A Diamond in
the Rough Finally Has
Its Day in the Sun
Southern Pines Golf Club
Southern Pines, N.C.
Date played: November 22, 2021
Greens fee: $55
Finally, my phone rang.
“Hello,” said Abby Liebenthal. “Where are you?”
“Hello,” I returned. “I’m in a bunker in the first fairway.”
The greens complexes at Southern Pines are nowhere near as treacherous as those at Pinehurst No. 2, but they still feature plenty of false edges and internal movement.
When I’d begun Instagram-bragging a couple of days earlier about my arrival in Pinehurst, Abby reached out. She’d recently moved to Pinehurst with her fiancé, she said, and they were happy to meet up for a bite to eat if time allowed. Abby and I knew each other from mindless interactions on Twitter; I’d interviewed her in 2020 about her five-week pandemic quarantine in the Sandhills, and we’d chatted for her podcast. But we’d never actually met in person. For an introvert who plays most of his golf alone, countering a Twitter pal’s dinner offer with an invitation to play a new golf course was a couple of steps out of my comfort zone. Then again, I’d spent 12 hours in the car to get here. The comfort zone had ended somewhere outside Birmingham.
But standing on the first tee after a rainy morning at Southern Pines — the long-beloved but only recently restored Donald Ross favorite a few miles from Pinehurst — Abby was nowhere to be seen. I pegged a tee ball and spent a minute — then two, then three — taking practice swings. Finally, I figured that she wouldn’t make it, and I teed off alone. Three minutes later, as I was stepping into a bunker along the first fairway’s right side, my phone rang. It was Abby, hurrying toward the clubhouse from the parking lot. “Hello. Where are you?” she asked.
In a bunker in the first fairway. And on the verge of the unexpected.
. . .
Even by the standards of the Pinehurst area’s history-soaked roster of golf courses, Southern Pines has been around longer than most. A year before Pinehurst No. 2’s 18 holes opened in 1907, Southern Pines did the same — on dramatically more varied land, to boot. But where No. 2 became one of the world’s great championship courses, Southern Pines — as Richard Mandell’s book tells — spent more than a century facing one existential hurdle after another. When the Great Depression hit, Southern Pines’ red ink-soaked balance sheet repeatedly forced the club to seek financial help from local officials. In 1936, the town of Southern Pines wiped out the golf club’s delinquent water bill. In 1941, after Southern Pines’ owner died, his widow sold the club to the town over the objections of members. After another decade of lean finances, the local Elks Lodge bought the club in 1951. One night in 1967, the clubhouse burned to the ground during a free steak dinner (“Honest to God, they were sitting on the hoods of their cars out there, eating and watching the fire,” a longtime member later told). And for most of the Elks’ 70-years-long ownership, Southern Pines remained a low-budget and minimally maintained but locally beloved golf course.
After Southern Pines’ new owners took over in 2020, architect Kyle Franz went to work restoring the Donald Ross design in the style that he’d returned to two other nearby Ross efforts, Pine Needles and Mid Pines.
In 2020, though, Southern Pines finally got the financial backing that it’d never had when the owners of Pine Needles and Mid Pines — two elite Ross designs just a few miles away — acquired Southern Pines from the Elks. The new owners immediately turned again to Kyle Franz, the architect who’d restored Pine Needles and Mid Pines to Ross’ original visions in earlier years. What reopened in 2021 was a vision that only Ross could have possibly imagined; outside Ross’ mind’s eye, no one had seen it before.
And from the outset, that vision pops with life, keeping up with the rollicking land on which Southern Pines sits. Like Mid Pines, Southern Pines’ scorecard yardage (6,354 yards from the tips) is far shorter than the championship-capable layout at Pine Needles. And as at Mid Pines, the tee shot at Southern Pines’ first hole (372 yards from the blue tees, 368 yards from the white tees) tumbles dramatically downhill. Unlike Mid Pines, though — or any of Ross’ typical handshake openers — Southern Pines confronts players immediately with a decision to make. The less fraught angle to the green comes from the fairway’s right side — the tee shot to which must carry sandy bunkering that cuts in from the edges, a la Pinehurst No. 2. But past that carry, a second fairway bunker lies ready to swallow up any drives that are too aggressive — and with the fairway’s downhill slope and the sandy turf’s natural firmness, it’s an easy trap to find; and the green’s false front demands that any approach from the sand be crisply struck. While I was thinking through my recovery options, Abby called, giving me a few more minutes to come to terms with my inability to strike crisply from a fairway bunker; I made bogey, and was glad to do it.
And like Mid Pines, Southern Pines’ site moves so playfully that it would be difficult to imagine a bad routing — but Southern Pines delivers anyway. Only once do consecutive holes move in the same direction; and after five holes along the property’s edges, the routing begins jumping throughout the site in triangles and zig-zags, over hills and across them.
Even in a collection of 18 tremendous holes, Southern Pines’ par-3s stand out — and no more so than the ninth.
Blind shots are common, but trouble is hard to find off the tee — but not impossible. Abby, I was pleased to learn, was as generous as I am in granting mulligans. But from time to time, I am unlucky enough to find an errant first tee ball after crushing a towering do-over, and I feel obligated to justify all the mulligans by playing the original. At the long par-4 sixth hole (423 yards from the blue tees, 405 yards from the white tees), I duck-hooked my drive into a wall of pine trees, and regretted to find it nestled behind several of them. But after threading a window no wider than six feet with a hybrid, my ball went bounding downhill to within easy distance of the green (I eventually made a seven, but that’s not the point). Southern Pines’ land has so much movement that, even when a player finds trouble, they can put themselves in position to recover bogey just by getting the ball rolling; the land’s contours and firmness generally will take care of the rest.
Between the fourth green and the fifth tee, a short par-3 with beautiful, cross-crossing waste areas — Ross’ “lost hole,” as it’s been dubbed — juts off to the left. It’s a “transitional” hole that holds together a nine-hole loop: the first four, plus the transitional par-3 hole, finished by the 18-hole routing’s last four holes. It’s a brilliant idea, the only downside of which is that it costs players some of the courses’ best moments. To the right of the eighth and ninth holes, wide views of the back nine open up — a side preceded by perhaps Southern Pines’ best par-3, the ninth hole (185 yards from the blue tees, 164 yards from the white tees), where the topsy-turvy green is guarded in front-left by sand, at front-right by a false edge, and at far right by rumpled, sloping surrounds. Like the rest of the course, it’s fraught with bad possibilities without being intimidating.
Southern Pines’ 14th green is defenseless, save for a small, innocuous knob in front that changes everything about an otherwise easygoing approach shot.
On a course with no mediocre holes, picking out the best is difficult. But ignoring the short par-4 11th hole (315 yards from the blue tees, 290 yards from the white tees) would be malpractice. The broad fairway runs nearly perpendicular from the tee, sitting on the side of a hill so that the fairway tilts sharply toward the tee but banks rightward toward the green. After an uncharacteristically strong drive to the top-right of the fairway, I putted 40 yards down the slope onto a green perched just short of trouble. But the par-4 13th hole (400 yards from the blue tees, 388 yards from the white tees) bears considering too: after a blind tee shot to a downhill fairway, the approach faces a long, bunkerless green protected only by a steep downslope behind and a thorny knob in front: come up short, and the knob will kick an approach back into the fairway — but one yard further, any shot hitting the back of the knob can ricochet over the green and downhill to a marshy death. It creates a remarkable juxtaposition: a target nearly 40 yards wide, but with no inviting options — all thanks to a bump about the length of a driver shaft.
. . .
By the time we hit the 14th hole, Abby and I were fully in daylight-chasing mode. Even at 4:30 in the afternoon, the late November sun had sunk low behind the pines. The light wasn’t the only thing fading: after 27 holes the day before, plus an afternoon of pushing my cart up and down Southern Pines’ hills, my legs were shot. I doubled the gettable par-3 14th (175 yards from the blue tees, 162 yards from the white tees) and tripled the short par-4 16th (316 yards from the blue tees, 303 yards from the white tees).
Southern Pines “lost” transition hole, which holds together a quick nine-hole loop.
By the time Abby and I reached the tee at the uphill, par-4 18th hole (350 yards from the blue tees, 339 yards from the white tees), we were somewhere between striding and jogging. But Ross wasn’t done with us yet. True to the form of a designer who gave away fairways but demanded solid approach shots, I smashed a drive to the right side of the fairway, but Abby pushed her tee shot into a sprawling waste area that swirled all the way up around and in front of the green. From the fairway, my 9-iron came up just short, and bounced down into the sand — but Abby followed with the shot of the day: a hybrid off the waste that cleared the greenside trap, then bit and released for a kick-in birdie. I don’t remember what I made. It was the only forgettable part of the round.
We adjourned, at last, to the Pinehurst Brewery for that welcome-to-town meal on my last night before driving home. I’d planned on ribs, but even by 6 p.m., the brewery was already sold out — so we settled for various other smoked pork products, cold draft beer, and post-round debriefing that turned more toward favorite podcasts than favorite holes. The loudspeakers played the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” a little too loud — a reminder of the ribs that got away. But after the previous day’s disappointment at Tot Hill Farm, Southern Pines had been exactly what I needed: it restored by amazement for Sandhills golf — that a scruffy layout, weighed down by a century of neglect and nothing going for it but pedigree and topography, could have been just a facelift away from being a top-50 public course. How many more untapped possibilities are still out there? Just over 50 bucks had gotten me on one of the best golf courses I’ve ever seen.
Southern Pines won’t be a $55 golf course much longer. But for the first time in its long history, it finally deserves it.
. . .
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