Golftown Journal

The Boss

The wit and wisdom of Claude Harmon

By Lee Pace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Golftown Journal

Payne’s Last Stand

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

By Lee Pace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The answer was, quite a lot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Golftown Journal

Seventies Shooter

When the pros returned to No. 2

By Lee Pace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, P.J. would love the changes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Golftown Journal

Finding Peace

The many pleasures of walking a golf course

By Lee Pace

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

And find a good story at every juncture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Golftown Journal

In the Loop

No Pinehurst but plenty of character

By Lee Pace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Golftown Journal

The Game of the People

Build it and they will come

By Lee Pace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Golftown Journal

Fathers, Sons and Golf

A tradition like no other at CCNC

By Lee Pace

The world of golf is chock-full of great father-son stories. Fourteen of the first 30 Open Championships beginning in 1860 were won by fathers and sons from two families — the Willie Parkses (Sr. and Jr.) and the Tom Morrises (Old and Young). Arnold Palmer learned to play from his father, Deacon, the greenkeeper and pro at Latrobe Country Club, and they played golf together on junkets to Pinehurst. Jack Nicklaus nervously ambled around Pinehurst No. 2 in 1985, watching his son Jack II win the same North and South Amateur title the elder Nicklaus had won 26 years earlier.

This summer will mark the 50th rendition of the Sandhills’ oldest tradition invoking dads and their boys. The Country Club of North Carolina’s National Father-Son Invitational was conceived by noted amateur golfer Dale Morey, and the first one was held on the Dogwood Course at CCNC in 1970.

“We think with the quality of golf courses and the tradition we have, the Father-Son is one of the special tournaments in all of amateur golf,” says CCNC Director of Golf Jeff Dotson. “We’ve had teams come from across the country, and it truly is a national event.”

CCNC opened in 1963 on land just to the southeast of Pinehurst Resort and Country Club, and was conceived as Moore County’s first true private golf club and one viewed as a weekend and leisure escape for businessmen and avid golfers from across the state and beyond. Willard Byrd and Ellis Maples designed what would be known as the Dogwood Course. The first nine holes of the Cardinal Course followed in 1970, with nine more added in 1981.

Donald and Jeffery Hall won the inaugural event and were followed in 1971 by Tom and Tom Kite Jr. — the latter at the time a 21-year-old University of Texas golfer. Another future PGA Tour standout, Scott Hoch, won the Father-Son as well, teaming with dad Arthur in 1977 and ’79 when Scott was still playing at Wake Forest.

The tournament is generally held in July — the 25th through the 28th this year — and utilizes both the Dogwood and Cardinal Courses. Both courses have been updated in recent years with modern turf and drainage, with the Dogwood Course getting a complete overhaul in 2015-16 from architect Kris Spence.

The format is to play the Dogwood Course for the first round, the Cardinal for round two, and then Dogwood again for the final round. The first two rounds are better ball and the final 18 is aggregate — both scores counting. So each team posts four scores over three days. If one player is the dominant player, he can carry the team for the first two rounds. But there’s nowhere to hide on the final day.

Ronnie and Hunter Grove have the most titles with five — collecting them in 1990-92, ’98 and 2000. A Senior Division was started in 2000 and a Super Senior Division in 2014, and Tim and Chris Miller have the distinction of being the only team to win in two divisions; they were overall champions in 2007-08 and then graduated to the Senior Division, where they won three straight from 2012-14.

Dick Schwob has been a CCNC member since 1999 and has cherished the times he and son Leighton have teed it up in the Father-Son.

“There is nothing like having three days one-on-one with your son playing the game you love on courses you love,” says Schwob. “We both played sports as kids growing up and have that competitive drive, and this is an outlet for competition and having fun with your son.”

Leighton works for the USGA as director of operations for the U.S. Open, so his summers are busy with travel, but he makes every effort to clear out that weekend for the Father-Son.

“The Father-Son at CCNC is as fun an event as you can have,” the younger Schwob says. “The field consists of a bunch of like-minded fathers and sons from all over the country who love the game of golf. We have met many great people over the years and look forward to seeing them each year.

“But the most important part of this event and what separates it from so many others is the time I get alone with my father out on the golf course. Life can be hectic these days between the Open and the growing family, but getting to spend quality time with my dad playing a sport we both love and are passionate about is as good as it gets.”

Rick Jones Jr. of Youngtown, Ohio, is the only golfer who has won as a son and a father. He was the son playing with Rick Sr. to win in 1980, ’85 and ’86. He was the father playing with son Connor two years ago, in 2017. That 1986 win was notable because in the final round on the Dogwood Course, Rick Jr. aced the par-3 16th, Rick Sr. birdied 17 and both Joneses birdied 18 — that’s 5-under in three holes to come from behind and win.

“It’s the best week of the year,” Rick Jones Jr. says. “It always has been, always will be. CCNC is my favorite place to play golf. I’ve never been anywhere so quiet.”

Bob Dyer and his son Kenny started playing in 1985 and were regulars for more than a decade. Bob is 87 now and says they aged out several years ago, but his affection for the annual trip sparked him and his wife to buy a house in Pinehurst and join the club.

“I finally got here in 2005,” Dyer says. “As soon as I walked into the property in 1985, I said, ‘Wow, this would be a good place to live.’ We had such a good time over the years. It was a wonderful experience.”

One of the interesting dynamics of fathers and sons teaming is melding the experience and strategic thinking of the more mature father with the “what, me worry?” attitude of the younger golfer. And then there is the evolution of age — as the fathers lose their athleticism and distance and their sons become the team leaders.

“You don’t realize how much pressure the dads are playing under,” Jones says. “I had no idea when I was young. When you’re young, you’re just playing and having fun. But the dads are grinding. They tend to choke a bit. You’re grinding so hard for your son. I learned that when Connor and I started playing.”

Kelly Miller, whose family owns the Pine Needles and Mid Pines resorts in nearby Southern Pines, has long been a competitor at the top level of national amateur golf. He’s a member at CCNC and has competed with son Blair often in the Father-Son, the Millers collecting the championship in 2002.

“I guess you’ll always be a father to some degree, but there’s a stage where you want to become a friend as well,” he says. “The Father-Son is a place to do that. You enjoy the time you spend with your son. That part is great. It’s an interesting dynamic as you grow older and your games change. You go from your son depending on you (when he’s younger) and all of a sudden you’re depending on him. It goes full circle.”

The Father-Son Invitational participation history for the Keim family of Erie, Pennsylvania, dates to the late 1970s and includes five golfers over three generations. Jim Keim, a top-ranked amateur golfer in Ohio and later on national levels as a senior golfer, brought his son Michael to the tournament in 1978 when Michael was 16. Another son, Chris, was four years younger, and over the years Keim played with both sons in the event. Michael has two sons, Aaron (now 34) and Alex (32), and both of them have competed either with their father or grandfather.

“It would be difficult to top the experience of playing at CCNC with your dad, your brother and your sons,” Michael says. “The golf courses are spectacular and challenging in every way, and the fact that the staff and the board managed to keep this thing going all these years I think is no small miracle in itself. My dad was very single-minded in his passion for golf over his entire life, and this tournament was perfect to enjoy the game with his sons and grandsons.”  PS

For information on the CCNC National Father-Son Invitational, contact Director of Golf Jeff Dotson at (910) 692-1502.

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

Golftown Journal

The Amateur Spirit

An enduring legacy of Pinehurst

By Lee Pace

An amateur is one who competes in a sport for the joy of playing, for the companionship it affords, for health-giving exercise, and for relaxation from more serious matters. As a part of this light-hearted approach to the game, he accepts cheerfully all adverse breaks, is considerate of his opponent, plays the game fairly and squarely in accordance with its rules, maintains self-control, and strives to do his best, not in order to win, but rather as a test of his own skill and ability. These are his only interests, and, in them, material considerations have no part. The returns which amateur sport will bring to those who play it in this spirit are greater than those any money can possibly buy.      —  Richard S. Tufts

Imagine a golf club every year having the very best players visit to compete for a title considered at the time among the elite competitions in the game. Imagine Walter Hagen and Horton Smith winning, envision the smile on Ben Hogan’s face when he finally, after years of incessant practice and yearning, wins his first professional event and the proverbial dam breaks on a Hall of Fame career. And listen for the words flowing from the mouths of the pro tour’s luminaries, of Tommy Armour saying, “The man who doesn’t feel emotionally stirred when he golfs at Pinehurst beneath those clear blue skies and with the pine fragrance in his nostrils is one who should be ruled out of golf for life.”

And then process it all with a decision that Richard Tufts made in 1951: No more professional golf. Our focus is the amateur game. Out goes the North and South Open with its half-century of history, in comes the North and South Senior Amateur for men and women.

“Amateur golf is in our DNA,” says Tom Pashley, president of Pinehurst Resort & Country Club. “Amateur golf is where the game began at Pinehurst, and it’s such a privilege to host a championship like the U.S. Amateur. We love having the U.S. Open every 10 years or so, but playing the game at the amateur level and having fun are at the core of everything we do.”

The occasion of the 2019 United States Amateur Golf Championship in August provides an opportunity to pause for a moment and consider the essential soul and character of golf, pay tribute to the values espoused by Tufts, the grandson of Pinehurst founder James W. Tufts, and remember that the pure golf experience is not from the professional tour but from the munis and clubs where the devotees go 36 holes with two-down presses and junk for a quarter and a cold beer.

“Those words from Mr. Tufts are near and dear to how the resort operates,” says Robbie Zalzneck, the USGA’s director of the U.S. Amateur Championship who’s headquartered in Pinehurst. “Some will say that most of the guys in the Amateur will go on to professional careers, but the fact is they haven’t yet and are looking forward to competing in a national championship at Pinehurst truly for the sheer opportunity to raise a trophy and see their name inscribed with so many great golfers. We’ll have 312 of the world’s best amateurs, and a huge portion of our field will look at playing in the Amateur as the biggest thing they’ve ever done in golf, and they’ll be proud of it.”

For half a century, Tufts stood guard over the game’s values as he espoused them in what he called the “Creed of the Amateur,” a passage delivered during a 1968 speech in which he accepted his induction into the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame. The words have been inscribed in bronze and sit on a plaque beside the 18th green of Pinehurst No. 2 and statues of Tufts and golf architect Donald Ross.

“Richard Tufts did a great job of capturing what is so special about the game of golf,” says Robert Dedman Jr., whose family has owned the resort and club since 1984. “He really reflected the values that make golf so different and unique and why it resonates with so many people — having fun, overcoming adversity, the importance of courtesy, the integrity and self-control aspects of the game. They have been a part of our traditions at Pinehurst since 1901.”

Tufts served the amateur spirit in a variety of capacities — from shepherding the Carolinas Golf Association into one of the nation’s most vibrant regional golf associations to reigning as USGA president from 1956-57 to running Pinehurst from 1935-62 with an eye toward preserving the sanctity of the game. He didn’t like artificial measuring devices, golf carts and slow play. He rued the discontinuation of 36-hole Saturdays in concluding championship events, believing the double round was an excellent test of physical and mental endurance. And he reluctantly ended what in 1951 was essentially a “major” pro competition, the North and South Open, when the players hinted they needed a larger purse to continue coming to Pinehurst.

The “Creed” was his most lucid and direct assault on creeping commercialism in golf, but over the decades Tufts spoke and wrote with force and passion in trying to keep the amateur spirit intact.

In 1934 he encouraged golfers across the Carolinas to compete in the Carolinas Amateur at Linville Golf Club:

“There will be a reunion meeting with the emphasis placed on good times and good fellowship rather than good golf,” Tufts wrote in a letter of invitation. “If you can think of any argument for not being among those present, the entertainment committee is prepared to refute it.”

In 1960 he told the annual meeting of the Southern Golf Association at Myrtle Beach that the game is getting “soft.” He said the game was getting too expensive, that excessive demands were being put on green superintendents and that use of motorized carts by those who do not need them was “almost degenerate.”

“The game’s standards are being lowered and subtly, bit by bit, golf is losing its character,” Tufts said. “Those unable to meet the challenge of the game seem to find a vicarious pleasure in destroying it.”

In 1963, as captain of the United States Walker Cup team, Tufts told his players that their two goals were to retain the cup in the competition against Great Britain and Ireland and to cement friendly relations with “our friends” from across the water.

“Failure in the first undertaking is acceptable if we succeed in the second,” Tufts said at a team meeting in New York, prior to departure for Scotland. “But the trip will be a complete loss if we win the match but lose the good will of our friends. We can stand criticism of ourselves as golfers but not as sportsmen and gentlemen.”

In 1979 he wrote to an official of the company that bought the resort and club from his family nearly a decade earlier to decry the creeping commercialism in the game:

“Amateur golf can be a most valuable antidote to the high pressure, artificial life we lead today,” Tufts wrote. “But only if the game’s ancient traditions and standards are maintained and golf is enjoyed for itself in friendly competition amid such natural surroundings as we find on the old links courses of Scotland. Golf should be a medium for relaxation and not commercialization.”

Quite simply, he said in one speech, “Those days when we tried to build a center for true amateur golf here in Pinehurst will always be my happiest memories.”

Tufts welcomed good people into the game of golf, applauding the decision of Pete and Alice Dye to enter the golf architecture business back in the 1960s, when Dye was an Indiana insurance salesman.

“Mr. Tufts was the spirit of everything good in golf,” said Alice, who died at the age of 91 in February 2019. “He really was. He was the spirit of good sportsmanship. His portrait hung on the far wall in the clubhouse. Every time you walked in you stopped and looked at it. It was like a picture of Lincoln or something. You looked at it with a sense of awe.”  PS

Chapel Hill-based writer Lee Pace has written extensively about the Tufts family over three decades chronicling the history and evolution of golf at Pinehurst and across the Sandhills.

Golftown Journal

Eye of the Needles

The USGA returns to a polished gem

By Lee Pace

The continued evolution of Donald Ross’ vintage Sandhills golf courses back to a more unkempt and rugged look over the last decade will be on display in May when the United States Golf Association stages its U.S. Women’s Senior Open at Pine Needles Lodge & Golf Club in Southern Pines. The 1928 course that has hosted three U.S. Women’s Opens has come under the nipping and tucking auspices of architect Kyle Franz over the last two years and will offer a visual presentation more in keeping with what Ross cobbled from the sandy ground nearly a century ago, and certainly integrate some shot values more consistent with the Scottish designer’s original intent.

Franz ran a bulldozer and other shaping and construction implements on Pinehurst No. 2 in 2010-11 under the employ of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw as the course was transformed from its sleek green appearance to a sandier landscape chock full of wire grass and jagged edges. He then took his skills and initiative and pitched Kelly Miller, president of the company that owns Pine Needles and is a partner in Mid Pines Inn & Golf Club, on the idea of restoring Mid Pines, a 1921 Ross design, in a similar fashion. That job was completed in 2013 to rave reviews, including designation by Golf magazine as the Best Course Restoration of the year.

“Except for lacking the Pacific Ocean, it almost has the visual appeal of Cypress Point,” magazine course rating panelist John Dempsey said. “It almost looks like the old pictures you see of Mid Pines of people wearing coats and ties and watching a match finish on 18. I can’t say enough about it. Going out and playing nine holes in the last of the winter sunlight in late afternoon, the visuals are fabulous.”

The next step was to apply many of the same ideas to Pine Needles, across Midland Road. The hook of converting Pine Needles’ greens from bent to MiniVerde Bermuda — as they had been at Mid Pines — was a convenient base from which to operate. Pine Needles closed during the summer of 2016 for the greens conversion, and Franz used that period, as well as the following two winters, to rebuild every bunker on the course, rearrange the fairway dimensions and add some new tees.

“The old stigma on Bermuda greens is that they were grainy and slow, but that’s not true anymore with the new ultra-dwarfs,” Miller says. “We had nearly 50 days with temperatures in the 90s during the summer of 2015, and it was a struggle to keep the bent healthy. Meanwhile, the greens really thrived at Mid Pines. After watching them closely for two years, we thought it was time to pull the trigger at Pine Needles.”

Franz grew up playing golf in Oregon, and when it came time to pick a college, he knew what he wanted: Oregon State’s turf management program. One summer he landed an internship working for architect Tom Doak on Pacific Dunes, the second of five courses created at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort, and later he met Coore and Crenshaw, who were designing another course there named Bandon Trails.

“Being an Oregonian, it was a really special experience,” Franz says. “Just being able to work on a piece of land like that was really cool. It got me interested in links-style architecture, and I had always been a fan of classic courses.”

Now 37, Franz has worked in Scotland, Australia and California, and more recently was on Gil Hanse’s staff in the design and construction of the course in Rio de Janeiro used for the 2016 Olympics. He’s also just finished a multi-year project at the Country Club of Charleston, which will be the venue for the U.S. Women’s Open one week after the Pine Needles Senior Open.

Among the tweaks Franz made that golfers who played Pine Needles in 2007 and are returning for the first time a dozen years later will notice are these:

* Expanded fairways to original margins to 38 to 60 yards;

* Restored and/or reconfigured all 70 bunkers to Ross’ rolled-over style of the mid-to-late 1940s and added eight new bunkers to challenge modern length;

* Re-established what Franz calls “horse-and-blade caliber micro-contours” in the greens to add interest and challenge to the putting element;

* Removed 11 acres of Bermuda rough and replaced them with native hardpan, wire grass and pine straw;

*Replaced the uniform-looking expanses of love grass in front of many tees with a more rugged “Pine Valley” look of sand and native growth.

“Overall, it’s a little more clean and manicured look and different from Mid Pines,” Franz says. “There we went guns blazing with the native stuff around the edges. At Pine Needles now we have a cool and rugged look, but it’s a little more manicured than No. 2 and Mid Pines.”

The championship will be played May 16-19 and is the second Women’s Senior Open, christened last year at Chicago Golf Club. Laura Davies, who finished in the top five at Pine Needles in 1996 and 2007 but missed the cut in 2001, won the championship by 10 shots over Juli Inkster. The field included noted LPGA players Danielle Ammaccapane, Helen Alfredsson, Liselotte Neumann, Rosie Jones, Hollis Stacy, Amy Alcott, Betsy King, Pat Bradley and Jane Geddes. The course will play just under 6,100 yards.

“The Women’s Senior is similar to the U.S. Amateur or Walker Cup in size and scope,” Miller says. “There are basically no grandstands, though we might put one on the 18th green. There are no skyboxes. It’s a very fan-friendly event. We rope off the tees and greens, but otherwise spectators walk with the players.”

The Women’s Senior is something of a prelude to the 2022 Women’s Open at Pine Needles, and having tees that can stretch the entire course to 7,000 yards will give USGA officials adequate flexibility when they host the longer LPGA players vs. the over-50 crowd.

“I think the Bermuda greens and wider fairways will work well for both events,” Miller says. “In Ross’ era, golf was played more along the ground. Now it’s more in the air. But the Bermuda greens are firmer and offer a more challenging surface. It’s more important now to be on the proper side of the fairway to have the shot you need to knock it close.

“For ’22, they can lengthen some holes, but I don’t think you’ll see a lot more rough. I think Donald Ross would have loved testing the players with longer shots and the strategy of proper placement of the tee shot versus having penalizing rough.”

One change that embodies the new-look Needles as much as any is the bunker complex down the left side of the par-4 18th hole. The finishing hole was actually the first hole of the course as it was designed, when the St. Joseph of the Pines assisted-living facility was the original Pine Needles hotel. When Peggy Kirk Bell and husband Warren acquired the golf course in the 1950s, they reconfigured the start and finish to be more convenient to the new lodging facilities they built on the southwest side of the course. Thus the second hole became the first and the first became the 18th.

Eighteen plays downhill and before there was no trouble down the left side. Now there is a natural sandscape with miscellaneous vegetation and whatever nature might deposit there, from pine needles to cones to wire grass.

“You could hit a speed slot on that side and the ball would roll forever,” Franz says. “What was conceived as a relatively easy starting hole didn’t stand up as a finishing hole.”

Miller remembers playing the 18th when he first visited Pine Needles in 1980 with a driver and 7-iron. “And that was with a persimmon wood and balata ball,” he says. “If you looked back up the fairway from the green, it looked like a bowling alley. Ross always had great motion to his fairways. Now it’s a cool look. You don’t just see all grass and two straight lines. This will make for a memorable finish.

“The best look at the flag is from the left side of the fairway. You’ll have to pause and think how far you can go over there.”

You blink around the Sandhills and realize it’s been five years since that back-to-back Open double-header on No. 2 in 2014. The chapters keep unfolding, as they have for more than a century.  PS

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

Golftown Journal

Yogis of the Fairways

A few poses could add a few yards

By Lee Pace

The thought of twisting one’s self into a pretzel while wearing leotards and listening to wind chimes and Tibetan cymbals would send most macho golfers into a rubber room. Downward facing dogs? Just some birdies with a side of fries, ma’am.  

“One of my biggest challenges early on was fighting the perception that in yoga, you sit with one leg behind your head, staring into a candle while chanting,” says Katherine Roberts. “I set out to bring yoga to a demographic of people who otherwise would never step foot in a yoga studio.”

Roberts was living in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1998 when she first took a yoga class and soon quit her job with a Fortune 500 company to teach yoga full-time. She was a 16-handicap golfer when the light bulb popped, illuminating the connections between yoga and golf. And thus the concept of “Yoga for Golfers” was hatched. Today her methodology is taught in 20 countries around the world, and she has co-authored a book with noted golf instructor Hank Haney called Swing Flaws and Fitness Fixes. She appears on Haney’s syndicated radio show each Friday to talk about melding golf and yoga.

“Gary Player, Tiger Woods and David Duval were the only people in the late ’90s in golf talking about fitness or yoga being beneficial to your game,” Roberts says. “People looked at me like,  ‘Are you crazy?’”

Breathing, flexibility and core strength are among the building blocks to a yoga practice that can apply not only to golf but other sports as well. Roberts has developed a niche in Major League Baseball and has been a consultant with the Chicago Cubs, including during their 2016 World Championship season.

“It all starts in the feet and travels up the through the torso, hips and shoulders and arms and out to a club or a ball or a bat,” Roberts says. “The methodologies are very similar. All great athletes, whether it’s a Major League Baseball player or a golfer, understand how to use the ground. It starts with the feet and feeling the connection to the ground.

“Breath is so important for all elite athletes. If you’ve got 70,000 people in the stands, you need to breathe. We teach how to use the breath to bring your mind to what is called ‘one point of concentration.’ You focus on that one shot, one pitch, one breath.”

On a January afternoon in Pinehurst, Robyn Humphrey could be seen taking the tenets Roberts organized into her “Yoga For Golfers” program and applying them to a group of Pinehurst Country Club members. Certified in Roberts’ protocol, she has been teaching her golf-oriented yoga class since 2016. It meets twice a week and the studio can hold 14 people.

Humphrey began practicing yoga about a dozen years ago while living in the District of Columbia area to help her recover from injuries sustained in her career as an elite distance runner — she has run in multiple New York and Boston Marathons and won frequently in Mid-Atlantic competitions. She enjoyed the practice of yoga and its benefits and then began teaching it to others.

“There’s no better way to improve your skills in something than by teaching it,” she says. “You’re forced to break it down to the basics to help someone else understand it and master it. That can only help you.”

Humphrey and her husband, Chris, and son Michael moved to the Sandhills in 2014 and joined the club at Pinehurst. She found the nine courses and all of the golfers in town motivation to improve her own game. It made sense in a golf-centric town to take her yoga teachings geared toward runners and redirect them toward golfers.

“I can’t tell you how strong some of these people have gotten,” Humphreys says. “Some came in with no core strength at all. Now their balance is better and they can turn into positions they couldn’t reach before. Imagine how that translates to their golf game.”

Among the exercises she puts the class through are “crescent poses” where the yogi stands in a split stance, then balances on the forward leg and moves the other leg forward slowly and into a right-angle with the standing body. Another routine evolves from that same split stance with the yogi leaning forward and rotating the upper body first to one side and then the other. Floor work involves core strengthening and stabilization and more flexibility circuits. Hip flexibility and stability is important in the golf swing, and one way to address that is to hit the ground in a “table-top” position and, with both hands and one knee on the ground, rotate the other leg slowly and fully in clockwise and then counterclockwise directions.

“First and foremost, you think flexibility,” Humphrey says. “Almost everyone can use more. You build on that. You build strength. When you’re doing standing yoga postures, you’re developing a lot of lower body strength. You need lower body strength to generate power in the golf swing.”

Humphrey was a mid-30s handicap when she moved to Pinehurst and now is close to a 20-handicap and plays four times a week. “I actually have an OK swing and I’m pain-free and take very good care of myself, so I should play golf for quite some time,” she says. “My students identify with me. I have the same ups and downs in golf they have.”

So she understands, for example, how the kind of breathing that is bedrock to yoga can also help on the golf course — long, slow, deep nasal breaths.

“Many of my clients tell me they’ve gotten good results from thinking about the breath over the ball,” she says. “You inhale slowly in the backswing and then exhale, and that force that comes from the core when you make that exhale can actually add power to your swing.

“I make enough parallels like that that they feel really comfortable that they are in a class that’s especially for them. Because I think that gets people in a yoga room that normally wouldn’t come into a yoga room.”

One of Roberts’ most gratifying stories is of a 67-year-old doctor in Scottsdale who lamented his own doctor telling him to quit golf because his back was so bad.

“I did some basic testing and saw he had a lack of mobility in all his muscles and no strength in his core,” she says. “I gave him some exercises to do, and he did them religiously five days a week. In three and a half months, he was playing golf pain free.

“So many of my clients come back and say, ‘My back’s not hurting on the 14th hole,’ or ‘I’m more focused’ or ‘I’m hitting the ball farther.’”

Katherine and Robyn both came to yoga because it improved their overall health, both physical and mental, and now have found their niches in golf — Roberts on an international stage and Humphrey in the Sandhills.

“Golf is a mind-body sport and everything starts in the mind,” Roberts says. “If the body can’t perform the way you need it to perform, you’re not going to enjoy the game as much. Yoga touches your mind, your body and your breath and brings them all together.”

Humphrey enjoys a reciprocal relationship with her students — she helps them with balance and flexibility and they help her with the nuances of learning the swing and course management.

“I came to Pinehurst as a runner, but now I’m playing more golf than I ever have,” she says. “If you come to Pinehurst, you have to play golf, right? It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I have a great appreciation for the challenge.

“What I’m trying to do through yoga is make it maybe a little bit easier — for me and my students.”  PS

Chapel Hill-based writer Lee Pace never set foot in a yoga studio until January 2018 and has found his decidedly unlimber body and cluttered mind benefit from the experience.