The Big Three
By Lee Pace
It made for a great story in the heady days of the late-1980s golf boom:
Arnie and Jack battling it out once again, staking their immense abilities and reputations face-to-face as they’d done so many times at places like Augusta and Pebble Beach and Oakmont.
Only this battle wasn’t with their drivers and putters and steely determination to hole 12-footers for birdie. This was about golf-course design.
Arnold Palmer and Pinehurst Plantation.
Jack Nicklaus and Pinehurst National.
Side-by-side on Midland Road between Pinehurst and Southern Pines, developers in the mid-1980s had seized on the hot concept of the day: High-profile designer, upscale club, private gate. Projects of this nature were sprouting throughout the Carolinas, the Southeast and the Sunbelt as developers and investors sought to cash in on the convergence of the maturing baby-boomer and the explosion of golf popularity.
“This is a dynamite golf course,” Seay said. “It’s everything a golfer could want. It’s one of the best we’ve done. Every hole nestles right in. From one hole to the next, you do not find a similar piece of ground. The variation in contour is remarkable for an area thought to flat. That’s one of the charms of this golf course.”
Both courses were not without their ownership travails, though, as the Gulf War and an early 1990s recession crimped the real estate market. In time, though, both have landed on solid ownership platforms, with the Nicklaus course now known as Pinehurst No. 9 and part of the Pinehurst Resort family, and the Palmer course now known as Mid South owned for nearly two decades by Pennsylvania businessman Robert Levy Jr., who also owns Talamore and Talamore Golf Resort. Both are open to the traveling golf public.
Nicklaus and design associate Jim Lipe moved only 185,000 cubic yards of earth in building their course — a very modest number by the 1980s standards, which had designers routinely moving mountains of dirt. It’s relatively forgiving off the tee but is exceedingly demanding around the greens. Multiple levels make putting a challenge, and missing a green requires a svelte touch to get up-and-down for par.
The courses at Pinewild are accessible to the traveling golfer as well through various package operators, making “The Big Three” alive and well in the Sandhills golf travel community.
Chapel Hill based writer Lee Pace has written about golf in the Sandhills since the late 1980s and has authored a dozen books about clubs, courses and the people who’d made it special over more than a century.
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