Two Renovations Later,
Pine Needles is a
Step Back in Time
Pine Needles Golf Club
Southern Pines, N.C.
Date: August 26, 2019
Pinehurst Resort is a great place to start for a golf trip to North Carolina’s Sandhills. But if you’re not careful, it’s easy to get stuck there: the resort’s packages cram your schedule with golf, and the its 10 courses (counting the Cradle) can lull you into contentment. It’s easy to forget that this region’s greatest allure is the sheer concentration of truly remarkable golf courses: no other place in America packs so many world-class tracks into so small an area. Appreciating that embarrassment of riches requires getting off campus.
And Pine Needles is a tremendous first stop.
Unlike Pinehurst Resort — which is timeless, but also unmistakably modernized — walking around the property at Pine Needles is like stepping into another era. The place is a time capsule for mid-20th Century Sandhills golf: the lodge is covered in wood paneling; the front desk still has mailboxes for guests; and the downstairs clubhouse area includes ping-pong and billiards tables. It’s jarring — like you woke up and found yourself at your childhood summer camp.
Accompanying the multitude of artifacts on the clubhouse wall are tons of old, framed photographs of Pine Needles’ matriarch, Peggy Kirk Bell. Bell was a stalwart of women’s amateur golfer, a founding member of the LPGA, a major winner, and a longtime owner and instructor at Pine Needles. Imagine if Ken Venturi had settled down to teach lessons and manage a sleepy, top-100 golf course in the middle of nowhere. That’s Bell.
An advertisement for Pine Needles in the Sandhills Daily News (April 7, 1936).
The time-machine aura of the place is not manufactured. Pine Needles traces its history back to 1927 — a Donald Ross design birthed during the heart of his career. Restorations by John Fought in 2007 and by Kyle Franz in 2017 brought Pine Needles’ design into the Twenty-First Century — lengthening holes so that tee shots played into the fronts of slopes, restoring the sizes and contours of greens, clearing trees, widening fairways, and reintroducing the classic, scrubby Sandhills aesthetic. Today, Pine Needles is more than capable of accommodating the modern game (it hosted the 2019 U.S. Senior Women’s Open, and in 2022, Pine Needles will stage its fourth U.S. Women’s Open), but in a good way, it still feels a little like playing golf in a museum.
. . .
There are overly chatty starters. And then there was our starter at Pine Needles.
Like any considerate guest, I arrived at the first tee a good 10 minutes ahead of my start time and handed over my starter’s slip. This is the right thing to do, but it is an unpleasant thing to do, because of the unwritten rule that starters must make awkward chit-chat with players. It is a matter of federal law, universally and absolutely commanded as though God himself inscribed it on one of Moses’ stone tablets: “Thou shalt not kill; Thou shalt not steal; Thou shalt not allow this golfer to pass without chatting him up.” These are usually painful conversations, made worse by the substantial likelihood that some stranger is about to watch you duck-hook your opening drive.
The old man was nice enough. He asked me where I was from, and where else I’d played. “Have you played Pinehurst No. 8?” he asked. Not this year, I responded. “I’ve always resented that course, because that’s where the gun range was, and I used to take my son out there,” he said. I chuckled politely and fraudulently, nodding a nod that warmly acknowledged the anecdote but hoped for the end of our exchange.
“He’s a Marine sniper,” the old man said. “He has confirmed kills from 2,000 yards and 3,000 yards!”
Oh, God. I glanced at the tall, green starter’s clock. Surely it was time to tee off.
“I was in the military too,” he said. “Vietnam.”
For God’s sake, will the players in the fairway never move…
“Do you know what a Huey is?”
When my playing partner finally arrived at the tee box (not 10 minutes early), the starter was railing against his deadbeat ex-son-in-law who’d fled to Montana to avoid paying child support. By this point, fleeing to Montana seemed like a pretty good idea. As a consolation, we teed off into the now-open fairway, walked to our cart as quickly as possible, and peeled out as the starter lamented the practicality of Montana family law.
. . .
Unlike the starter, Pine Needles quickly reveals itself as the farthest thing from a crime against humanity. Pine Needles is timeless. It plays up and down gently rolling hills, over brawny fairways to large greens with all the Donald Ross trimmings: contours, tilts, and false fronts. It’s no pushover, but it’s unmistakably a resort course. Its greens are less sadistic than Pinehurst No. 2, but they still manage to defend against low scores; the course intimidates less than No. 2, but its scrubby, sandy aesthetic and the pine forest through which it winds leaves no doubt where you are.
Pine Needles’ unusual distinction of having had major renovations by both Fought and Franz within a decade of one another might create the impression that the latter was a clean-up job, but the two efforts appear to have been complementary of one another. An April 2007 story in the Arizona Republic recounts: “In rebuilding the course, Fought used aerial photos from 1939 to see original outlines and contours. He rebuilt the greens, cleared trees, eliminated eight bunkers and lengthened eight or nine holes to ensure the tee shot on those par-4s played into the face of the top of a hill.” Contrastingly, Franz has described his mandate at Pine Needles as having “mowed everything out and . . . remove[d] fairway in the places where we needed to, to ‘neck down’ the fairway and really capture the ambiance and character of the original design.” Before-and-after photos show that Franz’s work involved aesthetic transformation as much as anything else.
The result of the two overhauls is a course where most players will hit lots of fairways — but anyone hoping to post a score must plot her way around strategically and avoid the complacency that short grass can instill.
The first two holes introduce the concept quickly. The par-5 first hole plays uphill — longer than its scorecard yardage (504 yards from the back “Medal” tees, 462 yards from the white “Regular” tees), but with a wide enough fairway to make staying out of trouble easy. Fairway bunkers pinch the second shot’s landing zone, but a decent drive makes either laying up or flying the traps perfectly doable. Getting to the small green in regulation so easily, though, is balanced by the difficulty of holding it: the green tilts from left to right, and any shot on the rightward third of the green risks rolling off. Donald Ross reportedly professed a preference for easy-ish first holes, but he was also a capitalist: on a Ross course, nothing is given away for free.
Like the first hole, the long par-4 second (480 yards from the back, 420 yards from the white tees) offers plenty of space in the fairway to welcome a tee shot — but that hospitality is an illusion. A crest in the fairway, from which the rest of the hole runs downhill, must be reached for the player to have any chance at making par: a tee shot hitting the face of the slope will die, leaving the player a long, blind approach shot. And the second hole’s green tilts front to back, so a long-ish shot coming in low and hot runs the risk of bouncing off the back.
Forcing the player to navigate the land’s ridges is a hallmark of Pine Needles’ layout and repeats itself throughout the round. It is masterful, but not perfect. If there is a shortcoming at Pine Needles, it is that the course occasionally feels residential; houses do not dominate the landscape, but they are common enough to interrupt the illusion of a different era. An overhead view of Pine Needles’ layout confirms that its primary routing is around a housing development — an unfortunate but, at this point, unavoidable reality. To its credit, the routing also breaks away from the housing in a couple of places to maximize the solitude of the place. And the land delivers such rich movement that one can forgive the development. At worst, Pine Needles has the feel of a more authentic Pinehurst No. 8, adorned with the subtleties that Ross was famous for. It’s not manufactured. It feels real. Not even the houses ruin that.
. . .
If the measure of a great golf course is that it lingers in your thoughts, then Pine Needles is great. Like Pinehurst No. 2, its devil is in its details; its difficulty is subtle, like a puzzle that you know you can solve if given the chance. But unlike Pinehurst No. 2, Pine Needles challenges your game without also crippling your self-esteem: its fairways are wider than No. 2, and its green complexes — while far from inviting — aren’t as sadistic and penal as those at No. 2.
And Pine Needles enjoys a level of authenticity that eludes even Pinehurst No. 2. That’s not to say that No. 2 is inauthentic, but a round at No. 2 feels a bit like a guided tour at the Louvre: you are surrounded by beauty in a genuinely precious place, but you’re also being nudged to move along the whole time. But a round at Pine Needles is a meditation. Even with the houses, Pine Needles feels apart from the world, insulated from change.
Pinehurst Resort’s more modernized atmosphere is tremendous. But there’s still room for Pine Needles’ approach to things, too. And any trip to Pinehurst should make time for both.
. . .
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