Golftown Journal

The Ross Trifecta

A new direction for an old gem

By Lee Pace

Despite the oft-told and entertaining story of Pinehurst founder James Walker Tufts commissioning a golf course in 1898 after learning that guests had brought their own clubs and balls and were hitting little rubber spheres in the dairy fields to the aggravation of the cows, evidence exists that golf was already being played elsewhere in the Sandhills.

Southern Pines was incorporated in 1887, and in 1895 the Piney Woods Inn opened on high ground northwest of the little town. The grand hotel built in the late Victorian style stood four stories high with ornate turrets atop the four corners of the structure and could accommodate 250 visitors. It offered golf, tennis and fox hunting for recreation, and a newspaper account in 1896 noted: “The golf links at Piney Woods start off immediately at the hotel. They consist of a nine-hole course — some fine natural hazards. The turf is firm and hard and kept in good condition.”

By 1906 another course was in operation on land to the south of the train depot and downtown. The evolution of Southern Pines Golf Club is a bit spotty, but the high points of a skeleton chronology include: nine holes open 1906; nine more by 1912; modifications in 1914; a third nine opened by 1924 with plans later in the decade for nine more (never executed amid the Great Depression); and sand greens converted to grass by the late 1930s.

The design and construction were supervised by Donald Ross, the Scottish golf majordomo ensconced in Pinehurst. By the end of the 1920s, Ross had seven courses operating in the Sandhills — four at Pinehurst Country Club, one at Mid Pines Inn and Golf Club (opened 1921), one at Pine Needles Lodge and Golf Club (1928) and Southern Pines.

A thread linking the three courses in Southern Pines is the flow of the land. Anyone who is a regular walker at any of the Southern Pines courses can attest to the strain of the fourth and 10th fairways at Pine Needles, up to the second and 14th greens at Mid Pines, and a half dozen holes at Southern Pines.

“The hills are rugged little mountains, giving all the charm desired to a climb or a walk in the pursuit of the game or in a ramble among the pine woods, where walks and roads and springs and forest foliage suggest the primeval,” read a passage in a 1920s print advertisement produced by Southern Pines Golf Club.

“Downtown Southern Pines is flat because it was located where the railroad ran, and it needed to stop on a flat part of the ground,” says Southern Pines resident and avid golfer Ran Morrissett. “But you get outside that little area and you start seeing quite a bit of land movement. Honestly, I think Southern Pines is the best block of land in Moore County. Think of these three courses — Mid Pines, Pine Needles, Southern Pines. Think of the land movement. To me, it’s the best topography in the area.”

Southern Pines Golf Club has existed for more than a century, first under the auspices of the town, then after World War II a Connecticut businessman named Mike Sherman (who employed a young accountant named Julius Boros), and finally over more than half a century The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, one of the world’s largest fraternal organizations.

Walter Hagen and Sam Snead played an exhibition there in 1924. The women’s Mid South Open was held there in the 1930s and ‘40s with Patty Berg, Estelle Lawson Page, Babe Zaharias and Helen Hicks among the competitors. But the course over much of its recent life has existed in relative anonymity as the Elks have had neither the financial nor management capital to elevate it to its potential.

“Quite honestly, the Elks have no business running a golf course,” says Chris Deanes, Exalted Ruler of the Elks. “We’re a volunteer organization that focuses on charity and giving money away. Running golf courses is not what we do.”

Which is why the news that the Elks have turned management and ownership over to the umbrella company that owns Pine Needles and Mid Pines is cause for celebration in the golf community. Kelly Miller, president and CEO of Pine Needles and Mid Pines, proposed to buy or lease the course as far back as 2005 to no avail with various other stabs ever since.

“It’s been a long chase,” says Miller, who first came to Southern Pines in 1984, when he married Peggy Ann Bell, daughter of Pine Needles owners Peggy Kirk and Warren Bell. “I have fond memories of playing Southern Pines years ago. We had a group of guys who played various courses around the area. Southern Pines was one of them.

“I’ve always thought it a wonderful golf course,” he continues. “It’s one of the best routings in the area. It has great topography and a set of par-3s that are unmatched anywhere. The club has a lot of fascinating history, and I think it’s a perfect fit for us.”

Pine Needles has been in the Bell family since 1953, and the Bells have been partners in owning Mid Pines since 1994. Miller and partners took over the keys to Southern Pines Golf Club effective July 1, 2020.

“We’re happy the course is going to a family that understands the golf course management business,” says Deanes. “Kelly and his partners truly appreciate the essence of the course and are committed to preserving it.”

Miller says an 18-month course improvement plan is being developed that might include any of the following: design tweaks from architect Kyle Franz, who has supervised restorations at Mid Pines (2013) and Pine Needles (2018); resurfacing the greens; and rebuilding the bunkers and cart paths.

News of the transaction struck a chord across the golf universe on social media.

“A massive addition!” enthused Ryan Hub. “I can’t wait to see what management has in store for Southern Pines. Extremely fun course with some awesome greens that will only get better with the new management.”

“This is fantastic news!” said Jake Weaver, a South Dakota golfer. “Southern Pines deserves ownership that ‘gets it.’ I can’t wait to get back and see it like it was meant to be.”

“The opportunity to do something magical here is immense,” said Tate Adkins, a Winter Park, Florida, golfer. “The restoration work at Pine Needles and Mid Pines was exceptionally well-executed. Massive fan.”

Morrissett and Chris Buie are regulars at Southern Pines and have sung the course’s praises online (Morrissett is co-founder of Golfclubatlas.com, a site devoted to course architecture and history) and in print (Buie is author of histories on both the Southern Pines Golf Club and Donald Ross).

“When in the Pinehurst area, head straight for this beauty — you will leave more invigorated than when you arrived,” says Morrissett.

“The fact that Ross was able to forge not only fascinating individual holes but a masterful collection was an impressive feat,” says Buie. “As the course measures under 6,400 yards, it is playable to virtually all. Yet even at this length the sharp players find it curiously resistant to scoring. And it is amusing to see the college teams which regularly pass through puzzling over this while wandering back to their vans.”

There is not a flat hole on the course, and level lies are found mostly on the tee boxes. The par-5 fifth requires a draw, the par-4 eighth and 10th demand a cut. The pins can be tucked in nefarious spots on the canted greens. The course can play 300 yards longer than posted because of numerous uphill carries. And the fact that the ninth hole doesn’t return to the clubhouse vouches for the routing being as good as the land offers; there was no artificial demand to route two separate nines.

And there is little real estate and no pretension.

“You have those brush-ups with the homes on four and five, but otherwise you are secluded in nature,” says Morrissett, who has taken numerous guests to Southern Pines over the years who have been nonplussed by the modest infrastructure but then wowed by the layout. “Even people surrounded by great golf in New Jersey and New York ‘get’ the relaxed atmosphere and low-key vibe the course evokes. It’s just a different experience.

“I swear to God in its own charmingly befuddled way, it reminds me of playing in the United Kingdom, where it’s nothing to do with the club experience or the bar or the men’s locker room. It’s all about changing shoes in the parking lot, a quick hello to the pro and then off to the first tee.”

Morrissett and Buie are devotees of the “golden hour” at Southern Pines, pegging it at 5 p.m. and finishing by dusk. Morrissett applauds the vision and golf chops of the new owners — with one caveat.

“My worry is this little relatively undiscovered gem gains in popularity to the point you need a traffic cop at 5 p.m.,” he says.  PS

Author Lee Pace has written about Pine Needles and Mid Pines clubs in his book Sandhills Classics, first published in 1996 and updated in 2009.

Golftown Journal

Jordan (Golf) Rules

The Last Dance on the first tee

By Lee Pace

Lew Ferguson opened the golf shop at Pinehurst No. 7 early one morning in June 1990 and exchanged pleasantries with the day’s first golfer to check in. The young man was waiting on the rest of his group to arrive, so he took the chair beside the counter in the golf shop and buried his head in his USA Today.

Another golfer walked in moments later and checked in with Ferguson. The man took note of the guy reading the newspaper, got a quick glimpse of his face and the long legs protruding from the chair. He mouthed in a whisper to Ferguson:

“Is that Michael Jordan?”

The man in the chair overheard the question. He dropped his newspaper to reveal his face.

“Yes,” said Michael Jordan, who then went back to reading his paper without another word. Sadly, what Jordan was reading was an account of his Chicago Bulls team having lost in the NBA Eastern Conference finals to the Detroit Pistons — less than 12 hours earlier.

Ferguson loves telling stories like these. The former head pro at No. 7 and later the director of golf at Pinehurst Resort and Country Club has a bunch of them where Jordan, his love of golf and the Pinehurst golf scene collide.

“The Bulls lost, their season was over, and Michael drove all night long and came straight to No. 7,” Ferguson says. “He rolls into the gate in a black Porche 911 with North Carolina plates and the number 23. I have to say, he was pretty sporty.”

Jordan’s life was dissected to the nth degree recently through the 10-part ESPN documentary The Last Dance. Cursory details of his passion for golf were presented, but the film hardly scratched the surface. With Pinehurst perched within reach of Jordan’s hometown of Wilmington and college headquarters in Chapel Hill, and with his former coach, Dean Smith, himself an avid golfer having many connections in the Sandhills, it’s easy to understand how Jordan found a deep presence in Pinehurst that exists today.

Ferguson made Smith’s acquaintance in the early 1980s when he was working at the Country Club of North Carolina under longtime pro Buck Adams. Smith would visit CCNC often to take lessons from Adams and play the club’s 36 holes. Ferguson had moved to No. 7 when he took a call from Smith one May afternoon in the late 1980s.

“Lew, I need a favor,” Smith said. “Michael needs a place to hide and play golf. Can you help?”

Ferguson secured tee times for Jordan and his entourage, and they would play dawn to dusk, sometimes with Smith joining the competition. Jordan became so enamored with No. 7 that a few years later, he listed it as his favorite course in an American Express commercial. Jordan occasionally ventured over to the main Pinehurst clubhouse for golf on No. 2, particularly when a large group of basketball coaches and players on the NBA and collegiate levels convened in an annual summer outing run by Smith and Doug Moe. Larry Brown, Julius Erving, Bill Raftery, Jerry West, Dave Gavitt and Billy Cunningham were among the regulars in the 1990s.

Brown and Moe were a fixture partnership, and Brown wryly remembers them playing Smith and Jordan at CCNC one year. There was some home construction underway next to one particular tee, and Brown recalls the workers taking respectful note of who was playing.

“When Coach and Michael stepped up to hit, everything got quiet,” Brown says. “You could hear a pin drop. They hit their shots, and then it was our turn. The commotion started right up. Doug and I hit with the hammers and saws going full blast.”

Brown remembers another time he and Jerry West were playing Jordan and Roy Williams, the coach who first recruited Jordan to Carolina in the early 1980s and took over leadership duties of the outing when Smith retired and later quit playing golf.

“Jerry was a really good golfer,” Brown says. “He was probably the best we ever had in our group. Jerry the whole time was trying to pump me up. Oh, man, that was an important match. Boy, was he competitive. All of us were, really. The golf course became a natural extension of the competitive nature that had served us all so well on the basketball court.”

It begs the question, who won the match?

“I remember, but I’ll keep that in the family,” Brown says.

Through the mid-1990s, Jordan visited Peggy Kirk Bell at Pine Needles, Adams at CCNC and Ferguson at Pinehurst until March 1997, when he made the discovery of a new private club on Meyer Farm Drive just northeast of the village. An early Forest Creek Golf Club member named Roy Mashburn was friends with Jordan and invited him to the club with the Tom Fazio-designed course that opened in 1996. Mashburn called Chuck Cordell, the club’s director of marketing and broker-in-charge, and asked him to play with them.

At the time, there few homes built and hardly anyone around. The course was a perfect green, having been over-seeded through the winter, and Fazio’s genius of routing the course through the rolling hills, pine forests and lakes left an indelible mark on Jordan.

“We had not even finished the front nine and Michael’s asking about joining and buying property,” Cordell says. “He said he only owned a house in Chicago and one at Hilton Head that he was fixing to sell. This was a perfect escape for him.”

That was a Wednesday. On Friday, Jordan was back at Forest Creek and looking at a blueprint of lots just opened along the 16th hole of what would be known as the South Course when the second 18, the North Course, opened in 2005. Cordell showed Jordan three lots and said, “One of these would work.”

“I’ll just take all three,” said Jordan.

“I thought he was kidding,” Cordell says. “But he was dead serious. So I said, ‘Well, you want to ride out and I’ll show them to you?’

“He gets that big ol’ smile of his and says, ‘How about we just go play golf and you show them from the golf course?’”

Cordell has seen Jordan break 70 on the Forest Creek South course from the back tees. Over many rounds with Jordan in various locales over more than two decades, he’s learned there are several constants on the golf course: You always play the tips. You always play for money — “whatever makes you nervous,” Jordan likes to say. And you always have to listen to his incessant chatter.

“The only thing that Michael did better than basketball was talking,” says Williams, who after returning to UNC as head coach in 2003, joined Jordan on the Forest Creek membership roster. “You’d better be on his team or he’d talk you to death. He could hit it a long way — sideways every now and then — and he had a nice touch. But you’d better be able to stand up to the lip.”

Jordan did in fact close on buying those lots and still owns the property today, though he’s never built a house on them. When he’s visited Forest Creek over the years — often bringing fellow pro sports and entertainment figures like Mario Lemieux, John Elway, Charles Barkley, Ahmad Rashad and Jack Wagner with him — he’ll stay in one of the club villas or a private home available for a short-term occupancy.

“I’ve always been delighted to see Michael come for a visit, and I’ve been delighted to see him go,” Cordell says with a laugh. “I was a dead puppy after three days. He’s up at 6 a.m. wanting to shoot pool. Then it’s 36 or 54 holes of golf. Then dinner, some wine and poker or more pool — until the wee hours. Then a little sleep and do it all over again.”

Sounds like Michael Jordan is Exhibit A of the golf nuts Pinehurst has been hosting for more than a century.  PS

Lee Pace has written about Pinehurst for more than three decades from his home in Chapel Hill. One of his forthcoming projects is a 25-year anniversary of Forest Creek, due out in 2021.

Golftown Journal

Trolley Line

The push and pull of golf

By Lee Pace

They are known as push carts, pull carts, caddie carts and trolleys. They are revered in some locales (e.g., the United Kingdom) and sniffed upon at others (many high-brow American clubs). They began as simple devices made of lawn mower tires mounted on a steel chassis and have evolved into high-tech gadgets powered by batteries and in some models with hands-free remote control.

But these gizmos that allow a golfer to walk the course but not have to carry his bag or employ a caddie are a key part of the walking landscape.

“At many clubs, players choose the carts because they are annoyed by the kid who smirks when a shot is missed,” noted a 1941 issue of Golfdom magazine.

“Caddies are scarce. Caddies are small. Caddies are arrogant,” noted another article.

Advertisements in Golfdom prove that these carts were available in the late-1930s and into the World War II years, when labor for caddies was restricted. One of the early models was dubbed the Kaddie Kart. Another early cart was conceived by Bruce Williamson in Portland, Oregon, in 1945, and evolved into the company that manufactured the Bag Boy Cart, which is still in existence though under a different owner.

“First a player will timidly try one and may feel a little self-conscious rolling the little cart along the fairways, but then he finds himself fresher and feeling better after his exercise,” a 1947 Golfdom article noted. “His shoulder does not ache and his scorecard shows better results.”

Sunningdale Golf Club outside London is a bucket list course for me, and a couple of years ago I noticed a Tweet from noted golf photographer David Cannon that showed Ernie Els and three golfers posing under a big tree outside the Sunningdale clubhouse. What caught my eye was the background — easily two dozen trolleys with bags on them idling between the building and the golf course. That’s the United Kingdom for you.

They hate “buggies,” as they call motorized carts. But they love “trolleys.”

“I don’t accept this stigma that a push cart is beneath a private club, because you go to Scotland and Ireland and Australia and all the top clubs have them,” says architect Gil Hanse.

“You can take a trolley at probably every course on the British Open rota, but you can’t at many of our top clubs in the States,” says former USGA Executive Director David Fay. “Something doesn’t add up.”

Trolleys are generally lumped into two categories: push carts have three wheels and pull carts have two. They are allowed today at top-rung golf destinations like Pinehurst, Bandon Dunes, Cabot Links and Streamsong, though policies vary on whether you can bring your own or use/rent one provided by the club. 

Through the 1970s and ‘80s, as batteries and gas overtook the human gait as the preferred means of traversing a course, Pinehurst Resort and Country Club remained true to its traditional roots by offering a “Walking Club” to members who gathered in the afternoons to walk and carry their bags on No. 2. Fay used the program as a template for a similar program the USGA instituted in the 1990s to encourage walking across the nation.

Thankfully, the walking tradition has been healthy at most courses in the Sandhills. Pinehurst maintains a thriving caddie program, and certainly a popular bucket list item for many golfers is to play No. 2 with a caddie. Members have been allowed for quite a while to walk any course at any time, and the resort in 2017 green-lighted hotel guests the option to walk and carry as well. Now push carts are available on all courses, including No. 2 and the recently redesigned No. 4. 

“We felt like walking is an important tradition in golf and something we should support,” says Director of Golf Ben Bridgers. “The trend has really changed the last few years. We’re seeing a lot of people grabbing their bag, throwing it over their shoulder or taking a pull cart. It’s pretty awesome. I played No. 4 recently, and that day you saw people carrying, taking a pull cart and taking caddies. Not many people walked No. 4 before the restoration. It’s going back in time; it has more of an old-time Pinehurst feel.”

Trolleys have become more prevalent in junior golf and college golf since 2008, when the American Junior Golf Association announced it would allow them in its competitions. Research by noted golf training entities such as the Titleist Performance Institute has revealed concerns about the constant grinding on the back and shoulders of golfers who carry their bags. 

“Carrying your clubs not only places a huge amount of compressive force on your spine, but also causes lactic acid buildup in the surrounding muscles, causing fatigue and injuries,” says Dr. Josh Nelson, a sports chiropractor and TPI consultant. 

Stanford University men’s golf team proved that push carts were here to stay on the collegiate golf level in the 2014 NCAA Championships when four of five Cardinal golfers used them. Stanford’s Cameron Wilson won that year’s individual title pushing a trolley. 

At the PGA Merchandise Show in Orlando in 2018, I met Thomas Reiter, who formed a company called Big Max Golf in 1994 at first to service golfers in Germany and Austria and then expanding across Europe. Reiter named the company after his first-born son, Max, and started with a two-wheel pull cart. But he soon noted the stress that the pulling motion placed on the arm and shoulder. 

“We were the first to weld a third wheel onto the two-wheel cart and turn it around,” Reiter says. “It was a simple change, but one that nobody had ever done before. It was less stressful on the arm, and it was easier to direct with the cart in front of you. We’d created the first three-wheel folding push cart.”

I tested the company’s flagship cart, the IP Blade, on several rounds in July 2019 and came away impressed with the engineering and the benefits of pushing a cart. The IP Blade fits compactly in the trunk of a car, folding to roughly 3-feet long by 2-feet wide by 3-inches deep. You take it from the car, and the three wheels fold out and the center console pops up. You adjust one lever to lock the console and you’re ready to go. The cart holds golf bags of any size with attachments high and low to keep the bag secure. There is an attachment for an umbrella and places to hold scorecards, tees, a GPS device and water bottle.

The cart pushes smoothly and can go almost anywhere you want to walk, though certainly not through traps or across greens. After 18 holes, my lower back wasn’t as sore nor my right shoulder stressed.

The company has been the leading trolley manufacturer for two decades now in Europe, where Reiter estimates 95 percent of golfers walk, and is gaining traction in the United States after opening a facility in Tacoma, Washington, in 2014. 

“We are trying to get golfers to realize that carrying your golf bag is bad for your body and your game,” Reiter says. “You don’t see Tour players carrying their bags around, do you?  By pushing a cart, you have time to contemplate your next shot, and you have more energy left over the closing holes. If you want a long, good golf career, you need to take good care of your body.”

The trolley has become more relevant in the golf world today in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic that has ravaged life in general and the golf universe in specific over the spring of 2020. Many of the courses that remained open restricted use of motorized carts, acknowledging that “social distancing” is more easily practiced by golfers walking a fairway. Forest Creek Golf Club, for example, remained open but required golfers to walk, and many members embraced the use of a push cart, which had previously not been allowed at the 36-hole facility 3 miles northwest of the village of Pinehurst. Coming out of the quarantine, the club is now allowing permanent use of push carts. 

And Big Max Golf saw a remarkable 800 percent jump in year-over-year unit sales of its Fold Flat push carts in March in states where golf was allowed during the pandemic. 

“One of the things I hope comes out of this is that more people will enjoy the walking game,” says Pinehurst President Tom Pashley. “I think that can be a nice outcome — more people walking the golf course.”  PS

Chapel Hill-based writer Lee Pace has written a book about the joys of walking some of the top courses in the Carolinas; the book is due out in 2021 from UNC Press. 

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.