in 1951 after financial squabbles with the tour pros, and Bill Maurer, the president of the new owners in the early 1970s, the Diamondhead Corporation, made it a priority to bring pro golf back to Pinehurst and its esteemed No. 2 course. He did so in the form of the 144-hole World Open, played over two weeks in November 1973 on the No. 2 and 4 courses. The purse was an unprecedented total of half a million dollars, with $100,000 to the winner (collected by Miller Barber). Miller entered the event but withdrew at the last minute because of an illness.

The following year, the format was trimmed back to 72 holes and was moved up to late September to coincide with the grand opening of the World Golf Hall of Fame, which sat for nearly two decades on ground to the east of the fourth green and fifth tee of the No. 2 course.

“The World Open in ’74 was the biggest money tournament of the year,” Miller said. “First prize was $60,000, which was unheard of at the time. Obviously, it was a big tournament and had a tremendous field. It was like a Players Championship of today.”

Miller shot a 63 in the second round, missing the course record 62s fired by Watson and Gibby Gilbert the year before. The round featured five birdies on the first six holes (including a 60-footer on the fifth hole).

“It was like one of those old Johnny Miller blitzes,” he said. “I dominated the course and scored a fairly easy 63, if there is such a thing.”

Miller and Nicklaus were tied at 209 after three rounds, with Charles Coody and Bruce Devlin two back and Bob Murphy and Beard trailing by three. The 27-year-old Miller, winner of $256,383 that year, reveled in the challenge of going head-to-head against the 34-year-old Nicklaus, who had earnings of $208,307 and a Tournament Players Championship that year.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if both of us shot in the 60s head-to-head,” Miller said after round three. “I’ve held him at bay recently and I’ve had a lot of success against Jack, but I don’t talk much about it. I know he’s a better player than I am, but I’m not afraid of him. He’s going to try to beat my brains out, but he’s got to respect me because I’ve had such great success against him.”

It turned out that Miller and Nicklaus each shot one-over 72s, allowing Murphy and Beard to force a four-way playoff with 69s and 281 totals, three-under for 72 holes (only eight players beat par for the tournament).

The playoff started on 15, where TV cameras were set up. Beard scored a routine par on the par-3, leaving a birdie putt dead short that could have ended it there. Miller and Nicklaus got up-and-down from the fringe, and Murphy was eliminated after his tee ball found a greenside bunker.

Miller won the tournament with a two-putt birdie on 16 after Beard three-putted and Nicklaus missed a 12-footer for birdie. Miller hit a 3-wood to eight feet — “The best shot under pressure I’ve ever hit,” he said — and went from thinking he had to make an eagle to simply needing to two-putt.

“To beat Jack Nicklaus in a playoff sort of capped off the year for me,” he said. “I enjoyed playing No. 2. It was perfect for my game. It gave you enough room off the tee, you had extremely difficult approach shots, and if you hit it real bad off the tee, you had broom grass, sand and trees. To me that course is the perfect course for my game. It’s the perfect test of golf because it’s got difficult putting, it accepts the approach shot fairly, and it penalizes the poor shot.”

A different Johnny Miller came to Pinehurst in 1979. He had been the talk of the tour in the early 1970s for his good play but now had become the talk of the tour for his bad play. He slid to 48th on the money list in 1977 and 111th in 1978, with only $17,400 in winnings. Miller hadn’t won a tournament since early 1976.

“What’s wrong with Johnny Miller?” the world wanted to know.

Miller responded that there wasn’t anything wrong that a bunch of birdies and a little confidence couldn’t solve.

“Before Pinehurst I played in the Lancôme in Paris and won against a good field, and that signaled that maybe I was ready to play well again on the U.S. tour. I came home a week or two later and continued my good play,” he said.

Miller opened with a 69 and then equaled his 1974 heroics with another 63. “It was amazing. It was like it was ’73 or ’74 all over again.” he said. Watson moved into contention after three rounds, shooting a 65 to stand at 203, one behind Miller. The leaders talked about the confidence Miller was gaining on the eve of the final round.

“Confidence isn’t something you get from reading a book,” Miller said. “You can’t have confidence if you’ve just hit four bad shots in a row. It comes from hitting a lot of good shots. Confidence is Seve Ballesteros hitting all those shots from the trees and making pars because he knows he’s going to. That’s the way Arnold Palmer used to be.

“The difference between 63 and 73 is so little it’s scary. It may be the distance between the ears.”

Miller hit a 3-iron on the 17th hole to one foot away and went one ahead of Watson, but a hooked tee shot on 18 led to a bogey and a playoff after a closing round of 70 and a 272 total. Watson won on the second playoff hole after Miller’s approach went over the green.

But Johnny Miller was back. Pinehurst has always been special to him for those weeks in 1974 and 1979.

“I almost can’t tell you how good the golf course is,” he said. “It might not be the hardest golf course in the world, but for pleasure, for going out and having a pleasurable time with a smile on your face, it can’t be beat. It’s hard to get mad when you play Pinehurst.

“The town reeks of golf, it has a definite golf spirit, very similar to a Pine Valley or Augusta National or Cypress Point. It’s very blessed with that golfing spirit.”  PS

Chapel Hill-based writer Lee Pace has written about hundreds of memorable rounds of golf in Pinehurst over some three decades.

Golftown Journal

Double Trouble

The colorful legacies of Billy Joe Patton and Harvie Ward

By Lee Pace

One came from a small town in the western part of North Carolina, one from a small town in the east. One was a Wake Forest man when the Baptist institution was located in northern Wake County, the other a Tar Heel from the University of North Carolina. Both played golf with flair and color. They talked to the galleries and regaled the news media, their pictures appearing in national magazines (one of them smiling on the cover of Newsweek) throughout the 1950s. Both had outstanding short games and were deadly putters. They won five Carolinas Amateur Championships between them.

Each flirted with winning major professional championships in golf. Billy Joe Patton led the Masters on the final day in 1954 before twice hitting into Augusta National’s creeks and ponds and finishing third. Harvie Ward was tied for the lead in the 1957 Masters on the final day before hitting into the pond on 11, making double-bogey and fading as Doug Ford raced to the victory.

Patton led the U.S. Open after one round in 1954.

Ward won the U.S. Amateur in 1955 and ’56.

They played on eight Walker Cup teams (Patton five and Ward three).

They both won the North and South Amateur, Ward while a student at Carolina in 1948 and Patton in the height of his working-man/crack-golfer career in 1954, ’62 and ’63. Both were right-brained golfers where feel, touch and imagination were tantamount, and each thrived on Pinehurst No. 2, a venue requiring those skills in copious amounts.

“I loved playing No. 2. You had to play a lot of bounce-up shots,” Ward reflected years later. “You couldn’t play into the green. It was more like Scottish golf — you had to bounce it in there. You used to have to hit the chip-and-run or putt from off the green on those sand greens in Tarboro. There and playing at Pinehurst helped when I won the British Amateur. They were amazed over there how good I was hitting the pitch-and-run versus the flop wedge, where you hit it in the air and stop it by the hole. I adapted to golf over there very easily.”

“When I think of Pinehurst, I think of No. 2,” Patton said. “If I listed the five best golf courses I ever played, it would never leave my hand. I don’t know if I ever thought any course was any better. I think Donald Ross just took what he had. It was a desert of sand and scrub oak and pine, and the fellow just built a golf course on it. He didn’t build it around a lake because there wasn’t a lake there.”

And both at the height of their amateur careers rejected the idea of turning professional. There simply wasn’t the money to make it the same draw it is today. Ward sold cars and later became a club pro and expert golf instructor. Patton was in the lumber business.

“As it is now, I get a terrific kick out of playing golf,” Ward said in 1955. “It’s a pleasure, rather than work. I like it that way.”

“I’ve had a good life,” Patton said in 1994. “I’ve been happy. I’ve enjoyed my golf. I’ve enjoyed my friends. I’ve enjoyed my family. I’ve enjoyed my work. I’ve spent a lot of time doing the things I wanted to do. A man can’t ask for much more than that.”

Ward died in August 2004, succumbing to a long bout with cancer. Patton followed in 2011 at the age of 88 after several years living in a retirement home.

As huge as their respective shadows were across golf in the Carolinas, surprisingly they had very little face-to-face experience with one another.

“I was in college at Wake Forest,” Patton remembered in 2007. “It was 1940, I think. Harvie was a high school kid from Tarboro. They had this little tournament in Raleigh called the Eastern Carolina Amateur. He beat me 1-up. He couldn’t have been more than 15 years old and showed up in short pants. He’d never graduated to long pants. He was very straight off the tee and was a wonderful putter. That was aggravating, getting beat by a kid like that. There was a story in the paper after that match and my fraternity brothers gave me a lot of grief.

“I evened it up a few years later. We were playing in the Biltmore Forest Invitational. I was pumped up because he’d beaten me before. We played 16 holes and I had eight 3s on my card. In fact, from the eighth hole I made five 3s in a row. I closed him out on the 16th hole. Those are the only two times I remember us playing one another. I was older than he was and then later he moved off to California.”

Ward played a game that golf writer and historian Herbert Warren Wind once described as “archaically relaxed” and possessed a “rare gracefulness to his shotmaking that made him a treat to watch.”

“I never saw Bobby Jones play, but I saw everybody else, and Harvie was the best amateur I ever saw,” Ken Venturi said. “That’s the best amateur. Harvie didn’t have a pro bone in his body. He was too much a free spirit.”

Ward spent the last 15 years of his life living in Pinehurst, taught at Pine Needles and Forest Creek Golf Club, and mentored a network of young club and teaching professionals he had developed over the years. Ward told friends he “felt like a kid all over again” in the twilight of his life.

“Harvie never lived an unpleasant day in his life,” said Furman Bisher, the venerable columnist from the Atlanta Journal. “Or if he did, he didn’t show it. He was among the most untethered, unabashed people I’ve ever known.”

Patton’s style was established as a youngster in Morganton. He began swinging hard and never looked back. “I wanted to attack everything,” he said. “It was a war within myself, to hit that little ball as far as I could.” His knees were bent at address in exaggerated fashion. He had a strong grip, a whiplash waggle and a fast backswing. He cleared his left hip quickly through impact and cut his follow-through off at chest level, a move that later prompted Byron Nelson to call him a “slasher.”

Just as Ward was a maestro with the putter, so too was Patton.

“He never missed from 6 to 8 feet,” said Joe Cheves, the longtime pro at Patton’s home course, Mimosa Hills. “In all the rounds I played with him over the years, I never remember him missing from that range. He knew he was going to make it, and you knew he was going to make it. He was a very confident putter.”

Over the 1950s and through the ’60s, Patton enjoyed a remarkable run in national circles — not to mention in and around the Carolinas. His legend grew from one end of the Carolinas to the other.

“Billy Joe was a guy with professional ability playing in amateur tournaments,” says Hale Van Hoy, the Carolinas Golf Association executive director from 1965-1991. “Most tournament players of his caliber want to play their rounds all serious, without speaking to anyone, but he was always just as friendly, just as affable in the middle of a critical North and South round or U.S. Amateur round as he would be in a weekend game with the guys.”

The consummate Patton story came from the North and South Amateur one year in the late 1950s. Patton was on the second hole of a playoff with Dr. Bud Taylor and had hooked his tee shot onto the lip of a bunker bordering the long par-4. A hundred or so people watched as he addressed the ball awkwardly with a 4-wood, his right foot in the bunker, his left foot maybe 18 inches above it and the ball in the high grass. Meanwhile, a motorist who’d probably been trying to figure out Pinehurst’s curious maze of streets stopped her car on the road next to the gallery and asked, to no one in particular, “Does anyone know where I can get a room for the night?”

Patton continued waggling. “If you can wait a few minutes you can probably get mine,” he said.

The gallery erupted. Then Patton punched out, en route to a bogey. Taylor, safely in the fairway, parred the hole and won the match.

“It was more fun following Billy Joe in the woods than it was from the fairway,” longtime caddie Jerry Boggan said. “He was something else.”

Billy Joe and Harvie — both long gone, but both still generating chuckles and warm memories across the Carolinas golf landscape.  PS

Golf writer Lee Pace has written frequently about Patton and Ward in a dozen books he’s written about golf in Pinehurst and across the Carolinas.30

Golftown Journal

True Chip Off the Old Block

Passing along the lessons of the short game

By Jim Moriarty

Like a juvenile Jeeves-in-training, 10-year-old Doug Ford Jr. carried a folding chair around Meadowbrook Country Club in the staggering July heat of the 36-hole final match of the 1955 PGA Championship. Six decades and change down the road, he might occasionally need one for himself. It would come in handy.

Doug Ford Jr. moved to Pinehurst from South Florida a few months after the passing of his father, Doug Ford Sr., in May 2018. Having had his fifth vertebrae replaced with a piece of space-age plastic a little over a year ago, Doug Jr.’s sessions sharing short game wisdom at the practice area of Seven Lakes Country Club — a lot of that wisdom having trickled down from dad — can make finding a place to sit for a spell something of a necessity. In 1955, his father may have needed it even more.

That year two future members of the World Golf Hall of Fame were in the 36-hole final of the PGA Championship, conducted at match play in those days. Dr. Cary Middlecoff, who had dispatched Tommy Bolt in the semis, was set to play Doug Ford Sr., who had been the tournament’s qualifying medalist. Ford Sr.’s father was the one who rechristened the family name from the original Fortunato. Doug Sr. matriculated in the pool halls of the Inwood section of Manhattan. “I grew up in sort of a rough neighborhood,” he once told Golf Digest. “I ran with a gang of about 10 other guys, and it was funny how we all turned out. Of the 10, six became FBI agents, and the other four went with the mob. I was the only one who didn’t end up carrying a gun as an adult.”

If the fidgety Middlecoff, who trained to be a dentist but spent less time over a patient than Steve Martin did in Little Shop of Horrors, was inarguably the slowest player on tour, Ford was just as indisputably one of the fastest. The chair was the idea of Doug Jr.’s mother, Marilyn. “She didn’t want my dad pacing and waiting to hit. That was the strategy,” he says. “When it was Middlecoff’s turn, sit down. And he did.”

Played at Meadowbrook Country Club west of Detroit, Ford squared the tight match on the 26th hole, then birdied the 29th, 30th and 32nd holes to go 3 up. “On what became the last hole,” says Ford Jr., “the pin was tucked left. Middlecoff in the morning round had missed in the bunker left. He hit it out stiff, 6 inches from the hole. In the afternoon Middlecoff is down now. Going for the pin he hits it in the same bunker and my dad says to me, ‘Dougie, there’s no way he can get it up and down twice in the same day from that bunker. I’m going to the middle of the green.’ He hits a 4-iron about 40 feet and he’s away. He putts it down to 2 or 3 inches. Middlecoff gets in the bunker, takes a swing, the ball doesn’t come out. PGA’s over with.”

Ford won his second major championship in the 1957 Masters, overtaking Sam Snead with a final round of 66 to Snead’s even par 72. At the 18th Ford plugged his approach into the face of the bunker short and left of the green. Appearing about as apprehensive as Ted Williams staring at a hanging curveball, he strolled into the bunker and holed the shot. The next year, as the defending champion, he would finish tied for second and slip the green jacket onto first-time Masters champion Arnold Palmer.

That was the year Palmer was allowed to play a provisional ball on the 12th hole, a ruling that rankled Ken Venturi (who had been playing alongside Palmer) the rest of his life. Though Venturi never let it go, Ford never took it up. At the time, Fred Hawkins, who was second with Ford, was encouraged to protest the Palmer ruling. He sought out Ford, but the response he got was that Clifford Roberts and Bobby Jones had made the decision, and that was that. Ford already had a green jacket and with it came an added responsibility to the tournament. Besides, Ford reasoned, he’d missed birdie putts on both the 17th and 18th holes that, had he holed them, would have made the entire episode nothing more than a rules footnote. 

Years later, after Venturi wrote about Palmer’s plugged lie and the provisional ball, Ford was asked yet again for his opinion. “My dad just said, basically, he’d known and played with and against Arnold Palmer many years and he was an honorable man and he left it at that,” says Doug Jr.

Doug Ford Sr. was underrated as a ball-striker mostly because his short game was so profoundly admired. “The swing was three-quarter but it was very wide,” says Doug Jr. “My dad was very strong. He had great lower body motion, similar to what Hogan did. His ball-striking was never recognized as much because he was so good around the greens. He would laugh today when they talk about short-siding. He would go right at the pin, no matter what. He was so good because he had pure roll on the ball. When he would be around the green before a round, chipping, the guys would be watching him hit shots.”

Following his one-day stint as his father’s chair Sherpa, Doug Jr. spent most of his golf life in South Florida. He played the PGA Tour briefly in the middle ’70s, prior to the all-exempt days. “I wasn’t good enough to stick out there. I was a rabbit,” he says of the Monday qualifiers days. “One year I went to the Canadian Open they had about 120 guys for four spots. That was the way it was.” He taught at Sherbrooke Golf and CC and Harder Hall Golf Resort, both in South Florida. Later, with his father and younger brother, Mike, he was part owner of Lacuna Golf Club from 1991 to 2004 in Lake Worth. After that he taught at Deer Creek Golf Club in Deerfield Beach before moving to Pinehurst. Doug’s brother owns Jack O’Lantern Resort and Golf Course in Woodstock, New Hampshire, and his son, Scott, is also a golf pro.

After back surgery and hip replacement, Ford pretty much confines his teaching to the short game. And if you don’t think the knowledge of the father can be passed to the son, here are two words to remember: Butch Harmon. If you have trouble convincing yourself that there isn’t much to learn from someone who has a cane in their hand from time to time, try Googling pictures of Harvey Penick. “What I learned from my dad, just watching and playing, was club selection,” says Doug Jr. “You don’t always grab the sand iron when you miss the green. He believed in not changing the swinging motion but changing the club to fit the shot. The more green you have to work with, the less loft you use. You want to get the ball on the green and get it rolling. As far as the execution of the shot, you’ve got a short shot so you shorten the grip on the club. You have to get in position so your body is still. Things like that. Obviously, everybody’s a little different.”

Almost any teacher will tell almost any golfer that the quickest route to better scores is through the art of the short game, Ford’s specialty. “I’m going to give it a shot,” he says. “See if I can develop a clientele.” PS

Jim Moriarty is PineStraw’s Senior Editor and a former writer for Golf Digest.

The Phantom Ryder Cup

“If it doesn’t open, it’s not your door.”

By Lee Pace

With the Ryder Cup on tap for later this month, it’s fun and perhaps a bit revealing to hearken back to Pinehurst’s two Ryder Cups — the one in 1951 that did happen, as everyone knows, and the one in 2004 that did not happen that hardly anyone knows about.

Of the former, you’ve probably read that Pinehurst No. 2 was the venue for the biennial match pitting top pro golfers from the United States against the best from Great Britain and Ireland (that team expanding to include all of Europe in 1979). As competitions go, it was rather a snore. The Americans had Ben Hogan, Sam Snead and Jimmy Demaret. The GBI team featured a nice phonetic lilt with Arthur Lees and Dai Rees but not much more. The Yanks won in a landslide, 9 1/2 to 2 1/2.

So casual was the atmosphere at the time for the early November event that on Saturday’s day off (the format called for matches on Friday and Sunday) Snead drove to Florence, South Carolina, for an exhibition. Other golfers went to Chapel Hill for the UNC vs. Tennessee football game. And Pinehurst owner Richard Tufts was struck by how many members and guests were playing golf on courses 1, 3 and 4 while the Sunday singles matches were underway.

“America has become the senior partner, and Great Britain the junior partner,” the English golf writer Henry Longhurst opined. “This is it in the military, the economic and the golfing spheres of influence.”

Fast-forward nearly half a century to the late ’90s.

Pinehurst Resort & Country Club by then had been under the stewardship of Robert Dedman Sr. and ClubCorp for nearly 15 years, and Dedman and chief lieutenants Pat Corso (president and CEO) and Don Padgett Sr. (director of golf) had ushered the club and its renowned No. 2 course back into the front ranks of the national golf hierarchy. The last decade of the 20th century had seen the club host two successful PGA Tour Championships, one U.S. Senior Open and the 1999 U.S. Open, won in pulsating fashion by Payne Stewart on the last stroke of the championship. The golf course was outstanding (one-under-par won the title), and the village, Moore County and the state of North Carolina heaped the proceedings with oodles of sponsorship cash, manpower and energy.

“Perfect,” said Stewart, who lost his life four months later in a plane crash. “A perfect way to win. I think everyone in the field will attest to how great No. 2 is, what a special place this is. To win here means a lot to me.”

Corso and Padgett had no idea in the run-up to the event that the ’99 U.S. Open would turn out so well, but they knew that one successful Open might mean another championship 10 to 12 years down the road. Throughout the ’90s, they were casting about for other significant opportunities to keep the Pinehurst and No. 2 names in the nation’s ongoing golf conversation.

“We thought to stay in the public eye and keep moving the business forward, we needed to have events every two or three years,” says Corso, who ran the resort from 1987-2004. “Padge and I never, ever believed we could wait 10 years for another Open.”

Padgett’s roots and allegiances were with the PGA of America, which owns and runs the Ryder Cup. He was a longtime club pro in Indiana and had risen through the service ranks of the PGA, becoming a national officer in the early ’70s and president in 1977-78. Padgett was among the tight circle of PGA officials that, with the vocal support of Jack Nicklaus, correctly saw the Ryder Cup had become lopsided and made the decision after the 1977 matches to expand the Great Britain/Ireland team’s boundaries, giving it access to European stars-in-the-making like Seve Ballesteros of Spain and Bernhard Langer of Germany.

Those were the credentials that Padgett brought when he became director of golf at Pinehurst at the age of 62 in 1987 and was charged by Dedman and Corso with giving the resort the guidance, ideas and connections it needed to further the Pinehurst cause in top golf circles. Pinehurst forged new relationships with the USGA for its 1989 Women’s Amateur Championship and with the PGA Tour with the 1991-92 Tour Championships. And it was Padgett’s initiative that brought the PGA Club Professional Championship to Pinehurst in 1988 and again for a two-year run at the new No. 8 course in 1997-98.

“We were kind of on a dual path,” remembers Corso, today the executive director of Moore County Partners in Progress. “At that time, we hadn’t actually conducted an Open yet. There was one relationship with the USGA and another with the PGA. We had no idea which way it was going to go.”

Part of the master plan for the 1997-98 Club Pro commitment was to show the nation’s club professionals and instructors that Pinehurst could be an ideal venue for another Ryder Cup — even a half  century after the 1951 matches. Corso invited N.C. Gov. Jim Hunt to a dinner the week of the 1998 Club Pro where Jim Awtrey, the CEO of the PGA of America, would be attending.

“The governor dropped everything and came at the last minute,” Corso remembers. “He sat on one side of Jim Awtrey and I sat on the other. The governor was great. He was very passionate in telling Awtrey that this state wanted the Ryder Cup and asked what he could do to help.”

By 1998, Pinehurst had shown that the state’s corporate community would support a major golf championship. With leadership from its Governor’s Council — a blue-ribbon group of key business executives from across the state — Pinehurst had sold a record number of corporate sponsorships well in advance of the ’99 U.S. Open. The club had rebuilt the greens on No. 2 in 1996 with the top-echelon bent grass and a modern drainage system to ensure the greens would remain firm any time of the year.

It was all enough to convince the board of the PGA in the summer of 1998 that No. 2 would indeed be a terrific Ryder Cup venue for 2003, and Padgett got the good news from Will Mann, at the time the PGA’s president, who was backed by Vice President Jack Connelly, Secretary M.G. Orender and honorary President Ken Lindsay.

“It was all set and agreed upon,” says Don Padgett II, speaking for his father, who died in 2003. “The PGA board said, ‘We want to come to Pinehurst.’ Dad told everyone (at the ClubCorp corporate office) in Dallas it was a done deal.”

Unfortunately for Pinehurst, Awtrey had other ideas. Unbeknown to the board, he negotiated deals with Oakland Hills C.C. in suburban Detroit, Michigan, and Valhalla G.C. in Louisville, Kentucky, for future Ryder Cup and PGA Championship dates — Oakland Hills getting the 2003 Ryder Cup and 2008 PGA and Valhalla the 2007 Ryder Cup. (The Ryder Cup was subsequently set on an even-year schedule following the matches’ postponement in 2001 because of 9/11.) Awtrey informed the board at a meeting in Chicago and left Mann, at the time the owner of a golf course in Graham, N.C., with the uncomfortable task of backtracking with Padgett.

“Financially, the package was so strong that it was the right thing for the association,” Padgett II says of the deal with Oakland Hills and Valhalla. “But none of the officers knew anything about it. The staff had not given them a heads-up; they went into that meeting blind.

“In Dad’s career, it was probably the most heartbreaking thing for him. He’d worked successfully with the Tour and with the USGA. And then the organization he’d given his professional life to was the one that let him down. Not too many things bothered him like that.”

“Padge had such a great love for the PGA and affinity for the club pros,” Corso adds. “To have that happen really, really sucked the air out of his sails for a while.”

But not for long. Later that fall, Padgett Sr. was ruminating on the falling dominoes and found a bright spot.

“Some people say Pinehurst lost out,” Padgett Sr. said. “I’m not so sure but that the PGA lost out.

“I’d say this gives Pinehurst the opportunity to continue aligning itself with the USGA and its championships. Maybe the Open comes back to Pinehurst sooner than it would have. Maybe Pinehurst gets a U.S. Amateur. Maybe the Walker Cup. I personally believe Pinehurst would be a terrific place to hold the Walker Cup.”

Indeed, the die was cast. Within eight months of the Payne Stewart Open, the USGA announced it was returning in 2005. Now over two decades, Pinehurst has hosted a slew of USGA events — the 1999, 2005 and 2014 Opens; the 2008 U.S. Amateur with another to return in 2019; the 2014 Women’s Open; and the 2017 Men’s Amateur Four-Ball. The Open returns in 2024.

And the third weekend in September 2004 was just another fall golf holiday at Pinehurst as the pros fought it out hundreds of miles away outside Detroit. The European team handily dispatched an American squad remembered for the ham-handed leadership of captain Hal Sutton and a dysfunctional pairing of Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson.

No one knew it at the time back in 1998, but it would all work out fine for everyone involved. Well, except Sutton. Maybe he wished that Ryder Cup had been in Pinehurst, the town of his 1980 U.S. Amateur win at the Country Club of North Carolina. PS

Chapel Hill-based writer Lee Pace has written about Pinehurst for three decades and authored four books about the resort, most recently The Golden Age of Pinehurst in 2014.

Homegrown Passion

Teacher, player, coach and friend — SCC’s Gus Ulrich is a man on a mission

By Lee Pace

The northwest end of the driving range at Pinewild Country Club is Gus Ulrich’s ultimate playpen. There’s plenty of hitting turf, a practice green and bunker, and a concrete surface with a mat that makes it easy to videotape golfers taking lessons. He’s got a handful of training aids like the Orange Whip and homemade swing plane guides made of old golf shafts and polyethylene swimming pool noodles. Inside the building alongside is a workbench to replace grips, a couple of clubfitting carts, a computer monitor to view those videos just shot outside, and an array of posters, books and photographs illustrating Ulrich’s singular devotion to the sport of golf.

He’s just 3.5 miles from the village of Pinehurst, where his wife bartends at the historic Pine Crest Inn, and from the venerable No. 2 course at Pinehurst Resort and Country Club, the site of three U.S. Opens, one PGA Championship and a Ryder Cup. And he’s just 7 miles from Sandhills Community College, where he latched on in 2008 as golf coach when the school formed a team to compete in the National Junior College Athletic Association (and winning a national title in 2014).

“I just love it here,” says the 55-year-old Ulrich, one decade into his stint as director of the Pinewild Golf Academy. “You know, Pinehurst and Pinewild are perfect for me. I’m a golf nut and I love golf.

“I love to teach it.

“I love to play it.

“And I’ve gotten to love coaching it. So it’s been a good spot for me and for my kids to have grown up here. I’ve loved every minute of living here.”

If the old saw is true that if you “choose a job you love, you’ll never have to work another day in your life,” then Ulrich has been in playground recess all his life. And gotten paid for it.

“Gus just has a love for golf, probably unlike anybody I’ve ever seen,” says Kelly Mitchum, a teaching pro at Pinehurst and Ulrich’s longtime partner in Carolinas PGA Section team competitions.

Ulrich grew up in Garner and learned to play golf around age 11 at Garner Country Club, a nine-hole course. He was a walk-on for the N.C. State golf team and, he says,  “scraped and clawed” his way into the starting lineup as a senior in the spring of 1985. He competed in several PGA Tour Qualifying Schools in the late 1980s — missing his card by one shot in 1987 and three shots in ’88 — and then spent two years on the Hogan Tour (today’s Web.com Tour) full time in 1991-92.

“I came real close to getting on tour but never quite made it,” he says. “I think I’ve got a really good short game, and my ball-striking has actually improved over the years. But I was always just average off the tee. If I could have been 15 to 20 yards longer, I think it would have made a difference.”

Ulrich gave up chasing the pro tour in 1993 and started his teaching career and working toward his PGA membership at a driving range and par-3 course near Garner. Several jobs later, he was offered an assistant pro position at Pinewild, where he worked for four years. Then he went to teach at Forest Creek Golf Club and Pine Needles before coming back to Pinewild in 2008 to run the Pinewild teaching operation.

He gravitated toward the instruction end of the business — as opposed to becoming a head pro, general manager or sales job of some sort — because it was the best way to stay connected to the grassroots of the game.

“You’re around the driving range or putting green or golf course all the time,” he says. “Or at least 90 percent. I love the game and just wanted to stay close to it.”

Ulrich became friends with Sandhills Community College President John Dempsey while giving him lessons at Forest Creek more than a decade ago. Ulrich joked that if Dempsey ever started a golf team at Sandhills, he’d love to coach it. Dempsey took him up on that in 2008, and the Flyers finished second in national competition in 2013 and ’15 and took first place in between.

“The term golf professional kinda rolls off the tongue without really thinking about it, but Gus is truly a professional,” Dempsey says. “He’s not only a good player — and he’s a very, very, very good player — and a good teacher, but he’s a good ambassador for the game and the kind that people want to be around. He’s the kind of person our kids want to be around.

“He’s a gentleman and a gentle man. There are not many higher compliments than to call someone a ‘gentleman’ and be able to split that into two distinct words. He is a gentle person. Gus is a great addition to our team and to this community’s golf culture.”

Ulrich’s playing resume is impressive. Of late he’s played in two U.S. Senior Opens and two Senior PGA Championships; he missed the cut by one shot at the Senior Open at Scioto Country Club in Columbus, Ohio, in 2016, and at the Senior PGA at Trump National in Washington, D.C., the following year. He won the Carolinas PGA Section title in 2011 at the Ocean Course at Kiawah Island and was Section Senior Player of the Year in 2016 and ’17.

Ulrich and Mitchum once shot a 57 in a two-man scramble format in the Carolinas Pro-Pro at Dormie Club, including a double-eagle on the par-5 fifth hole with Ulrich holing out a 5-iron from 205 yards. They won the Pro-Pro in 2004 and 2011. Mitchum remembers one time in a scramble hitting a 55-yard wedge to one foot and then watching Ulrich jar it right behind him.

“At our level, he’s probably the best partial wedge player I’ve ever seen,” Mitchum says of the 25-to-75 yard distances. “He’s got a beautiful wedge game. But Gus really has no weaknesses. He’s a solid ball-striker and knows how to manage his game around the course very well.”

Ulrich takes that feel and talent from his own short game and emphasizes it with the members at Pinewild and his other pupils — whether they are kids in a First Tee outing at Pinewild or his golfers at SCC.

“I stress short game for sure,” he says. “You almost have to pull them away from the range to do that a lot of times. But I do feel like with my skill level in the short game, I can share that and express that as well as anything. With golfers who are limited with physical ability, you can only do so much with the full swing. But you can overcome a lot with a great short game.”

In any given week or any given day, Ulrich might be competing, running a kids’ golf camp, handling recruiting or scheduling issues at SCC, or working on his own game.

“I’ve got my hands full,” he says with a smile. “I stay busy with the whole gamut. I thought I’d lose my desire to play as I got older, but it hasn’t happened. I feel like I keep getting a little bit better. The age is going to catch me at some point, and maybe I feel like I just don’t want that to happen, so I work harder and harder.

“I’m just trying to share my passion for the game with as many people as I can and hopefully encourage them to play. To me, it’s all about sharing the game.” PS

Chapel Hill-based writer Lee Pace has been chronicling the Sandhills golf scene in PineStraw since 2008.

Golftown Journal

Four by Two

Hanse and Wagner reshape Pinehurst’s No. 4 course

By Lee Pace

The bar was set quite high indeed for this new No. 4 golf course at Pinehurst Country Club when it opened in 1919, commissioned by Pinehurst owner Leonard Tufts and designed by the Scottish architect Donald Ross.

“It is perhaps the best laid-out course of the whole bunch, and when more thoroughly trapped will tax the skill of the wariest golfer,” noted the Pinehurst Outlook in early December 1919.

Later in the month, the newspaper added: “Mr. Ross is warm in his praise of the No. 4 course which is now a complete eighteen hole affair, and he states that he considers it will be the best golfing proposition of all when it has been fully trapped and the fairgreens developed.”

Best golfing proposition? Lofty praise indeed, though admittedly coming well before the No. 2 course was expanded, revised, remodeled and amped up in the mid-1930s when the prideful Ross was irked of hearing about some upstart course in Augusta, Georgia.

The No. 4 course followed the opening of No. 1 in 1899, No. 2 in 1907 and No. 3 in 1911. From the main clubhouse, No. 3 was set essentially to the west, across Hwy. 5, No. 1 to the south, No. 2 to the east, and No. 4 was tucked to the southeast between No. 2 and 1, much as it is today. Maps indicate that in the very early days of No. 2, three holes peeled off from what is now the 10th green and ran into an area that would later comprise No. 4, then rejoined the current routing at the 11th hole. The large 5-acre lake that has been the primary visual feature was originally much smaller.

No. 2 evolved into its status as one golf’s grandest venues when Ross arrived at its current routing in 1935 and replaced the sand/clay greens with Bermuda grass, and it was deemed at nearly 7,000 yards to be one of the strongest, most severe tests for the elite golfer. It has remained so over nearly a century and in the last two-plus decades has hosted three U.S. Opens and a U.S. Women’s Open.

But being the last to arrive, No. 4 was the first to stumble when difficult economic times arrived in the 1930s, the first domino falling in what would become a checkered existence.

The Tufts family closed nine holes of the course in 1936 and shut down the remaining nine in 1939. Then, when better times arrived after World War II, Richard Tufts, Leonard’s son who had now ascended to the presidency of Pinehurst Inc., tweaked nine of the original holes and they were opened back in 1950. A complete 18-hole course followed three years later.

When the Diamondhead Corporation, Pinehurst’s new owners, enticed the PGA Tour to hold a 144-hole event at the club in 1973, a second course was needed as a venue along with No. 2, and Robert Trent Jones, who had become a Moore County landowner with a parcel bordering Pinehurst Country Club and the Country Club of North Carolina, was retained to lengthen and strengthen the course for the professionals. Then a decade later, son Rees Jones authored yet another renovation — the crux of the project the rebuilding of all the greens to be more receptive to the longer tee shots his dad had integrated years before.

“No. 4 had become a hybrid of designers and ideas with no thread to tie it all together,” Pat Corso, Pinehurst’s president and CEO from 1987-2004, said in 1998.

As he spoke, Tom Fazio and his team were busy at work rebuilding and shaping the course toward yet another iteration. The new No. 4 that opened in December 1999 was routed through essentially the same corridors as the earlier course, but holes were rearranged and Fazio integrated a British flavor of a myriad of pot bunkers as a nod of the cap to Ross, the Scottish designer.

The course also embraced the design flavor of the era: It was green, and it had smooth, soft edges, and there were flower beds in several nooks and crannies, most notably the slopes around the green of the par-3 fourth hole.

All of that was fine until 2011, when No. 2 next door was given a new set of bones and coat of paint courtesy of the design team of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw. The Deuce had also become sleek and glossy in the golf world’s creep toward the standards set by Augusta National. Don Padgett II, the Pinehurst president and COO at the time, slammed on the brakes and charged Coore and Crenshaw to return the club’s pride and joy to its sandy, linksy, disheveled self that Ross had molded with his native Scotland in mind.

The more No. 2 has succeeded over a half dozen years from contexts of visuals, playability, maintenance and fidelity toward Pinehurst’s past, the more No. 4 paled by comparison. Thus the decision in 2016 by Pinehurst owner Robert Dedman Jr. and Tom Pashley, who succeeded Padgett in 2014, to hire Gil Hanse and partner Jim Wagner to rebuild No. 4. The course closed in October 2017 and Hanse set about his face-lift, his sleeping quarters over the winter being the Ross Cottage by the third hole of No. 2. The new course was sodded and sprigged by early June, and this month is growing in toward a September reopening.

“It all started with Coore and Crenshaw,” Hanse says. “They were brought in to bring back the character and to restore the sandy waste areas and Ross’ vision for what Carolina Sandhills golf looks like. We’ve carried that a little further in this presentation. It’s not a tribute course to Ross or course No. 2. But we feel it will be a good companion golf course.”

The corridors from the old course were used but several shifts in holes were made. Two of the par-3s have been altered substantially. The green on the fourth hole has been moved from well below the tee and beside the lake to a higher elevation farther to the left, with a sharp slope now cascading to the right toward the water. The sixth green was elevated and substantial sandscaping integrated around it. The old 12th hole was abandoned in favor of a new par-3 built into the woods, sitting in a triangle between the previous seventh, 10th and 11th holes.

“The characteristic about No. 4 that is most special is the land. It has some of the most dramatic contours on the entire site,” Hanse says. “On No. 2, holes four and five and 13 and 14 are the most dramatic in terms of topography. I think we’ve eight or nine that have that element. That gives us the opportunity to create very dramatic landscaping and more picturesque landscaping. The new course has something of the look and feel of No. 2 and returns a more natural connection to the landscape.”

Another interesting twist is creating a massive waste area on the par-5 ninth hole similar to the “Hell’s Half Acre” at Pine Valley. Golfers will traverse a sandy area dotted with wiregrass, broom sedge and other wild growth for some 80 yards on their second shot.

The designers and their construction company transplanted thousands of wiregrass plants from the site of the abandoned Pit Golf Links on N.C. 5 near Aberdeen and also moved “chunks” of dirt, sand and vegetation from the site as well. They scooped out sections of ground roughly 2-feet wide by 4-feet long, moved them intact to the No. 4 course and placed them around bunkers. Then a shaper followed and tucked them into the surface, the result hopefully looking like ground that has aged and weathered for years.

Just like No. 2 looked after Coore and Crenshaw took aim in 2010-11.

Just like Mid Pines, another Ross relic from the 1920s, looked after Kyle Franz restored it in 2013.

“What Jim and I focused on was creating something that is going to look and feel and be sort of philosophically in line with the playable characteristics that Ross embraced at Pinehurst,” Hanse says. “The golf course will capture more of that look, that look that Kyle Franz did at Mid Pines. There is an excitement around Pinehurst about recapturing that ‘Pinehurst look.’”

Noting that at Pinehurst “our history is our road map to the future,” Pashley adds that a halfway house will be built alongside the fifth hole of No. 4 and will also serve golfers coming off the 10th green of No. 2 nearby. The architectural model will be the original Pinehurst clubhouse from 1900 — two stories with an observation deck. Coming full circle seems to be an enduring theme at Pinehurst.  PS

Author Lee Pace wrote extensively of the Coore and Crenshaw restoration of Pinehurst No. 2 in his 2012 book, The Golden Age of Pinehurst — The Rebirth of No. 2.

Patriot Games

Building on a tradition of success

By Lee Pace

Pinehurst is where the golf architectural genius of Donald Ross sprouted. It’s where thousands of visitors in the 1910s and ’20s were first exposed to golf, were smitten and spread the idea for new courses in their hometowns across the Northeast and Midwest. The No. 2 course at the resort has been host to the U.S. Open (men and women), the U.S. Amateur (men and women), the Ryder Cup and PGA Championship.

There are 40 golf courses within Moore County and a sand wedge of its border.

So why shouldn’t the area be home to one of North Carolina’s juggernaut high school golf teams?

Pinecrest High School has won the boys 4-A state title four of the last six years and collected three in a row from 2015-17. The Patriots finished fifth in the most recent state competition, with Raleigh Broughton taking the championship while Pinecrest’s A.J. Beechler won his second consecutive individual title.

“We broke open the floodgates my senior year, and it seemed to really set the tone for what was to come with future teams,” says Zach Martin, a member of the 2013 state championship team who went on to play at the University of North Carolina. “The success builds on itself. This run of state championships is pretty strong.”

The Patriots’ remarkable stretch of success in both the boys’ and girls’ programs began two decades ago when one of the staff golf professionals at Pinehurst Resort and Country Club was frustrated that there was no golf team at West Pine Middle School. Rich Wainwright wanted a team that his son John, a sixth-grader, could play on and begin to develop his game. So Wainwright volunteered to start a team, hoping John and his friends would be motivated to continue the game into high school at Pinecrest.

“I remember having a lot of fun with it,” says John, who is now 32, and is a golf instructor and tournament director for U.S. Kids Golf in Southern Pines. “A lot of guys got the bug then. Once our team started, we bonded and became lifelong friends. We had golf to talk about during the school day, and it was fun getting out of school for golf matches. That bond and that structure helped when we went to high school.”

When John moved to high school, Wainwright began volunteering as a coach for the Pinecrest team in 2000 and has been the Patriots’ “co-coach” ever since, working with high school staffers Sandy Sackmann, Jennifer Kearney and Lynne Beechler through the years. Wainwright enjoyed his experiences teaching juniors at the club dating back to the 1980s and was further motivated by his boss at Pinehurst, the late Don Padgett Sr., who was a longtime proponent of junior golf and was the resort’s director of golf from 1987-2002.

“Rich always loved to work with youth; he had a drive and enthusiasm to work with young people,” says Ken Crow, who was also on the Pinehurst staff at the time and now has a son, Benjamin, on the Pinecrest team. “Back in the ’80s, Rich was the guy having the most fun in junior clinics, encouraging them to get better.”

Wainwright remembers commiserating with Padgett in the early 2000s over a patch of high scores posted in recent competitions. Padgett, as he was wont to do, leaned back in his office chair overlooking the putting green to the south side of the Pinehurst clubhouse and addressed Wainwright by his nickname, Red.

“Red, just have ’em putt,” Padgett advised. “Teach those kids the short game. Have ’em pitch the ball over that row of bushes and see who can get it closest.”

The light popped on in Wainwright’s head. For going on two decades now, it’s been all about the short game — sage advice not only for high school golf teams but rank-and-file golfers of every shape, size and era.

“If these kids have good short games, we can win most tournaments,” Wainwright says. “I do very little to nothing in the full swing. We do a lot of situational short game practice.”

Golfers coming through the program remember all the 5-foot putts at sundown, their stomachs growling for dinner and the pressure of having to make x-number in succession so everyone could go home.

“We learned a lot about playing under pressure,” Martin says. “Everyone on the team would have to make, like, 10 putts in a row before anyone could go home. You don’t want to be the guy who misses and keeps everyone there to putt another round.”

Sometimes Wainwright will have his golfers hole out a chip before they can leave or even jar two from a bunker before calling it a day. He’ll set up recovery shots from the woods and encourage his golfers to envision a shot with a 7-iron and another with a pitching wedge.

“He’s a numbers guy,” Martin says. “Golf comes down to the short game when you want to score well. He definitely puts a lot of importance on it. It’s paid off the last few years.”

“Dad’s gotten pretty good teaching guys how to play the game of golf better,” John says. “He doesn’t spend too much range time. It’s all about how to get the ball in the hole. How do you still score when you’re not having your best day at ball-striking? It’s been neat to watch him evolve.”

It’s obviously worked well. Pinecrest won the girls’ state title in 2001 and 2016 and the boys’ in 2006, 2013, 2015, 2016 and 2017, and more than a dozen golfers have advanced to play collegiately.

Joshua Martin followed older brother Zach to Chapel Hill. Jack Fields and Robert Riesen also played at Carolina, Eric Bae at Wake Forest and Josh Stockwell at UNC Greensboro. This year’s boys’ team has four players going to Division I schools in Benjamin Crow and Symon Balbin to UNC Greensboro and A.J. Beechler and Attie Giles to East Carolina.

Among the top girls’ players have been Josie Shinn at UNC, Gabrielle Weiss at James Madison, Elizabeth Nguyen at Georgetown and Mackenzie Battle at The Citadel. Wainwright is particularly high on sophomore Jaclyn Kenzel and senior Lorin Wagler on this year’s team.

The environment has helped attract golfers who otherwise might not have been in Pinehurst. Bae, who was born in South Korea, was living in Raleigh when he made the decision to fully commit to becoming an elite golfer, and moved to Pinehurst to live with his adopted uncle.

“If you want to get good at golf, where better place to be than Pinehurst?” asks Bae, who earned a starting position as a freshman last spring at Wake Forest and is a sophomore now. “Playing for Pinecrest was an awesome experience. I enjoyed every minute of it. Guys like Joshua Martin and A.J. were really competitive; it helped me improve as a player. Coach Wainwright created a really good environment for me to improve.”

In mid-April, the Patriots were playing a match at Pinehurst No. 8, the scene of their 2015 state title, when Bae eagled the par-5 17th and then birdied 18 to secure the championship. Giles had a 50-yard wedge shot and knocked it in the hole for an eagle.

“Coach, I channeled my ‘inner Eric Bae,’” Giles told Wainwright.

Wainwright texted Bae and told him, “You’re still helping us win golf tournaments.”

That’s the way it goes in championship athletic programs — success begets success. A culture is created and grows on itself.

“I’ve had a lot of fun,” Wainwright says. “I like to win. My goal is 10 state championships. We’re closing in on it.”  PS

Chapel Hill-based writer Lee Pace has been chronicling the Sandhills golf scene in PineStraw since 2008.

Time Capsule

A hall devoted to Carolinas golf history

By Lee Pace

Pinehurst in the 1970s was the repository of the United States’ most impressive golf museum. The $2.5 million structure christened in 1974 as the World Golf Hall of Fame loomed behind the fourth green of Pinehurst No. 2 and featured bronze busts of its honorees, a replica Scottish clubmaker’s shop and all manner of memorabilia. Alas, the building cost too much to operate and visitors to Pinehurst would rather play golf than study its history, so the museum was bought by the PGA of America, closed in the early 1990s, moved to St. Augustine and reopened there in 1998. The building was eventually razed, and that parcel today is owned by Pinehurst
Resort and sits vacant, awaiting possible development.

That has left the Tufts Archives in the village of Pinehurst and Heritage Hall in the Resort Clubhouse at Pinehurst as the area’s nods to the rich golf history that has been building here since Dr. Leroy Culver staked out the first nine holes in 1898, drawing on his visions and notes from a recent visit to St. Andrews, Scotland.

The Tufts Archives, an adjunct of the Given Memorial Library, chronicles the development of the village and resort with maps, photos, postcards, letters, and assorted documents and displays. Less than half a mile away, Heritage Hall runs from the front door of the clubhouse back to the golf shop and salutes Pinehurst’s rich competitive history — particularly through the boards listing winners of its prestigious North and South Amateur and long-defunct North and South Open.

The Sandhills’ newest development in the museum arena is the Xan Law Jr. Hall of History that opened in February in the Carolinas Golf Association’s headquarters in Southern Pines. The CGA, which celebrated its centennial in 2009, opened Carolinas Golf House in 2014 across Ridge Road from Pine Needles Lodge & Golf Club and set aside 1,500 square feet for an eventual museum.

CGA Executive Director Jack Nance and the association’s Executive Committee then set about raising approximately $1 million for the museum and decided to name it in honor of the Charlotte businessman and avid golfer who died in 2016 shortly after a watershed fundraising dinner that gave the museum an important underwriting base.

“Golf, like life, is a puzzle to be worked on but never solved,” Law said that evening.

The CGA retained the services of Andy Mutch, a former USGA museum director who, for the last 17 years, has operated Golf Curator Inc. in assisting clubs and associations organize, document, preserve and display their heritage.

“I was struck by how tight the golf network is in the Carolinas,” Mutch says. “Jack made calls to people who knew people who donated artifacts. We were able to acquire a museum full of authentic original artifacts — not loans or purchases, but donations — which was amazing. Even the folks at the USGA were incredulous that the only real loans we had for the entire Hall of History were from them. We were able to build a pretty serious museum of North and South Carolina golf history through this close network of committed CGA golfers. I think this authenticity comes through when you see the displays.”

A visit to the Hall of History can take from 30 to 60 minutes or longer, depending on how closely you delve into the photos and descriptive text at each of the displays. Here is the story behind the story of five of the artifacts on display:

• The 1910 Carolinas Amateur contestants photo. The CGA was founded in October 1909 in Charleston and scheduled its inaugural Carolinas Amateur for the following June at Sans Souci Country Club in Greenville, South Carolina. One of the first images you’ll see in the Hall of History is a massive blown-up group shot of 23 of the contestants on the front steps of the clubhouse, the gang accented with bow ties, a cigarette or cigar in many hands and mouths, and bowler or straw boat hats on many heads. There are enough grins and bad posture to indicate the golfers have flubbed a few shots of golf and slaked a few shots of adult beverages. “On the final night, two hardy contestants commenced their next day’s contest in the bar room and left there for the first tee in the morning. One is reported to have broken five clubs in the first nine holes,” reported the local newspaper.

• Peggy Kirk Bell’s Titleholders Blazer. The jacket is made of green velvet and was young Peggy Kirk’s prize for winning the 1949 Titleholders — a tournament on the fledgling women’s professional tour held at Augusta Country Club and modeled in the fashion of the Masters at nearby Augusta National. It was Peggy’s only professional win, and in time she would focus on the resort and golf teaching business with husband Warren “Bullet” Bell at Pine Needles, which they began running in 1953 and later purchased outright. In recognition of that Titleholders win, the Bells acquired the rights to the tournament in 1972 and moved it for one year to Pine Needles, with Sandra Palmer winning. Today a 40-inch bronze statue in the shape of the Titleholders crown logo still hangs in front of the Pine Needles entrance.

• Paul Simson’s Ping Zing Putter. The Raleigh insurance executive arrived at Yeamans Hall outside Charleston in the fall of 1990 for the Carolinas Mid-Am and discovered he’d left his Ping Zing putter at home. Fellow competitor Vic Long said he just happened to have that very model in the trunk of his car that Simson could use. Simson liked the feel and function of the putter and won by five shots, breaking through after years of second-place finishes. “That opened the floodgates,” Simson says. “If a putter feels good and you win with it, how am I going to change?” Long gave Simson the putter in return for two dozen golf balls, and Simson used the club for many of his 33 CGA victories — giving it up finally in 2012 for a more modern version of the same putter.

• Lionel Callaway display case. Donald Ross as an architect, Richard Tufts as an administrator — those leaders in early 1900s American golf are well known. Not as visible was Lionel Callaway, who was the teaching pro at Pinehurst for some 40 years in the mid-1900s. Today the Callaway Handicap System exists as a method for scoring golfers without established handicaps in competition. Callaway is also credited with developing putting cups with collapsible sides, grip molds to encourage proper hand placement on the club, practice nets and the standard of selling golf balls in packages of three. A variety of artifacts including photos, a scrapbook, his PGA of America membership cards and a handicapping gauge are collected under glass in the Hall of History.

• Ben Hogan at Biltmore Forest photo. One of the best pictures on display is a gem from a gray day in the 1940s when Hogan is captured teeing off in front of a well-dressed and attentive gallery in the Land of the Sky Open, held in Asheville from 1933-51. North Carolina was a key juncture in the evolution of Hogan’s career. He was winless through eight years of pro golf when he came to Pinehurst in March 1940 for the North and South Open. He finally won, then went to Greensboro and on to Asheville for three consecutive victories. In three tournaments, Hogan played 216 holes 34-under-par, breaking par 11 of 12 rounds. “I won just in time,” Hogan later reflected on his remarkable trilogy. “I had finished second and third so many times I was beginning to think I was an also-ran. I know it’s what finally got me in the groove to win.”  PS

The museum is open during regular CGA business hours, 8:50 to 5:00 Monday through Friday.

Chapel Hill-based writer Lee Pace authored the CGA’s centennial commemorative book, Golf In The Carolinas, which was published in 2008.

The Raynor Touch

Remembering Donald Ross’ greatest rival

By Lee Pace

Golfers in these parts speak of Donald Ross as if he’s a next-door neighbor or first cousin. And why not? Just a few generations ago, he was building seven golf courses in Moore County, running the Pine Crest Inn and hopping the nearest train to head south to Palm Beach or north to Rochester to lay out another showpiece. In North Carolina alone, you can’t sling a 7-iron without landing on a Ross design.

That said and his immense talents acknowledged, how fun might it have been for the golf world if Ross, who designed an estimated 385 courses over nearly half a century, had had to compete mano a mano with another architect with a similar background in agronomy and construction?

Someone like Seth Raynor, for example?

In 1923, officers at the Country Club of Charleston were moving their course from a site north of the city to a new location on James Island, just across the Ashley River from the Battery. They retained Olmsted Brothers landscape designers, the second-generation offshoot from the esteemed Frederick Law Olmsted, to develop a master plan, and one letter from Olmsted staff to club leadership read as follows:

“Suggestions.  (1) Golf Architect: Ross best known so his name probably has best advertising value. Raynor or some other good architect (Strong) probably easier to get when you want him and fees perhaps a little less.”

Raynor got the job there and another concurrent assignment at a new course being planned a dozen miles inland, Yeamans Hall Club. He designed both concurrently, and the Country Club course opened in May 1925 and Yeamans Hall in November.

Ross was prolific designing courses in the mid-to-late 1920s during stout economic times. But so was Raynor. His schedule in early 1926 was reflective of his popularity and the innate desire of any industrious businessman to take on as much work as reasonable.

Raynor’s first trip in early 1926 took him from his home on Long Island west to California by train. From there he took a boat to and from the island of Hawaii, then journeyed back across the nation by train to Florida. Under construction amid the palm trees of Oahu was Waialae Country Club, and within the dense forests of the California coast was the Dunes Course at Monterey Peninsula Country Club. There was a new venture at Monterey to plan for as well — an elite club to be known as Cypress Point. Raynor had been approached for the job through his Eastern connections with Marion Hollins, the 1921 U.S. Women’s Amateur champion who was tapped by Cypress  Point founder Samuel Morse to help plan and develop the club. In Florida, Raynor had already designed and built nine holes at the Everglades Club for Paris Singer, the heir to the sewing machine fortune, and his visit in early 1926 would be to fine-tune a new 18-hole layout for Singer to be known as North Palm Beach Country Club (it now exists as a Jack Nicklaus-signature course with no remnants of Raynor’s work).

The intense physical toll manifested itself on the train trip east when Raynor developed fever, coughing and chills — he had contracted pneumonia. He checked into the Helen Wilkes Resident Hotel in Palm Beach and died on Jan. 22, 1926. He was 51 years old.

“It was too much travel, too much work, too little relaxation,” one of his relatives later lamented.

One obituary notice in his hometown paper in Suffolk County, N.Y., was brief but lauded Raynor for his place in golf. “Mr. Raynor was internationally known for his genius in laying out golf courses and overcoming engineering obstacles in his work.”

And this from a tribute in the Metropolitan Golfer written by Gould Martin:

“It is the irony of life that every once in a while one who has risen to the very top of his chosen profession passes away from this existence with almost no contemporary notice. Seth J. Raynor was not only at the top of his profession but he was an artist, indeed a genius as well.”

And to think: Raynor developed these skills and nuances in a sport he didn’t play as a child and never even remotely mastered as an adult. He claimed that if he played too much golf, his courses would become too easy. He felt the ideal links should not come down to the playing level of a poor golfer.

Raynor actually worked less than two full decades in golf course design and construction, roughly half that time as an associate of Charles Blair Macdonald and the rest under his own shingle. He’s credited with nearly 50 designs by Ron Whitten and Geoffrey Cornish in their book The Golf Course, and four of his courses are listed in the Golf Digest Top 100 rankings for 2017-18 — Fishers Island, Camargo, Shore Acres and Yeamans Hall, as is one he was intimately involved in building for Macdonald, National Golf Links, and another he remodeled years later, Chicago Golf Club.

Macdonald in 1906 decried the lack of sophisticated golf venues in the States, saying, “As yet we have no first-class golf course comparable with the classic golf courses in Great Britain and Ireland.” He proposed to solve the problem himself by buying land on the eastern extreme of Long Island and building a links-style course that would become the National Golf Links of America. Macdonald knew golf and he knew great holes. But he didn’t know construction, drainage, agronomy or greenkeeping.

“It was imperative I secure an associate, one well-educated with wide engineering capabilities, including surveying, companionable, with a fine sense of humor, but above all, earnest and ideally honorable. Such a man I found in Seth J. Raynor,” Macdonald said of retaining Raynor in 1907 to survey the site for his new course.

Raynor was born in Manorville, N.Y., and studied engineering at Princeton. He worked for himself as a land surveyor and landscaper in Southampton when Macdonald brought him into the National project — first to survey the land and then with an invitation to supervise construction once Macdonald learned of Raynor’s skills and meticulous work ethic.

“He scarcely knew a golf ball from a tennis ball when we first met,” Macdonald said, “and although he never became much of an expert in playing golf, the facility with which he absorbed the feeling which animates old and enthusiastic golfers to the manner born was truly amazing, eventually qualifying him to discriminate between a really fine hole and an indifferent one.”

Macdonald’s goal with the National was to help expose Americans to a quality golf experience like they would find overseas, and one of his ideas was to take the concepts for the well-known holes in Britain and adapt and tweak them for particular sites in the States. They became known as “template holes,” and Raynor would carry on the philosophy when he hung his own shingle in 1915 after Macdonald retired. Among them were the Short, Eden, Redan, Bottle, Sahara, Cape, Alps and many others.

Architect Tom Doak in his foreword to George Bahto’s book The Evangelist of Golf, the Story of Charles Blair McDonald, observed that “playing a course by Raynor or Macdonald is like visiting an old best friend — the familiarity returns almost instantly, even if you have never seen it before!”

Doak wondered if he was a hypocrite for finding it distasteful when modern architects repeat their own work while acknowledging a fondness when Macdonald and Raynor did the same thing. But he noted a distinct difference.

“Macdonald and Raynor were paying homage to a classic form, and at the same time, trying to devise improvements to it based on the local situation,” Doak wrote.

Raynor met with fortuitous timing in spreading his design wings after leaving Macdonald, as the United States was reaping the financial rewards of the Industrial Revolution and enjoying the heady economic times of the Roaring ’20s. Golf was growing in popularity, and Ross was handling a myriad of jobs, including the Pine Needles and Mid Pines projects in Southern Pines. There was plenty of work to go around.

Imagine what Seth Raynor might have accomplished had he not died so young.

“Sad to say he died ere his prime,” Macdonald wrote. “Raynor was a great loss to the community, but a still greater loss to me. I admired him from every point of view.”  PS

Chapel Hill-based writer Lee Pace is currently working on a history book for the Country Club of Charleston, set to be released prior to the club hosting the 2019 U.S. Women’s Open.