The Fall Foursome (And Beyond)

By Lee Pace

They come from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and all points on the compass. The weather is starting to turn and cool off.

The lure of the famous courses they’ve seen on television — Pinehurst No. 2 for the U.S. Open and Pine Needles for the Women’s Open, for example — beckons groups of four golfers up to a couple dozen to flock to the Sandhills of North Carolina. The variety of golf designs from Donald Ross to Tom Fazio to Tom Doak renders too many choices and not enough time.

It’s the fall golf trip — the best time of year for the ancient game.

“We drive in on Hwy. 211, and you start to see the pine trees and the huge pinecones,” says Mark Milletary, who’ll be motoring in from Pittsburgh in October as he’s done for more than three decades. “It’s different. It’s peaceful. It makes you happy.”

Caption: Pine Needles

Milletary and three buddies traveled to Myrtle Beach in the late 1980s, got snowed out one January and on the way back north decided to stop in Pinehurst. They played the Pit Golf Links (the Dan Maples design in Aberdeen that was shut down in 2010) and have been coming to the Sandhills every October ever since. Their group has grown to 16 golfers, and they stay in the lodging facilities at either Mid South or Talamore, the sister resorts on either side of Midland Road between Pinehurst and Southern Pines. They play four rounds of golf Thursday to Sunday in a “mini-Ryder Cup format,” as Milletary calls it, with golf package specialist Nikki Conforti making all the arrangements.

“Everything is so close together at Pinehurst, it’s not spread out like some places,” Milletary says. “Nikki plays golf herself, so she knows what’s in good shape. She gets us on the best courses.”

Mike Close began his annual sojourn to Pinehurst and the venerable Pine Crest Inn in October 1996. The weather had started to turn in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, and his private airplane provided quick access to a warmer venue. He and three regular golf pals picked Pinehurst from a golf magazine advertisement.

“We made two tee times, flew down Sunday, played golf, spent the night, played Monday and flew back home, and our wives didn’t even miss us,” says Close, today a retired judge. “We came back the next year. Soon a couple of other guys wanted to come. By natural progression, it just bloomed. The last 30 years, we’ve had between 16 and 28 players. We don’t care if you’re a good golfer, you just have to be a good guy to hang around.”

Caption: Pine Crest Inn

The Pine Crest has been their Sandhills home every year. They love the rocking chairs, the bar, the food and the service they get from the Barrett family, the longtime owners of the inn that first opened in 1913. Instead of taking a big group to the inn’s dining room or a restaurant in the village, the Pine Crest food and beverage staff arranges private dinner buffets every evening — from fish and chips one night to an Italian theme the next to seafood another.

“It’s kind of like you’re going home, they treat you like a million dollars,” Close says. “This trip is all about friendships. We sit on the porch, smoke cigars, have a drink and tell stories. Some guys have known each other for 50 years or more. We love the Pine Crest. It’s quaint, it’s comfortable and they have a great bar.”

Bill Shaw, Jock Heaton, Bob Branson and Joe Crisham were a regular foursome at their course in Dixon, Ill., and over the 1980s and early ‘90s they played a regular game of “Nine Point” with a lot of trash side bets. Instead of exchanging dollars among winners and losers each week, they put all the money in a pot that had reached enough by 1996 to fund a golf trip for the foursome.

They picked Pinehurst and played Pine Needles, Pinewild and Pinehurst Plantation (later renamed Mid South). They’ve been coming back ever since, though the group is now three following Heaton’s death in 2017. Shaw and Branson liked the area so much they joined Forest Creek Golf Club, the 36-hole private club northwest of the village with two Fazio courses.

“What small-town Midwestern golfer would not be impressed with what Pinehurst has to offer?” Shaw reflects. “There were a multitude of fine golfing venues as well as watering holes like the Pine Crest Inn and Dugan’s Pub. The village with its winding streets and old-time charm captivated us from the beginning.

“Pinehurst, I love it,” Branson adds. “It’s the best place in the world.”

Caption: Mid South

Golfers have been singing that hymn for more than a century. It began with Pinehurst founder James Walker Tufts building nine rudimentary holes in 1898 as an experiment to test the waters on whether this stick-and-ball game imported from Scotland would have any traction in the United States. Then it continued in 1900 when he hired a young Scottish golf professional named Donald Ross to run the golf operation.

Ross embraced the sandy soil and native wiregrass with their similarities to the landscapes he’d known at home in Dornoch and while working apprenticeships at St. Andrews and Carnoustie. He began giving lessons, hiring caddies, organizing competitions and designing golf courses. By 1919, he had built four courses at Pinehurst and by the end of 1920s had seven designs in the community, including Southern Pines Golf Club, Pine Needles and Mid Pines. Golf’s popularity was spreading like wildfire in the early 1900s, and Pinehurst was at the epicenter.

“My friends laughed at me,” Ross said. “They said it was folly to try to make a winter golf colony down in the jack pines and sand of Carolina.

“Pinehurst was absolutely the pioneer in American golf. While golf had been played in a few places before Pinehurst was established, it was right here on these sandhills that the first great national movement in golf was started. Men came here, took a few golf lessons, bought a few clubs and went away determined to organize clubs.”

Today there are some 40 golf courses within a 15-mile radius of the Village of Pinehurst. Pinehurst No. 2 has hosted four U.S. Opens and four more are set through 2047. Pine Needles has also been the venue for four Women’s Opens. Six of Ross’s designs remain open and the inventory has been augmented by the finest modern designers, including Fazio (Pinehurst No. 6 and No. 8 and Forest Creek North and South courses), Rees Jones (Talamore and Pinehurst No. 7), Gil Hanse (Pinehurst No. 4), Ellis Maples (Country Club of North Carolina Dogwood and Woodlake), Arnold Palmer (Mid South), Jack Nicklaus (Pinehurst No. 9 and Legacy) and the design team of Bill Coore & Ben Crenshaw (Dormie Club, No. 2 restoration in 2010-11).

Caption: Forest Creek

The newcomer to the menu is Pinehurst No. 10, which opened in April on land three miles south of the resort. Tom Doak routed the course on land that once was the site of a sand quarry.

“We’re not trying to compete with Pinehurst No. 2, but maybe we’re trying to build a cousin to No. 2,” Doak says. “We’ve got a really cool piece of land. This ground has more variety and a different feeling to it than any of the other courses at the resort. The course will start gently, then get more dramatic and then to the quarry and then to the high ground, where we’ve got great long-range views. It gives you the opportunity to do something really different.”

Different indeed. That’s been the appeal for more than a century of golfers across the land making the pilgrimage to Pinehurst.

Caption: No. 10

Lee Pace is a freelance golf writer who has written about Sandhills area golf for four decades and is the author of club histories about Pinehurst Resort & Country Club, Mid Pines, Pine Needles and Forest Creek.