Adrenaline Bursts
Come in Small Packages
Mid Pines Golf Club
Southern Pines, N.C.
Date: August 27, 2019
I hit the pin on the second hole.
It’s a medium-length par-3 (190 yards from the blue tees, 162 yards from the whites) that, for me, put me between a 6-iron and a 5-hybrid. The elevated green, along with the sinking, middle-aged realization that I’m not as long as I think I am, led me to the longer club. The tee shot carries a waste area near the tee, then navigates a front-right greenside bunker — and, in my case, hit the pin and ricocheted down a few inches from the hole and finished inside 18 inches.
“Damn it,” I muttered through a smile. It was the bitterest tap-in birdie of my life.
Looking back from the green to the tee at Mid Pines’ par-3 second hole.
I’m zero-for-forever in the ace department. I saw one, once. Every time I stand over a tee shot on a par-3, I wonder whether this is the day; and every time I peg a Mulligan ball on a par-3, I pray to God this isn’t the day. For an amateur golfer, the odds of hitting a hole-in-one are 12,500 to 1. Do the math: four par-3s per round means the average amateur should drain one at some point within her first 4,200 rounds or so. I play 25 or 30 times per year. So mathematically, the near-miss at Mid Pines isn’t a huge deal, because I’m all but guaranteed an ace at some point over the next 140 years.
The heart-pounding start set the appropriate tone: Mid Pines is awesome. I’d played Pine Needles a day earlier, and somewhere along the way, I developed an impression of Mid Pines as the redheaded stepchild of the pair. If it is, then it’s the redheaded stepchild who grew into a rebellious teenager and blasts Guns N’ Roses deep tracks on the back of a dirt bike on his way to the video arcade with John Connor. It’s shorter than Pine Needles (6,723 yards from the back tees, compared to 7,062 from the tips at Pine Needles), and its fairways aren’t nearly as expansive. But with wall-to-wall short grass, the scale of the place feels perfect. Mid Pines’ hills jut up and down more dramatically than at Pine Needles, and the routing careens through the landscape like race car, looping back on itself in places to maximize the smaller but more rollicking property on which it sits.
Several years ago, a friend of mine earned a position of some responsibility, and his new colleagues held a lovely reception for him. It featured all the trappings of a polite, boring mid-afternoon affair: white cake, ginger ale, French onion dip. As I got ready to leave, my friend found me and said quietly, “In a few minutes, we’re gonna go to the real party.” We were there all night.
Mid Pines is the real party.
. . .
Mid Pines’ place as the less heralded of its two-course family is difficult to square not only with its setting, but also with its history. After all, Mid Pines came first. The Donald Ross design opened in 1921, some six years before Pine Needles. At Mid Pines’ completion, the Moore County News declared it “probably the best course in the state, if not in the south” — no small praise, given that Ross’ four courses at Pinehurst had been open for years.
The Moore County News (July 14, 1921).
At some point, Pine Needles became the more prestigious of the two clubs. It hosted the final edition of the Titleholders Championship, now recognized as a major by the LPGA. In 1996, it hosted its first U.S. Women’s Open; in 2022, it will host its fourth.
If Mid Pines’ reputation as a second banana was ever deserved, then that changed after Kyle Franz’s renovation in 2013. Today, the sandy, scrubby, no-rough aesthetic is fairly common among Sandhills courses. In 2013, though, Pinehurst No. 2 was still the only course in the region trying to pull off that look, and the 2014 U.S. Open (which, with one notable exception, vindicated No. 2’s transformation) still hadn’t happened. The idea of embracing wall-to-wall short grass and raw, haggard bunkers in an area where lush, pristine conditions yet ruled the day was still fairly radical. But Mid Pines went all in on it, and Franz — who had contributed to the No. 2 renovation — undoubtedly was the perfect person for the job.
Ironically, one of the Sandhills’ oldest courses now feels the most youthful: Mid Pines combines tons of short grass with the rambunctiousness of some of the area’s best topography and the fun of a shorter course. It checks every box.
. . .
Mid Pines’ mildly terrifying locker room.
If Pine Needles’ clubhouse feels like an old-time newsreel, then Mid Pines’ dimly lit locker room is something out a horror movie.
Everything is brown: the lockers, the benches, the floor, the old telephone. If you woke up there, you’d open yourself to the possibility that you were still asleep and having a nightmare about Camp Crystal Lake. It’s the farthest thing from the energetic, quirky golf course that waits outside. But inevitably, it continues to exist for one of two reasons: either Mid Pines would rather spend its money on keeping up the course, or at some point, someone in charge looked at the locker room and said, “Ah, f___ it, who cares?” Either way, Mid Pines’ head is in the right place.
And if a swift dash away from the locker room (and the undead murderer who might or might not live inside it) sounds like a good idea, then Mid Pines’ first hole obliges. The opening tee shot flies downhill into a huge swale, then uphill to a heavily contoured green. The tee shot feels tighter than it really is, thanks to a setup technique that makes the most of Mid Pines’ small footprint: pine straw underneath the fairway-separating trees transitions quickly to short grass — which is to say that the sandy waste areas en vogue at Pinehurst No. 2 are less intrusive at Mid Pines; here, they are more frame than mat. The result is fairways that are more than adequate, but still feel uncomfortable because they give way so quickly to trouble.
Mid Pines’ 14th green is trapped aggressively at front-left, front-right, back-left, and back-right.
That’s not to say that Mid Pines is all grass and trees; the artistic balance in Franz’s fairway bunkering is breathtaking. Its high sides are starkly cut into the landscape, but the low sides of the bunkering drift inexactly and naturally into the grass, with no precise line of demarcation between fairway and sand trap (the only other place I’ve seen this look pulled off so well is Sweetens Cove). The result is an appearance that looks less constructed than it does formed by centuries of wind and rain. The deftness of this presentation appears so frequently throughout the course that you start to take it for granted, but there’s a reason not many courses have bunkering like Mid Pines: because it’s not easy.
Nowhere does Mid Pines display this style better than at its fifth and sixth holes. Both are par-5s of manageable lengths (No. 5 measures 484 yards from the back tees and 458 yards from the whites; No. 6 runs 537 yards from the tips, but only 480 yards from the white tees), and neither introduces dramatic bends into the line of play (although the sixth fairway moves leftward slightly after the tee shot). Instead, both holes defend themselves with dramatic land movement and deep bunkering in all the wrong (or right, if you’re the architect) places. At the fifth, the green sits atop a hillock, with a gaping greenside bunker running up the entire right side of the slope. On the sixth, sand traps flank the right side of the fairway for virtually its entire length — but avoiding them on the left side of the fairway brings into play a large, center-left greenside bunker that looks torn out of the earth. Playing closer to the fairway traps is dangerous, but it offers the only clear shot into the green. Either way, the player cannot avoid risk forever.
Mid Pines’ careening 15th fairway, as seen from the green.
As good as the fifth and sixth holes are, Mid Pines’ best two-hole combo are the 15th and 16th — rollicking, neighboring fairways sharing a common apex, similar to Pinehurst No. 2’s fourth and fifth holes. The fairway at the par-5 15th (542 yards from the back tees, 478 yards from the white tees) banks hard from right to left, and winds past bunkering that challenges the tee shot and a layup. Once on the green, the stunning 16th comes into view: long for a par-4, especially by Mid Pines’ standards (440 yards from the blue tees, 376 yards from the whites). The fairway doglegs leftward, and the inside of the bend is full of pine trees — so only after the sharply downhill tee shot does the green come into view. It’s a dramatic section of the property, routed brilliantly to reveal one stunning element after another.
. . .
The greatness of the North Carolina Sandhills’ collection of golf courses lies in its diversity: among the greatest of its courses, none are the same. But none of them is perfect. Pinehurst No. 2 will make you hate your life. Pinehurst No. 4 has a couple of water holes on the back nine that, while architecturally sound, feel out of place. Pine Needles occasionally feels a little tired. To be clear, these are nit-picking critiques: from top to bottom, these courses can stand against any public tracks in America. Perfection is elusive, and Mid Pines doesn’t achieve it, either. It’s a remarkable collection of holes, but its third hole is a long par-4 with woodlands to the right that must be navigated with a fade — and if you can’t hit a fade, then you’re one golf ball lighter. It’s just one blemish, but one blemish is short of perfection.
Still, Mid Pines comes as close to perfection as any of the Sandhills courses I’ve seen. Its land its terrific; its routing is a master work; its bunkering is astonishing; and it uses visual trickery to balance playability with challenge. Most of all, it’s a blast. It’s a course that you’re sad to leave.
The Sandhills’ embarrassment of golfing riches pressures golfers into constantly playing new courses: experiencing the region’s full array requires sampling one course and then moving on. But Mid Pines is not a course to be played once and then left behind. It stands shoulder-to-shoulder with any other course in the area. Nearly a hundred years after Mid Pines opened, the Moore County News’ early description is true again: Mid Pines is one of the South’s best golf courses, period.
. . .
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