Southern comfort - Pinehurst Country Club, North Carolina

Golf Digest, June, 1999 by Charles McGrath

If the many legendary American golf courses, Pinehurst No. 2 is the one that most resembles a muny: It's open to anybody, of whatever station or ability, who can foot the bill. But in a way No. 2 is also the most elusive of the classic

layouts. Because in recent years it has played host to so few important tournaments, the course hasn't yet become television familiar, its lofty, pine- towered aisles memorized by the cameras, its puzzling greens computer-graphed and analyzed. All this is about to change, of course, but for now, in the imaginations of many of us, Pinehurst No. 2 still exists much as it did in the head of its creator, Donald Ross-as a kind of waking dream. Pinehurst, the locals like to say, is a state of mind.

Ross, whose kindly, steel-spectacled likeness is everywhere in Pinehurst, was actually the second, or maybe the third, visionary associated with the place. The first was James Walker Tufts, an apothecary from Medford, Mass., who in the years after the Civil War made a killing in the soda-fountain business. His fountains weren't just a spigot and a handle, they were marble and chrome monuments to the miracle of carbonation. Like so many New Englanders of his

generation, Tufts was also a health nut, and he had a notion of founding a sani-tary winter colony for God-fearing citizens who wished to escape the frigid, pestilential North. (The original applicants were required to submit letters from both their doctors and their ministers.)

In 1895 Tufts purchased 6,000 acres of virtual wasteland in the Sandhills of North Carolina-land that had been burned and clear-cut in the manufacture of tar and turpentine-and hired as his landscaper the illustrious Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of Central Park.

Olmsted found Tufts' site unpromising; it was little more than a desert. But he drew up a village master plan-a series of curving roads radiating from and returning, like lines of magnetic force, to a central village green-and he also dispatched one of his associates to oversee the planting of some 250,000 trees and shrubs. A gabled hotel, the Holly Inn, quickly went up, and so did dozens of "cottages"-shuttered and clapboarded single-family residences. Pinehurst was open for business. It looked-and still does-like a little slice of New England transplanted to the pinewoods.

The original sports at Pinehurst were tennis, shooting (Annie Oakley ran the gun club), lawn bowling, and-Tufts' favorite-a game called roque, which was a sort of one-armed version of croquet. Golf arrived, by accident, in 1897, after farmers complained that their cows were being disturbed by some of Mr. Tufts' guests whacking tiny white balls around the pasture. A little nine-holer and a clubhouse were promptly built, but the defining moment in Pinehurst history came in 1900, when Tufts hired Ross, newly emigrated from Scotland, to supervise his golf operations.

Ross' association with the resort lasted until his death, in 1948, and though he went on to build hundreds of courses, including several in the Sandhills area, none meant as much to him as his beloved No. 2, which was both his masterpiece and a constant work-in-progress. Ross' other great Pinehurst legacies were the first driving range ever-Maniac Hill, as Pinehurst's practice ground was called-and the Pine Crest Inn, on Dogwood Street in the village, which he owned and operated from 1921 until his death and which hasn't changed much at all in the years since.

Where the rest of Pinehurst, especially that part run by the resort, is proper and upscale, the Pine Crest is funky and pleasingly down at the heels. The lobby smells of stale cigarette smoke, and the cabbage-rose wallpaper in the main stairwell is due for a face-lift. But there is always something going at the Pine Crest-nightly chipping contests, for example, where guests hit off the carpet at a round target propped up in front of the fireplace, or the weekend appearances of Clarence and Tim, a piano player and Elvis impersonator, who by the end of the evening usually have everybody, college kids and geezers, up and dancing to "Blue Suede Shoes." If the Pine Crest isn't the heart of Pinehurst, exactly, it's easily the id. (The men's-room graffiti is simultaneously scatological and golf-related, as in this entry: "Doug can't golf for s---.")

The collective memory of Pinehurst, on the other hand, is crammed into the back room of the Given Memorial Library. The Tufts Archive, as it's known, is in the process of being reorganized, and at the moment it resembles an overcluttered attic stuffed with bills, bric-a-brac, old dance cards and family albums. The collection includes John Hemmer's striking portraits not only of guests but of the working folk-the caddies and mule drivers and greenkeepers.

In some respects, the present-day village of Pinehurst is a little like Bedford Falls-it's almost too good to be true: You half expect to see Jimmy Stewart and Clarence (the other Clarence) shuffling down the street. Ross transformed the place, turning what had been a kind of Chautauqua into a golf mecca-but enough of the small-town vision of Tufts and Olmsted persists that it still has an identity of its own, and is much less self-consciously a shrine than, say, St. Andrews. (A golf memorabilia store in town, Burchfield's Golf Gallery, sells not chotchkes and T-shirts but prints and photographs.)