On Friday, I scrambled over to Pine Needles with a carload of books. Peggy Kirk Bell’s autobiography had arrived from our printing house in Michigan just two hours before the grand opening of the merchandise tent at the U.S. Women’s Open.

That’s not the kind of just-in-time delivery I was hoping for when we started the project of publishing Ms. Bell’s autobiography more than a year ago. Needless to say, I was full of nervous energy as I unloaded 1,500 books at various locations around the resort. While I was doing that, I bumped into my friend Kelly Miller, who runs Pine Needles with his family.

Kelly wanted to know where I was taking my next load of books. He asked me to wait for just a minute.

So, I waited — figuring he had something he wanted me to take with me to my next stop. After I spent five minutes tapping my foot and looking at the clock, Kelly appeared carrying a camera in one hand and the three-foot tall, sterling silver Championship trophy in the other.

With a rueful grin, Kelly presented the trophy to me and said, “Congratulations. We got the book out.”

Then, I did my best Payne Stewart imitation. I hugged it. I pumped my fist. I even kissed that damn thing. All, of course, captured on Kelly’s camera. We were making such a commotion at the front door to the lodge that a tourist, who happened by, whipped out his video camera and filmed the shenanigans.

With my luck, the whole episode will end up on “SportsCenter” with Chris Berman saying, “That’s the closest Woronoff will ever get to a trophy.”

Ms. Bell’s memoir is part of our efforts to perfect our award-winning coverage of the 1999 U.S. Open in Pinehurst. The Pilot won the coveted Community Service Award from the N.C. Press Association for our work that week.

I promised the Bell family that this newspaper would exert as much effort and energy on the Women’s Open as we did on the men’s.

So we’re going to publish eight daily tabloid editions — exclusively about the Women’s Open — in addition to our four regular afternoon editions of The Pilot on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and the following Monday of Championship week. That’s 12 editions in a span of time when we normally would publish four.

To accomplish this Herculean feat, we split our crew of 15 newsroom staffers into two teams and recruited an extra reporter and a photographer for the week. Editor Steve Bouser, though keeping a foot in each camp, has put Managing Editor David Sin-clair in charge of our “regular” newspaper so Steve can focus on the Open.

The Open paper will provide some of the most comprehensive coverage of the course and contestants at Pine Needles. But, more important, we will put all the proceedings into the proper local context.

This is an important community event. We will tell you about the Moore County folks who will make our Women’s Open the standard by which all others are measured. Whether it’s the Sandhills Community College faculty picking up trash or the Episcopal Day School PTA flipping burgers, we will put a Moore County face on this Championship.

From Horse Country to High Falls, Sinclair’s team will keep you abreast of all the other news and events happening throughout the Sandhills in our regular afternoon editions.

Our five-person circulation department will work around the clock to deliver the Open tabloids free of charge to every hotel in the county and just about every breakfast restaurant in the Southern Pines, Pinehurst and Aberdeen area — as well as to every golf club in the area. We even have a carrier driving to hotels in Raleigh and Greensboro. The Open tab will be inserted into The Pilot on regular publication days.

We’ve enlisted the support of 45 Girl Scouts, who have graciously offered to hand out our Open paper to spectators as they leave the event. They will deliver the paper with a smile and ask the visitors to return to the Sandhills soon. For their efforts, we will make a $5,000 donation to their local Girl Scout chapter.

Aside from delivering all the details of Women’s Open, we will chronicle the event through our recently redesigned web site, www.thepilot.com. Our Internet staff will publish everything that’s in our tab on the web and update the leaders’ scores at least every 30 minutes.

Our hard-working, five-man pressroom staff will become vampires to produce all of these print editions. They won’t see the light of day for the entire week. They will come to work around 10 p.m. and go home about 5 a.m. As grateful as I am to these fellas for turning the lives upside down for a week, I’m even more appreciative to their spouses.

We’re going to all this trouble because we want the Sandhills to take its rightful place as the venue for national golf championships. We believe that’s important for the future of our community. The tournaments enable us to attract the kind of economic growth that will help us be as proud of our community in the future as we are today.