Donald Ross wouldn't recognize these greens: the truth about Pinehurst's special surfaces: not much of the old master's work remains

Golf Digest, June, 2005 by Ron Whitten

PINEHURST NO. 2 HAS THE GREATEST SET OF GREENS IN ALL OF GOLF. They're the epitome of what generations of Donald Ross fans have called the crowning achievement of the legendary golf architect, a one-of-a-kind set of crowned greens that slope in every direction, with roll-offs that propel balls down into closely mowed chipping swales.

Pinehurst's greens are turtlebacks. They look wide but play narrow. They're less about putting than they are about hitting a perfect approach shot, or an outstanding recovery shot, to an ideal spot, regardless of where the flag is.

Green for green, there are none more challenging than those at Pinehurst No. 2.

And they're nothing like Donald Ross intended. Not in size, not in slope, and certainly not in speed. Not even in the shapes of the bunkers that guard them. "They're totally different from what Mr. Ross designed," says golf architect Pete Dye, who played Pinehurst No. 2 almost daily in 1946 while in the Army and stationed at nearby Fort Bragg, N.C. Dye also competed several times in the North and South Amateur on the course until the late '50s. He remembers the original greens were broad, rolling and receptive. So does his wife, Alice, who first played No. 2 in the late '40s.

"Back then, if you hit to the center of the green, the ball would stay there. It would never roll off, ever," says Alice, like Pete, a former president of the American Society of Golf Course Architects. "There were rolls in the green, of course, but there weren't dips around the edges. If you hit the green, it would stay there."

That's certainly not the way Pinehurst's greens are today. Now they're dog-eared, with perimeter portions that slope outward, so a well-struck shot might land in a slight dip in the middle of a green, take a 90-degree turn, slowly roll off, trickle down a surrounding slope and come to rest at the base of a swale, 30 yards from where it landed.

Could the greens really have changed that much in 70 years?

The question could be settled if we could examine the original Ross diagrams of his greens. The Tufts Archives in Pinehurst has the country's largest collection of Ross plans but has none of his plans for Pinehurst No. 2. Because none exist.

Ross lived in Pinehurst during the fall and winter of 1934 and '35 when, at the encouragement of Pinehurst president Richard Tufts (grandson of the founder of the resort), he refashioned the No. 2 course and converted its flat sand greens to Bermuda grass. Ross had few other design projects at the time (the country was in the middle of the Great Depression), so he and greenkeeper Frank Maples spent almost a year remodeling No. 2.

Ross would walk the layout nearly every day, conjuring up another concept, another contour, another strategy. Maples would make it happen, sometimes massaging the final shape and flow of a green for a full week, using teams of mules with improvised wooden drags to float out the final contours from the native sand. They completed the course in time for the 1936 PGA Championship.

Maples' oldest son, Ellis, who later became a golf architect himself (designing, among others, Pinehurst No. 5), observed the work as a teenager. He confirmed to reporters in 1960 that Pinehurst No. 2 was done freehand. "They didn't have a single blueprint," he said. "They did it all from their head."

So there are no diagrams. But the Tufts Archives does have a few photographs of the original Ross greens, taken when they were first put into play in October 1935. The photos clearly show that No. 2 originally had low-profile greens that sat below the highest edges of surrounding bunkers. Today, those same greens are perched above those same bunkers.

More than a foot of top-dressing

In 1935 the greens were like inverted paper plates, slightly raised in the center and canted in different directions for surface drainage. By the 1960s they had become inverted pie pans, and by the 1980s, inverted bowls. Not by original design, or by conscious remodeling, but by happenstance, by application after application of sand topdressing, year after year, which raised the profiles of the putting surfaces at least a foot during a period of 25 to 30 years.

Pete and Alice Dye had been away from Pinehurst for a decade when they returned in the mid-'60s, when Alice competed in the Women's North and South Amateur, an event she would win in 1968. They were startled that the greens had become "raised angel cakes."

"The greens had a sharp edge all around them," Alice recalls. "Right at the collar. If your ball would drop off, it was so steep that it would run like crazy through the bottom of a little hollow and end up on the opposite slope. So then you'd have a lot of those ghastly downhill lies, shooting back up and over those little ledges. It was horrendous. That's why Pinehurst played so tough."

Alice says Richard Tufts explained to her that the "angel cake" effect occurred because they'd always top-dressed just to the edges of the greens, and never on the slopes around them. Peggy Kirk Bell, longtime proprietor of nearby Pine Needles Lodge & Golf Club, also recalls talking to Tufts about buildup of the greens. "He said the greens weren't nearly that high when they were built," she says.