“Our relationship with CCNC is centered around Donald Ross and the Pinehurst area,” Macrae says. “The recently developed relationship between the Royal Burgh of Dornoch and Pinehurst will provide even more opportunities for the two communities to share their history through golf and friendship.”
This area of south-central North Carolina has deep Scottish roots dating to the 1700s, when droves of Scottish emigrants fled the Highlands to the shores of North Carolina and moved up the Cape Fear River and its tributaries inland to the pine forests of Moore County. They found land for the taking and plentiful game for hunting.
Tom Fazio was working at Inverness Club in Toledo, Ohio, in the mid-1970s on some course renovations leading up to the 1979 U.S. Open when he noticed an ambitious and talented member of the course maintenance staff named Mike Strantz.
“Mike developed a close friendship with Andy Banfield of our staff,” Fazio remembers. “He was a talented artist and drew sketches of golf holes. He showed a real desire to get into golf course design. He liked us and we liked him. After the Inverness project was finished, we offered him a job working for us.”
If Mike Strantz hadn’t died from tongue cancer in 2005 at the young age of 50, would he ever have made it to Pinehurst proper to design a golf course?
We’ll never know, of course, but at least 25 percent of his remarkable but all too limited design portfolio was built within 45 miles of the Village of Pinehurst.
Twenty-five miles to the northeast is Tobacco Road in Sanford, which opened in 1998 with craggy edges, blind shots and dramatic ups and downs whittled from the site of an old sand quarry.
Pinehurst Resort has announced that it will be creating a brand-new golf courses for the first time in 28 years. Pinehurst No. 10 is set to open in 2024 and will be designed by acclaimed golf course architect Tom Doak. Aside from the golf course, the site in Aberdeen will include a short course, clubhouse, guest cottages and other lodging.
“Tom Doak builds incredible golf courses on sand and we’re excited to see what he’ll create in the North Carolina Sandhills,” says Pinehurst Resort President Tom Pashley. “We’ve worked with some amazing golf architects who’ve embraced our natural aesthetic and believe Tom will do something fantastic on this site.”
Golf architects Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw each have a significant tie to the Sandhills and Pinehurst No. 2 from their respective early days in golf.
Coore was born in 1946 and grew up in nearby Davidson County. As a boy, he made frequent trips with adult golf friends and boys his own age to Pinehurst to play limitless summertime golf on No. 2, this before the advent of air conditioning and Pinehurst becoming a year-round resort
Gil Hanse launched his golf design firm in 1993 and for nearly two decades carved a niche doing restoration work on classic courses across the United States, among them Merion, Winged Foot, Fishers Island, The Country Club, Los Angeles Country Club, Oakland Hills and Baltusrol.
Jones Family Imprint Across The Sandhills of North Carolina with favorite courses such as Pinehurst No. 7 and CCNC’s Cardinal Course.
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.
“For me, Pinehurst is such a special place for golf,” says Fazio, who at 77 is still designing new courses and working on renovations of his earlier works. “Put Donald Ross in the equation and it’s even more special. It’s been an historical destination for over a century. There’s a special feeling — a feeling for golf and its tradition and history and longevity.”
