The finest 200 square yards of turf at Pinehurst are the first tee of the No. 2 course.

The world is the golfer’s oyster on the first tee. A 68 is still possible for the crack golfer. A 79 is still possible for the 10-handicapper. A career round is still in the offing for beginner.

On the first tee you’ve not hit one into the pine straw. You’ve not chilly-dipped a wedge from the hollows around Donald Ross’s table-top greens. You’ve not three-whacked your golf ball on the slick putting greens.

The fairway looks a hundred yards wide, but you look further down and see that green cocked at an angle with bunkers on the left. You realize that the only good angle for your second shot is right-center of the fairway. That’s just the first of a battery of strategic challenges awaiting you the next four hours.

If you’re lucky and you’re teeing off at 9:30, 12:30 or 3:30, you’ll hear hymns ringing out from the carillon atop the Village Chapel. If it’s near Easter and you hear "Christ The Lord Is Risen Today," don’t even try to hit your golf ball.

Everyone who’s anyone in the game of golf has been here.

Donald Ross and Francis Ouimet wore tweed jackets and neckties and swung hickory-shafted clubs on this very plot of land nearly a century ago.

Ben Hogan scowled and puffed on cigarettes here.

Jack Nicklaus was pudgy and crew-cutted here in 1959 and bell-bottomed with long golden locks 15 years later.

Lee Trevino cracked jokes here in the 1994 Senior Open. Frank Stranahan flexed his muscles here and Carolina students heartily cheered Tar Heel hero Harvie Ward on the first tee.

Walter Hagen showed up on the first tee reeling from an all-night soiree one day and topped his tee shot—but still shot 66.

Bill Campbell, a successful insurance man who could afford all the new golf balls he needed, nonetheless amused his playing partners by rifling through his golf bag on the first tee for the best of his nicked golf balls en route to four North and South championships.

Name him, he’s been here.

"Strolling down the first fairway, I always think of everyone that’s played here," says Chris Dalrymple, proprietor of the Gentleman’s Corner in Pinehurst and an annual participant in the North and South Amateur. "It’s a pretty incredible thought."

Caddies, too—Fletcher Gaines carrying Curtis Strange’s bag in the mid-seventies North and Souths, Jerry Boggan dressed in yellow pants and green hat with Billy Joe Patton in the fifties, and all the others like Hardrock, Rat, Dr. Buzzard and Barney Google.

Richard Tufts once showed up on the first tee and was greeted by a newly hired starter who didn’t know Tufts from Adam. "Need to see your ticket," the starter said, whereupon Tufts, the owner of the place, walked into the pro shop and got one.

Golf architect Pete Dye says if Donald Ross were still alive he’d pick the first tee up and move it 40 yards back into the parking lot. "If he saw a young girl like Brandie Burton hit a driver and wedge on the first hole," Dye says, referring to a participant in the 1989 Women’s Amateur, he’d jump out of that box and come out fighting."

I can’t remember getting goose-bumps on the first tee the first time I played No. 2.

But I was young and stupid and innocent in the history of Pinehurst. Youth was certainly wasted on the young that day in the early 1980s.

But I did chill up last October when I walked onto the first tee at St. Andrews for the first time. By then I’d spent more than a decade making the lion’s share of my living in the grand old game and had acquired a keep appreciation for its history.

I shared the story later with Jon Wagner, the championship director of the 1999 Open and a man who can wax eloquently about the feelings and intangibles of the game. Wagner says it would be a great idea if every employee at Pinehurst could play the first at St. Andrews to get a feel for what many feel on the first of Pinehurst No. 2.

"To me the first hole at St. Andrews was an overwhelming experience," he says. "Some people dream of getting to Pinehurst the same way."

On Thursday, 156 golfers will come to the first tee of No. 2. No one’s made a bogey yet. The Open is theirs to win.