Think about it. No golf. No golf courses. No Pinehurst Country Club. No Pine Needles or Mid Pines or Whispering Pines. No Peggy Kirk Bell or Harvie Ward or Don Padgett.
Dan Maples would probably live in the mountains. Pat Corso might still be a singing waiter in Michigan or some other cold place.
Golf writing legends such as the late Charles Price and Dick Taylor and Bob Drum would never have dreamed of retiring to Pinehurst.
The Carolina Hotel wouldn’t exist. Neither would the Magnolia Inn, Pine Crest Inn or Holly Inn. There wouldn’t be any sparring for the right to use the name of Pinehurst. You’d be lucky to find it on a map.
James W. Tufts wasn’t thinking about golf when he founded Pinehurst back in 1895. He was just looking for a quiet, relaxing place to escape from the winter chill of New England. But if the climate and soil of the Sandhills weren’t created for the game of golf, Bobby Jones never made a 2-foot putt.
The original concept of the winter health resort was drawn up by Frederick Olmsted, the Boston landscape artist who designed New York’s Central Park and Biltmore Estate in Asheville. He did such a good job that, a century later, they’ve named a shopping center after him.
Before golf, guests at the resort spent their time cycling or taking long walks in the wooded areas. There were 20 cottages for rent in an area that was carefully preserved.
Tufts built a rough nine-hole course in 1898 simply to give his resort visitors something else to do during the daylight hours. By the time that he realized he was on to something special, Scottish golf course architect Donald Ross had come to America and decided to make Pinehurst his home.
Tufts brought the man and the property together, and the rest is golf history.
The initial nine holes, designed by Dr. D. LeRoy Culver of Southern Pines, opened for play in 1898. A second nine was opened in 1899. Ross was hired as the golf professional in 1900 and almost immediately began construction of the No. 2 Course, nine holes of which were opened in 1901.
James Tufts died of a heart attack in 1902 and his son, Leonard, took over operations. The second nine holes of No. 2 were completed in 1907, and by that time, golf was becoming such an attraction at the resort that the No. 3 Course was added.
It was not until 1917 that Ross began fine-tuning No. 2 into the world-renowned status that it holds today. To that point, the greens had been simple flat squares of a sand and clay mixture, but Ross rebuilt them, adding curvature to the edges and undulation to the surfaces.
Ross remained busy, and the No. 4 Course was completed in 1919, when Pinehurst became famous as the first resort in the world to offer 72 holes of golf on the premises.
Tufts, concerned that the rustic little Pinehurst getaway was becoming overcrowded, decided to expand. The result was a move down what is now Midland Road and the opening of the Mid Pines golf course and hotel in 1921. Ross originally designed 36 holes at Mid Pines, but only one course was built, at a cost of just over $46,000.
Ross built the Pine Needles course in 1927, and a hotel was also opened on the property in early 1928. Business was booming, and golf was credited with much of the successful luring of the Yankees and their dollars to the Sandhills.
Then came 1929 and the stock market crash. The Yankee dollars were a distant memory. The hotels that had flourished only a year earlier were now mostly empty. The golf courses that had been packed during the fall and spring months were getting little play.
As the Great Depression dragged on, the shrinking of Pinehurst began. Leonard Tufts turned the management of the company over to his sons, Richard, Albert and James, and they struggled to keep the resort afloat. The Mid Pines course and hotel were sold to an investment company in 1934 for $90,000.
Pine Needles was soon bankrupt and was sold to a development company headed by George Dunlap Sr. for $75,000 in 1935. The Pinehurst No. 5 Course, which had been built in 1928, was totally abandoned in 1935. Nine holes of the No. 4 Course were eventually shut down in 1936, and the other nine closed in 1938.
Meanwhile, Ross was still going strong, converting the existing Pinehurst courses to grass greens. The No. 2 conversion was done in 1935, and No. 3 followed in 1936.
Things were beginning to turn around in the 1950s, and nine holes of No. 4 were reopened, with the second nine reopening in 1953. Ellis Maples designed No. 5, and it opened in 1961. The No. 6 Course, designed by George and Tom Fazio, opened in 1979, followed by No. 7, a Rees Jones creation, in 1986. Tom Fazio’s No. 8, The Centennial, opened in 1996.
Meanwhile, there had been tremendous changes along Midland Road. Mid Pines had been sold to Maisie and Frank Cosgrove, while Pine Needles had been purchased by the husband-and-wife team of Peggy Kirk and Warren “Bullet” Bell in 1953.
The Cosgroves sold Mid Pines to the Quality Inn Hotel chain in 1973, and in 1994 the Bell family formed a partnership to buy Mid Pines, giving them two Ross courses across the road from each other.
The Bells, with Bullet operating the lodge and Peggy promoting the game with her play and teaching, turned Pine Needles into one of the most popular golf destinations in the country. The course had hosted the U.S. Women’s Open in 1928 and the Titleholders in the 1970s, but the jewel in the crown came with the U.S. Women’s Open in 1996 and the Women’s Open return this year.
Meanwhile, as golf grew ever more popular and the area proved to be perfect for the game, other courses were showing up all over the county. The Southern Pines Elks Club, Whispering Pines and Whispering Woods, the Country Club of North Carolina, Knollwood and Midland were added. By 1998, with the opening of Forest Creek, another Fazio gem, and The Carolina, an Arnold Palmer design, there were 42 courses in the immediate area.
There are eight courses located along Midland Road, the four-mile stretch between Pinehurst and Southern Pines. They are Mid Pines, Pine Needles, Knollwood, Talamore, Midland, The Club at Longleaf, The Plantation Club and The National Club.
The course architects are as famous as the area, including the aforementioned Ross, Ellis Maples, Fazio and Palmer. Other courses were designed by Jack Nicklaus, Rees Jones, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus II, Dan Maples, Willard Byrd, Tom Jackson, Gene Hamm and Peter Tufts.
The North and South Amateur Championship, which is still recognized as one of the more prestigious amateur events in the nation, was first held in 1901. The championship is the longest continually played amateur event in the U.S.
The great Ben Hogan came to Pinehurst in 1941, a winless vagabond of the PGA Tour who was about ready to give up the game.
“Bantam Ben” found magic in the pines during the professional version of the North and South and won his first professional tournament, launching a career that made him into a legend.
It was another 10 years before the Ryder Cup came to Pinehurst in 1951. The U.S. team roster read like a who’s who of the world’s greatest players, including Hogan, Sam Snead and Jimmy Demaret. The British squad never had a chance.
Richard Tufts, who had assumed the job of running Pinehurst, was never a big fan of professional golfers, according to his son Peter.That was the end of professional golf at Pinehurst until the Diamondhead Corp. purchased the resort in 1970, ending 75 years of Tufts family ownership. Diamondhead, a company headed by trucking magnate Malcolm McLean, paid the Tufts $9.2 million for the property and immediately went about changing the image of the resort.
In the late 1970s, Diamondhead began having financial difficulties, however, and eventually sold to ClubCorp of Dallas, Tex., in 1984.
ClubCorp adopted a policy of restoration. Under this guidance, Pinehurst regained national prominence by hosting the 1991 and 1992 PGA Tour Championships. Craig Stadler won the first in a playoff on No. 2, and Paul Azinger won in 1992.
Under the leadership of Pinehurst Inc. President Corso and Director of Golf Padgett, the wooing of the USGA had begun. The first fruits were plucked in 1994, when the Senior U.S. Open was held on No. 2, with the colorful Simon Hobday winning.
The apex was reached in 1999, when the U.S. Men’s Open was held on the No. 2 Course and the late Payne Stewart won over Phil Mickelson on the final hole by making a 15-foot par putt.
The USGA declared The Open Championship the most successful in history, and officials quickly revealed that they had placed Pinehurst No. 2 on the Open rotation list.
The consensus was that the championship would probably be back in 2008. But seven months after the 1999 Open and only three months after Stewart had died in a plane crash, the USGA announced that it would bring the Men’s Open back to Pinehurst in 2005.
