A delegation of two dozen Pinehurst executives and staffers traveled to the Hamptons last week for one last opportunity to tweak their plan for hosting golf’s national championship in 2005.
Pilot Publisher David Woronoff went along. Here is his report.
On the surface, the town of Southampton, N.Y., host community for the 2004 U.S. Open Championship, shares much in common with the Pinehurst area.
The geography and geology of the area are similar to the Sandhills. Highway signs refer to the place as “Long Island’s Pine Barrens,” although the thickets of pines look more like Christmas trees. They are far shorter and squatter than our majestic loblolly and long-leaf.
The region, commonly called the Hamptons, is a sophisticated and cosmopolitan small community like ours — only much more so.
With its mature trees, diagonal parking and fancy shops, this quaint New England village is a pleasant mixture of the best features of Pinehurst and Southern Pines. Friends greet each other warmly along the wide brick sidewalks. Shopkeepers call their customers by name. The familiarity is reminiscent of Moore County’s brand of commerce.
But the similarities with the Sandhills end two blocks east of downtown. That’s where America’s elite families have turned a season into a verb. These wealthy folks have summered on the beaches of Long Island for more than a century.
White picket fences give way to manicured shrubs, which give way to 14-foot hedges. These impenetrable evergreen walls protect the privacy of the owners of the imposing edifices. The mansions could have jumped straight from the pages of “The Great Gatsby” — as if F. Scott Fitzgerald himself had designed them.
Advertisements in the local weekly newspaper say these prestigious properties fetch an eye-popping $20 million for a beachfront estate. These mondo boxes are home to what one local attorney, who was standing in front of her rustic and charming 17th century office building, derisively called “pre Internal Revenue Service wealth.”
Retailers like Polo, Cartier and Saks dot the downtown streetscape. A recent photo shoot featured fashion models wrapped in fur coats draped over a Ferrari. Locals walked by as if such a scene were as common as a retired couple strolling down the gently winding streets.
Conspicuously absent from the relaxed downtown scene last week was any sign that the world’s biggest golf tournament was under way less than a mile away. No signs welcoming visitors. No golf fans window-shopping.
Just a casually elegant little resort town that seemed blissfully unaffected by such a spectacle.
It’s obvious to spectators that the local community has failed to embrace the Championship. Residents seem to view the event as more of an intrusion than a point of civic pride.
Traffic into the Hamptons snarls at a snail’s pace on a good day. Drop 35,000 golf-tog-wearing out-of-towners onto this narrow spit of land, which has only one two-lane road in and one two-lane road out, and you have a recipe for long waits and short tempers.
The headline in the local newspaper, The Southampton Press, treated the Open as if a hurricane were making a bead for Long Island. The June 11 edition blared, “Region Bracing for Start of 2004 U.S. Open.” The subhead noted: “Transportation Atop List of Local Concerns.”
The family-owned weekly paper, which has a paid circulation of 18,000 and sells for $1, worried that the event “could make the already unbearable traffic even worse.”
Those concerns sounded like a familiar refrain to the contingent of Pinehurst-area visitors. Just as happened here in 1999, those fears proved unfounded. Traffic moved along at a steady clip and came to a standstill only momentarily — just in front of the golf course.
Although the residents were pleasant and accommodating to their guests, the fears of gridlock traffic had adversely affected their communal attitude for the Open. There just wasn’t much excitement around town for the golf tournament.
“Oh, yeah,” one local woman said. “I heard that was going on this week.”
This coastal community zealously guards its unique quality of life and ambiance. The result is a pleasant, one-of-a-kind town, which proudly claims to be the oldest English settlement in the state of New York.
“The event fits in a more seamless fashion into Moore County,” said Caleb Miles, the president and CEO of the Convention and Visitors Bureau, as he reflected on his visit. “It feels like it belongs here and most locals greet it with open arms. In the Hamptons, it feels like a forced fit. It’s as if the event had been laid on top of the community and it was not embracing it.”
Aside from the landed gentry that has always been a part of the local tapestry, the Hamptons are also home to such prominent celebrities as Jimmy Buffett, Billy Joel and Jerry Seinfeld.
“We live in an area where we are surrounded by very famous people,” said Courtney Ratcliffe, the operations manager for the hefty and healthy Southampton Press. “We have this New York passiveness about us. We’re not fazed by big events. We live right next to Manhattan, except we have beaches and pretty trees.”
Upon reaching the top of Shinnecock Hills, spectators quickly realize why the United States Golf Association picked this prestigious and exclusive golf club to host the U.S. Open for the fourth time.
“The reason the Open is at Shinnecock is because this is one of the best golf courses in the country,” said Stephen Cryan, Pinehurst’s director of retail. Before moving to Pinehurst, he worked at Pebble Beach, so he knows a good golf course when he sees it.
The understatedly elegant clubhouse sits like a crown on top of the golf course. With a commanding view of nearly every hole, the clubhouse appears to be holding court with each hole being one of its royal subjects. For this week, at least, Shinnecock is the king of golf.
The 112-year-old clubhouse, which is the oldest in the country, was designed by world-renowned New York architect Stanford White. It provides majestic views of the golf course. During the practice rounds, players would stop on the undulating ninth fairway to take snapshots of each other with the cedar-shake-shingle-sided house in the background.
“The first thing I had to do was to make sure I was on U.S. soil and not in the British Isles,” Miles said. “It looks just like a British Open venue.”
Indeed, the course has a decidedly British feel to it. The layout looks as if the pros were playing golf in a meadow. Waist-deep fescue shimmered in the sunlight as emerald waves of grass flickered under the nearly constant 10-mile-an-hour breeze.
The deep grass is where birdies go to die. A bogey out of that will feel like a birdie, as David Duval found out during his first round play Thursday.
That wind can turn this seemingly tame golf course into a tempest. It blows off the Atlantic Ocean to the south and the Peconic Bay to the north — and sometimes at the same time, which confounds even the most accomplished golfer.
The USGA took out several hundred trees to emphasize the windswept look, as if it were encouraging the wind to blow harder.
Despite the Scottish links look, the golf course gives a couple of nods to Donald Ross and his masterpiece, Pinehurst No. 2. First, the greens were of the inverted saucer variety and were lightening quick, though the dropoffs were not as severe as at Pinehurst.
The USGA also shaved the collars around the green, which caused a few approach shots to roll off the putting surface. Just like No. 2, Shinnecock has only one hole with a water hazard.
“The greens are very tough to putt,” said Corey Pavin, who won the Open in 1995, the last time the Championship was played in the Hamptons. “It’s a very tricky golf course just like a Pinehurst, where the greens are very difficult to judge.”
Perhaps the biggest change in the Open from 1999 is the dramatically increased police presence.
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, security has been upgraded at the Championship. While that adds plenty of expense to staging the event, it does provide a sense of safety to the fan.
All spectators are scanned with a magnetometer and their bags are searched by hand prior to boarding the shuttles. All tickets and credentials have been bar coded, which are scanned at the admissions gate. That adds another layer of security. The entire procedure moved quickly and didn’t add that much time to the process of entering the grounds.
There were hundreds of police officers, both uniformed and plain clothes, from just about every municipality in the area as well as state troopers and county sheriff’s deputies. These officers manned every gate and were dispersed throughout the crowd of nearly 35,000 fans.
The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigations made a quick trip up to Shinnecock early last week to confer with their public safety counterparts and learn their strategies. They will assist in the security at the 2005 Open.
The logistics and presentation of the 2004 Open posed plenty of challenges for the USGA staff. They just don’t have much infrastructure available to them. The club was carved out of an Indian reservation and is hemmed in by roads and other golf courses.
The parking plan was reminiscent of the 1999 Open, in which spectators parked in a remote lots a dozen or so miles away and were shuttled to the site via a fleet of yellow school buses and coach buses. They were dropped off about 100 yards or so from the front gate.
Spectators were ushered through a plywood walkway that was covered with beige two-ply carpeting. The admissions gate lacked the grandeur of the one at the 1999 Open as well as the 2001 U.S. Women’s Open.
“It’s an understated club,” Cryan said, who led his team of five staffers to study the merchandising tent. “The site is limited by space. It’s harder for them to put on a full-on presentation like Pinehurst does. Also, it’s a private club.”
Pinehurst Championship Management sent its entire staff to Shinnecock to study everything from television spotters to measuring corporate hospitality tents. The contingent of more than two dozen executives included Don Padgett II, who takes over as president of Pinehurst on July 1; Beth Kocher, chair of the 2005 U.S. Open executive committee; 2005 Championship Director Reg Jones; Lee Bowman, director of operations for the 2005 Open; Cryan; Brad Kocher, vice president of golf course maintenance; and Stephen Boyd, media relations manager.
“The USGA folks, volunteers, everyone we run into this week can’t wait to get to Pinehurst,” Cryan said while standing inside the 36,000-square-foot merchandise pavillion. “Seeing their natural enthusiasm at coming back to Pinehurst just gives you goose bumps.”
One thing the Convention and Visitors Bureau learned from the 1999 Open is that not enough spectators played golf.
This time around the CVB wants to get the word out that the local golf course are open for business — and not just for the heavy-hitters in the corporate village.
Miles and his organization believe that if more people play golf, they might stay an extra day and spend more money here in Moore County, which will benefit the entire community. They hope to maximize the utility of our area golf courses and work that around the logistics of the Championship.
“We want folks to know that we have a lot of golf available,” Miles said. “We want people to enjoy the experience, and we want them to come back. We realize that a spectator only has so much time when they’re attending the Open Championship.
“If we can tell them there are so many other things to see and do, it will make them want to come back. More important, they’ll tell their friends to come back.
“The people who go to the Open have a lot of influence over their colleagues’ impression of the community. When they sit around their clubhouse or family room, people will take what they say as the gospel. If they had a great time, it will resonate with their comments.”
The saying goes that you never get a second chance to make a first impression. No one knows that lesson better than Stephen Boyd, Pinehurst’s indefatigable media relations manager.
With more than 1,000 credentialed media people coming to the resort, Pinehurst and the entire community have a rare opportunity to put their best foot forward again while the world’s attention is focused on the Sandhills.
The positive words and images that visitors take away can draw even more tourists to local hotels and golf courses. The best way to ensure that outcome, Pinehurst Resort people say, is to make sure the media messengers have everything necessary to make the job of covering the Open easier.
“It all boils down to years of nurturing relationships with members of the media,” Boyd said. “I want them to know that they have a friend at Pinehurst.”
For the 1999 Open, Boyd created a media advisory committee to smooth any rough spots.
The photographers and writers, who must run about five miles a day with all their equipment in tow to capture all the action for readers and viewers, were concerned about the hot and humid weather conditions here in June. So Boyd had water coolers and fresh fruit placed at strategic points on the course for them. No other Open venue — before or since — has done that.
Those little touches have paid off nicely for Boyd, the resort and the community.
“I think it’s the best Open venue in America for the media,” said Dave Hackenberg, golf writer for The Toledo Blade. “The access to the course is so easy. And you set foot in the village of Pinehurst, and it’s as if the calendar flips back a hundred years. We could go to Pinehurst every year for the U.S. Open, as far as I’m concerned.”
Jim McCabe, The Boston Globe’s golf writer, covered his first U.S. Open when the Championship was held in Pinehurst in 1999. He said it was a special experience for him. As far as McCabe is concerned, Pinehurst set the standard for hosting the Open that none of the five hosts since have been able to match.
“When you’re in Pinehurst, everything is about golf,” McCabe said from inside the cavernous media tent. “I don’t think anyone is there for any reason other than golf. The overall experience was as good as it can get. I haven’t had a better experience since.”
Pinehurst executives used the Open at Shinnecock as an opportunity to scour, scout and sweat all of the logistical details involved in presenting the U.S. Open Championship. That attention to detail is paying off with downright effusive praise from members of the golf media.
About the only criticism members of the media had about Pinehurst was the area restaurants did not stay open late enough. Most reporters have deadlines of 10 p.m. or later. Most local eateries were closed by then.
Boyd and the rest of his colleagues are betting that those good vibrations find their way into print and onto the air. Judging from their reception in Shinnecock, the odds look pretty good.
“It’s a gorgeous area,” said Dave Anderson, the venerable sports writer for The New York Times. “It seems like there is a golf course at every stop sign. You go there and everyone talks about golf. It’s like a little golf planet.”
