Where Golf Memories Last a Lifetime
Fall in the NC Sandhills: Where Golf Memories Last a Lifetime
By Lee Pace
In 2014, as his son prepared to graduate high school, Kevin Foster wanted to share some wisdom and perspective he’d gained over half a century.
He based his message on an annual golf trip to Pinehurst that he and a group of lifelong friends had been taking for more than 20 years.
You see, we were all equal in our own eyes. To be able to laugh and cry together, to share good times and the bad times together. True friendships are not measured by the material things. They are measured by love and fellowship. For the person who beholds such friendships, he truly beholds one of the great gifts of life.”
Hear, hear.
And the experience is all the richer by bunking down at the Pine Crest Inn in the heart of the Village of Pinehurst, playing golf, drinking cold beverages, settling bets and telling stories that grow in dimension with every passing year.
The Foster group started with eight golfers in 1989, all of them friends from the same private Catholic military high school in the late 1960s. It has grown to as many as 20 golfers but has settled in at 16 players traveling to Pinehurst in early August for a Wednesday-through-Saturday itinerary. The 2025 trip was their 36th, with Foster organizing the group from his home in Tampa and golfers coming from across the country, from places like Malibu, Denver and Cleveland.
“We don’t play quite as much golf as we used to,” Foster says. “We’ll drink a little more beer and watch the world go by. As I tried to explain to my son in that letter, time passes very fast. Pinehurst has been a very special place for us.”
You can multiply the Foster story numerous times throughout the coming fall golf season across the Sandhills — groups of four to 40 descending during the best time of the year. A nip in the air. Color framing the fairways. A fire pit with a cigar and tumbler of the good stuff after golf.
The bell cow is the No. 2 course, which has been the venue for the PGA Championship (1936), the Ryder Cup (1951), four U.S. Opens (1999, 2005, 2014 and 2024) and the U.S. Women’s Open (2014).
Ross, Ellis Maples, Tom Fazio, Rees Jones, Jack Nicklaus, Gil Hanse and Tom Doak have worked their magic on the ground to create the 10 courses, and Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw are working on course No. 11 toward an opening in 2027. Five courses play out of the main resort clubhouse, and courses 6 through 10 are dotted around the landscape within two or three miles of the Village. A smashing success in the golf offerings at Pinehurst is The Cradle, a nine-hole course next to the clubhouse built in 2017 by Hanse and design partner Jim Wagner.
Ross had built four courses at the resort by 1919, and business was so good through the Roaring Twenties that the Sandhills needed more golf. Ross designed Mid Pines in 1921 and across the road Pine Needles in 1928, the latter settling in in recent years as a four-time venue for the U.S. Women’s Open. Those two courses and Southern Pines Golf Club (Ross, 1906) are under the same ownership umbrella linked to the family of LPGA founding member Peggy Kirk Bell.
Now the family has entered into a venture with Marine & Lawn Hotels & Resorts, a hotelier with extensive experience renovating and managing historic golf-centric hotels in the United Kingdom. Work has already begun at the historic inn at Mid Pines and will continue at Pine Needles in coming years. Soon the lodging at Mid Pines and Pine Needles will be on par with historic properties that Marine & Lawn Hotels & Resorts manages at elite U.K. destinations such as St. Andrews, Dornoch and Newcastle.
Over a century some three dozen courses have sprouted throughout Moore County to turn the Sandhills into such an alluring golf destination.
Mid South (Arnold Palmer and Ed Seay) and Talamore (Rees Jones) are sister resorts on opposite sides of Midland Road, halfway between Southern Pines and Pinehurst, with on-site lodging and dining facilities. The resort in 2024 added Legacy Golf Links to its offering by purchasing the Jack Nicklaus II-designed course south of Aberdeen.
Pinewild Country Club is a gated residential community with 45 holes open to visiting golfers. The Magnolia Course was designed by Gene Hamm and opened in 1989, and the Holly Course followed in 1996 with a contrasting look created by Gary Player. The Magnolia is a big-boned, championship style golf course where there’s a premium on length, while the Holly is more about precision as golfers hopscotch wetlands, ponds and streams on nearly half the holes. The nine-hole Azalea course is perfect for a twilight emergency round.
I got excited. After a month, I went back to Cara and said, ‘I don’t think you know what you have here. You have one of the best golf courses in North Carolina.’ That’s saying a lot, especially for this region.”
Many golfers traveling from the north like to begin or end their sojourn to the Sandhills with a round of golf at Tobacco Road, located in Sanford half an hour away. The late Mike Strantz chiseled 18 memorable holes out of ground previously used as rock and sand quarries and tobacco and soybean farms. The result is visually stunning and fun to play.
No wonder golfers make a lifetime of memories visiting the Sandhills.
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.
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