This article originally appeared in The Pilot in 1995.

I was saddened when the PGA World Golf Hall of Fame was unceremoniously moved out of Pinehurst in 1993.

And not for the conventional reasons. I don’t play golf, and I don’t follow the sport except to watch the final rounds of the Masters and the U.S. Open on television. I don’t even do that if a familiar name — a Nicklaus, a Floyd, a Trevino, a Norman — isn’t on the leader board going into the last 18 holes. Most of today’s touring pros have all the charisma of bean curd.

But the Hall of Fame has occupied a special niche in my memory since that day in the summer of 1974 when George Raynor, my managing editor at the Salisbury Post, bellowed to me across the newsroom, "Hackney, you’re covering Ford at the golf Hall of Fame dedication in Pinehurst tomorrow."

I nearly choked on my coffee. I was 26 years old and had been a newspaper reporter for two years, spending most of that time covering the Salisbury City Council. And now I was going to cover the president of the United States, who would deliver the keynote speech at the dedication of the new golf shrine.

I had covered Gerald Ford a few months earlier in Charlotte, when Richard Nixon was still holding onto his chair in the oval office by his fingernails, telling the nation the Watergate scandal was nothing more than a media concoction. Ford was certainly a prominent public figure then, but after all only vice president. Now, however, he was the most powerful man on the planet, and I was about to become, if only for a few hours, a member of the White House press corps. Gerald Ford and I had arrived.

I didn’t sleep that night.

I set out for Pinehurst early the next morning, with my managing editor in tow. He was an even more unlikely figure at a golf-related event than I. George was a crusty, tyrannical, chain-smoking newspaper editor who would have been right at home on the set of "The Front Page," green eyeshade and all. Polyester was not his fabric of choice. He complained profanely during the entire three-hour drive to Pinehurst about the rock music being played on the radio. I paid no attention to him. I would soon be entering the heady world of big-time journalism.

George and I had to show press credentials issued by the White House as I drove the car into the parking lot at the Pinehurst Country Club. I waved the documents nonchalantly, as if I did this sort of thing all the time. We walked to the clubhouse to pick up yet another set of credentials that would admit us to the press gallery for Ford’s speech. I found myself standing in line behind Dan Jenkins, the golf writer for Sports Illustrated. I cursed myself for not bringing along my copy of Jenkins’ new best-selling novel, "Semi-Tough," for him to autograph.

We got the necessary requisite pieces of paper and walked outside the clubhouse, where I had my second encounter of the day with a celebrity. There stood Lee Trevino, taking swings with a driver in preparation for a practice round for the Hall of Fame Classic, the PGA tournament that would be held on the No. 2 course that weekend.

We made our way from the clubhouse to the gleaming new Hall of Fame and stood alongside the outdoor stage from which the president would speak in a few minutes. We found ourselves among a group of loitering reporters who had accompanied the president from Washington to Pinehurst. On the tags dangling from their necks were printed the names of people whose bylines I had seen in the newspapers and whose faces I had seen on the network newscasts.

George ran into an old friend, New York Times White House correspondent Marjorie Hunter. He introduced me to her, and it was all I could do to say, "Nice to meet you." Until then, I had never seen a New York Times correspondent in the flesh.

"This job has its moments," Hunter told George, "but this isn’t one of them." She had been doing this sort of thing every day for a long time and had become jaded. I made a mental note to myself to cultivate some jadedness.

Members of the White House press office staff circulated among the reporters, distributing copies of the speech Ford would make in a few minutes. What a deal! I wouldn’t even have to take notes. Covering the president, I decided, was an easy job.

At last I settled on one of the benches in the press gallery overlooking the stage. Taking a seat next to me was a strikingly beautiful young CBS reporter named Connie Chung. She introduced herself but did not ask me to whisper anything to her. I would have, had she asked. I would also have done anything else she asked, such as fetching her a soft drink or singing "The Hallelujah Chorus."

Finally a high school band struck up a really bad rendition of "Hail to the Chief," and the leader of the free world ascended the steps to the stage. Behind him in single file were the golfing legends that were to become the Hall of Fame’s first inductees. They included Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, Arnold Palmer, Patty Berg, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player, Byron Nelson and Gene Sarazen. Even for someone who wasn’t a golf fan, these were household names.

I don’t remember a single word Gerald Ford uttered that day. I do remember that it was not what the press refers to as a major policy address. It seems that he began with a few jokes about his golf game. A club was a deadly weapon in Ford’s hands. He was notorious for shanking shots into galleries and nearly decapitating spectators.

I also remember how godawful hot it was in Pinehurst on Sept. 11, 1974. The temperature must have been in the high 90s, and as giddy as I was about being present for the proceedings, I was glad when it was over and I could get in an air-conditioned car.

The dedication of what would later be renamed the PGA World Golf Hall of Fame was also the high point in its brief history. The facility never became a tourist mecca comparable to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., or the Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. By the early 1990s, there were rumors that the PGA would close the shrine, which was plagued by financial problems, and open a new version of it in Florida. PGA officials denied there were any plans to make such a move.

Like Nixon before them, they were lying. They finally made a formal announcement, and the Hall of Fame closed its doors at the end of 1993. It would have been more fitting if the PGA had loaded the hall’s artifacts on trucks in the middle of the night and hightailed it out of town.

The building that housed the Hall of Fame is no morel. But I will always remember it as what it was on Sept. 11, 1974 — the place where a starstruck young reporter got to rub elbows with the big boys.