This was early in the morning on New Year’s Eve, and I was supposed to be helping her get ready for a big party.
“Why would anybody want to do that?” she wondered, the way you might ask a small child if it was really wise to stick his tongue to a frozen flagpole.
I explained that nobody had ever done this before, so far as I knew — teed off at No. 2 in Pinehurst and putted out five miles later at the 18th green at Mid Pines in Southern Pines.
The crazy idea had been put in my head by Bob Burwell, who runs Roberts Golf. I’d mentioned it to a couple of golf pals and, being guys, one thing quickly led to another. Pretty soon we had a group of New Year golf nuts eager to set off and see if it could actually be done. America, it should be remembered, was discovered exactly this way.
“We could make sporting history,” I pointed out to her, predicting that the fine folks from the Guinness Book would probably call with hearty congratulations before the New Year’s ball.
“This is, after all, going to be the longest hole ever played,” I told my wife.
“Or the shortest trip to the emergency room in the history of husbands,” she replied.
“Columbus didn’t worry about that sort of stuff when he set off to find America.”
“He didn’t have your hook, honey.”
Before I shouldered my bag and set off to make history, she asked me to at least take out the trash.
Through Six Courses
The other guys were already waiting when my cousin Bobby Tracy and I got to the first tee at No. 2 shortly after 9.
We’d agreed to play two-man alternate shot teams and worked out a rough itinerary that would carry our golfing band of brothers over five different Sandhills golf courses, through forest and fairway and over private yards and perhaps the odd public highway or two.
The teams included Sandhills Community College President John Dempsey and Pinehurst Director of Golf Matt Massei; former Pinehurst president Pat Corso and Pine Needles president Kelly Miller; Old Sport Gallery shopkeeper Tom Stewart and physician Walter Morris Jr.; and lastly, Pilot Publisher David Woronoff and my cousin Bobby from Charlotte. Initially, I’d planned to tag along merely to make smart-aleck comments and notes for the guys at Guinness, but at the last minute it was proposed I would play, too, if only for some comic relief.
“The idea here is to ring out the old year and welcome in the new,” Tom Stewart said, setting a lofty tone for the Ross Cross Country Golf Quest, “and in doing so, to take the game but not ourselves too seriously. Donald Ross, it should be remembered, invented miniature golf and loved to put on wacky golf events like this. We’re simply playing in the spirit of Mr. Ross himself.”
Some fool then proposed that each team predict its final cross-country score.
Teeing up, Doc Morris boldly predicted that golf from Pinehurst to Southern Pines would require only 72 strokes — “even par.”
Corso and Miller exchanged presidential looks and came up with 115.
“Better to lower expectations,” Miller said, or something to that effect, “and sneak up on the field.” He also provided the field with nice red-and-green Pine Needles caps that made us festively resemble a troupe of golfing elves.
Dempsey and Massei projected a gutsy 84.
I glanced at my teammate and boss, David Woronoff. The King of the Slice, as I fondly think of him. Our team was playing with special Pilot logo balls that Woronoff buys by the truckload from some outfit in the Third World. Every time he slices one of these special decorated balls to the woods or someone’s back yard, he comforts himself with the belief that he’s merely getting free advertising. If his game ever improves significantly, I’ve pointed out the flaw in this reasoning, the newspaper’s circulation could take a serious nosedive.
David gamely predicted 102 in our behalf. What he didn’t know was that Cousin Bobby, our third player in the group, was my secret weapon — the only hope we had, I calculated, of keeping up with this bunch of New Year rogues and golfing bandits.
Making History
By the fourth shot, I knew we were in big trouble in the inaugural Ross Cross Country.
We were already 200 yards behind the rest of the expedition, which had cleared the pine trees flanking the first fairway and was already chugging down fairway 8.
After my opening slice, Davy’s foozle, and Cousin Bob’s blistering recovery attempt, I was taking dead aim at the group two fairways away when an older gent wrapped in winter mufti and out for an early walk with his poodle, stopped and helpfully pointed out, “Hey, dummy, you’re aiming the wrong way. The hole is down there.”
“This is the shortest way to No. 7,” I tried to explain. “In the spirit of Donald Ross, we’re playing golf from Pinehurst to Southern Pines. We’re going to make history.”
“Are you drunk?” he asked, and pulled his poodle sharply away from me. The dog was suspiciously sniffing my leg.
“How far is it, exactly?” Corso was asking Miller when I caught up to them on the ninth tee. Corso was attempting to shoot over the green toward a gap in the trees that led to the 14th hole of No 7. It would take a one-in-a-million shot to get there.
“Four and a half miles, give or take,” deadpanned Miller. They were lying just seven swings compared to our team’s 10. Stewart and Morris had already vanished, trailblazing their own way through the woods to Grandma’s house, while Dempsey and Massei had already reached the back of nine green and were puzzling over a challenging lie directly behind a huge magnolia tree.
A few yards away, Team Pilot was blocked by the relief hut.
The first drama of the Ross Cross occurred here. Cousin Bobby decided to take a daring line under the eaves of the toilet hut, struck a mighty blow, and had the ball ricochet violently off the concrete slab directly in front of him. As I looked up from my Guinness notes, a Pilot logo golf ball sizzled past my cute button nose, just grazing its tip.
“What’s the penalty for accidentally taking out one of you own partners?” our team captain idly wondered. His concern was touching.
“Depends if it was in bounds or out of bounds,” someone explained, like a USGA rules official spot on the scene at the National Open.
“Everywhere is in-bounds,” an embarrassed Cuz Bobby pointed out. We were now three strokes and 300 yards behind the pack.
“I’m staying away from you guys,” declared President Dempsey, hustling off to catch up with partner Massei.
A Personal Escort
The next cross-country drama came behind the 17th green, where it was agreed we would all play into the back of a Pilot delivery van and be transported across highway 15-501 by Pilot Sports Editor Hunter Chase to avoid causing automotive mayhem, a slight alteration of the original plan. It was agreed we would also have to play out of the van at The National.
“I think I can jar it from here,” Doc Morris declared but left his pitch shot 20 feet shy of the open van. Partner Tom Stewart followed up with a daring wedge shot that just missed the top of the van’s gaping door, bounced over the roof, and wound up in some guy’s juniper shrubs across Inverrary Road. This was the A-team’s first sign of human weakness.
Carmen Lloyd happened to be out walking his big dog, Nugget. Pausing, he wondered what a bunch of grown men in elves’ caps were doing shooting golf balls into the back of a waiting van.
“We’re the Albanian golf team,” someone cheerfully told him. “Isn’t this how you play golf in America?”
When I explained to Carmen about Donald Ross’s love of unconventional golf and how we were attempting to make New Year golfing history, etc., and asked for a nice friendly spectator quote to give Guinness if and when they phoned, Carmen thought for an instant and grinned. “Cross country golf, huh? You guys might be on to something. Do you need another player? I could run home and get my clubs.”
Moments later, Team Morris-Stewart’s ball flew violently into the van and we were off to The National when General Manager Ken Crow and Director of Golf Tom Parsons were only too happy to personally escort us safely across the property. In war zone parlance, this is called “safe and proper” conduct. “We have the lives of innocent members to think about,” Crow explained.
At this juncture in the inaugural Ross Cross Country, roughly midpoint through the odyssey, Stewart-Morris clung to a one-shot lead with 14 strokes, followed by the other two teams at 15 and the three clowns from the Pilot at 18 strokes.
Moments of Drama
Another key drama occurred in the woods between The National’s 15th green and Mid South’s 13th fairway.
Miller had just struck the day’s most stellar golf shot over the woods, boundary fence, Knoll Road and safely onto a Mid South fairway. The rest of us were deep in the piney woods, lost lambs trying to calculate any route out, when I saw Doc Morris pull a small handsaw from his golf bag and begin sawing down a small pine tree obstructing his path.
“Hey,” I said to him, “that’s against the rules.”
“We don’t have any rules,” Morris accurately pointed out.
“Then it’s against the laws of nature.”
“Trust me,” he said, “I know what I’m doing. I’m a doctor.”
“Is that true, or do you just play one on TV?” one of the other surprised competitors asked.
“He must be a tree doctor.”
Moments later, Morris fired his ball clear of the woods, Knoll Road and well up the fairway at Mid South, causing lots of grumbles about violations of the “allowed clubs” rule and golfing sawbones.
From this point, Mid South assistants Joe Waters and Chris Terry ably led the expedition backwards along several holes of the lovely back nine, routing us over the entrance road, the 13th fairway, and along a gas pipeline alley behind the clubhouse to the first and second holes.
Except for the new home under construction that Cousin Bobby struck a glancing blow, everything went smoothly until our team attempted to chip into the back bed of a maintenance vehicle parked behind the fourth tee. After Tom Stewart nailed a brilliant pitch into the “Gator” from 50 yards — second-best shot of the day — every other team save the chumps from The Pilot quickly followed suit. Team Pilot advanced only because its captain bravely sacrificed his body by using his hands to execute a textbook drop volley — oops, wrong sport — banking our fourth attempt into the Gator.
“I get the assist,” Woronoff demanded.
Brilliant Drives
President Dempsey saved his best shot for this leg of the adventure, nailing a driver from the front of the sixth green at Knollwood that flew over Pee Dee Road, cleared the woods and landed on the 14th tee at Mid Pines to start the home stretch.
Miller struck yet another brilliant drive here, too, then hurried across the road toward his home course with the rest of the field close on his heels because an irate older couple was bearing down on us for playing through their fairway.
Coming out of a portable outhouse, Cousin Bobby paused and got an ear chewed off by the woman.
“She wanted to know if we were all drunk,” he explained, blushing, when he finally caught up. “I told her I had never seen you people in my life.”
Leaders Stewart and Morris, meanwhile, ran into their first major challenge — a lost ball with just a quarter of a mile left to play.
Several golfers out for a casual New Year’s Eve spin around the course at Mid Pines paused to actually cheer the players on, as the various teams took different routes through the hills and vales of the venerable Ross golf course to the home hole. Team Pilot chose a risky lower road home and was rewarded by shaving off a couple of strokes.
The real miracle of the first-ever Ross Cross Country occurred when it was determined that the teams were actually within a stroke or two of one another.
The scene was this, a drama worthy of Masters Sunday at Augusta: Miller and Corso were on the final green lying 44 strokes with a wee six-footer uphill to win. Stewart and Morris were in an identical position, with a six-foot downhiller to tie.
Dempsey and Massei were also on the green, facing a 60-foot birdie that could put them in a tie if the other two teams somehow missed.
Pilot boss Woronoff faced a mere 60-yard chip to the green. We were just one thin stroke back of the leaders.
“This is no time to think of free advertising,” I said, trying to boost his confidence. “Hole it out, Davy boy, and we can actually steal the championship from under their noses.”
He left it short in the bunker. The other elves laughed, and I said some things to my boss I sincerely regret. It was my turn to play. Somehow I holed the bunker shot and the others missed their putts. Golf really is a riddle wrapped in a conundrum.
An Annual Event?
Thus, the first Ross Cross Country ended in a three-way tie. Before he graciously offered us chili and beer, Miller joked that the playoff would be back to Pinehurst.
Later that night at the party, everyone agreed it was such a hoot we ought to do it again next year.
“This is the latest I’ve ever seen you stay up,” my wife observed as the last revelers were departing. It was after midnight and she was already cleaning up.
I admitted I was waiting up for a call from the Guinness Book of Records. Frankly it mystified me why they hadn’t called yet.
She laughed and handed me a sack of New Year trash.
“Would you mind taking this out, hon, before coming to bed?”
Awarding-winning author Jim Dodson has been a writer-in-residence with The Pilot since June. He can be e-mailed at jasdodson@earthlink.net.
