Count to Ten

By Lee Pace

Tom Doak was bitten by the golf bug as a youngster growing up in Stamford, Conn., first playing a local municipal course and then tagging along on his father’s business trips to esteemed golf destinations like Pebble Beach, Cypress Point, Harbour Town and Pinehurst. He first saw Pinehurst No. 2 in the early 1970s and it made an impression on a kid who had decided early on that he wanted to spend his life working in the golf business.

“It’s always been one of my favorite golf courses,” Doak says. “What made it cool was a bunch of little stuff, little ridges, touches of wire grass here and there. The strategy of the fairways stood out.”

After studying landscape architecture at Cornell in the early 1980s, caddying at St. Andrews and visiting the great courses of Great Britain for a year and then working on the construction crew for Pete Dye at Long Cove Club on Hilton Head Island, S.C., Doak hung his own shingle in the golf design business.

Four decades into his career and with notches in his design belt the likes of Ballyneal in Colorado, Cape Kidnappers in New Zealand and Pacific Dunes on the Oregon coast, Doak has returned to the Sandhills.

His design of Pinehurst No. 10 opened in April 2024 and is the first start-from-scratch new course at the resort and club since the Tom Fazio-designed No. 8 opened in 1996.

“We’ve got a really cool piece of land,” Doak says. “This ground has more variety and a different feeling to it than any of the other courses at the resort. There is a lot going on on this land. It keeps building up and getting more dramatic.”

The golf drama at Pinehurst has been percolating now for more than a century. Scotsman Donald Ross designed the first four courses from 1901 through 1919. Ellis Maples, the son of Frank Maples, Ross’s right-hand man in design and maintenance, built No. 5 in the late 1950s. George and Tom Fazio added No. 6 in the late 1970s and, after his uncle’s retirement, Tom returned for No. 8 in the mid-1990s. Rees Jones added his thumbprint in the late 1980s with Pinehurst No. 7.

And the resort added the Jack Nicklaus designed course originally called Pinehurst National when it purchased the club in 2012 and designated it as Pinehurst No. 9.

Pinehurst owner Robert Dedman Jr. looked toward the future and additional golf in 2011 when he purchased a tract of land three miles south of the resort that had been a sand quarry in the early 1900s and later was the site the Pit Golf Links from 1985 through its closing in 2010. After considering his options for a decade, Dedman in the post-Covid glow of the golf industry explosion in general and the robust demand for Pinehurst’s existing nine courses decided in late 2022 that it was time to pull the trigger on the new course.

Bill Coore and Crenshaw had designed a potential routing in 2011 on this site, but their schedule in 2022 over the next year precluded them from handling the new job. Doak, by a stroke of scheduling coincidence, had a hole in his calendar and could mobilize his designers and construction workers to bolt to Pinehurst in early 2023 and build a new course.

Like the Pit before it, the course makes significant use of the rugged dunes, mounds and berms forged by mining excavations a century ago and accented over decades by natural tree and plant growth.

“This course starts out pretty gentle, then goes into some of the old quarry works in the pit and gets downright crazy for a little bit,” Doak says. “Then it goes up on the hill and there are the big views and then all the holes coming back are pretty dramatic. You have water in play on 15 and 17. It’s a pretty dramatic golf course. It’s a big piece of land, and you feel like you have all the pieces of the puzzle. It gives you the opportunity to do something really different.”

No. 10 is a walking course, and golfers are given the option of carrying their bag, pulling a trolley or hiring a caddie. Doak was given the freedom to find the best 18 holes without returning the ninth hole to the clubhouse, so it has an old-school feel as the routing ventures to the west and the 10th green is on the western edge of the property, far from the clubhouse and the start.

“This is an awesome golf experience, similar to No. 8 in that you’re off on your own, away from the resort, no homes, no traffic, just golfers out in the woods,” says head pro Tyler Yancey. “The sand pit is the feature that gets everyone’s attention. The corridors are so wide and the vistas so different that it adds to golf experience here. A lot of golfers say this was the best course on their trip and they can’t wait to come back.”

Two holes generating much early buzz are the par-4 eighth (385 back tees, 357 middle) and the par-3 17th (175 back).

Eight ventures into the heart of the old sand quarry and is marked by a giant mound dubbed the Matterhorn facing the golfer off the tee. The safest play is the left of the fairway, but the better angle of approach into the green comes from the right. The green sits below the fairway, encircled by an amphitheater of sand dunes.

“The best way I can describe this hole is that it’s like playing down the spine of a dragon,” says Philadelphia-based golfer and photographer Jon Cavalier. “A huge sandy nob blinds most of the fairway and its mammoth mounds on this short par-4.”

Adds Southern Pines golfer Ran Morrissett, “Eight features jumbled landforms and a sunken green of the sort more readily associated with an Irish links like Lahinch.”

Hole 8 Course No. 10

Seventeen requires a full carry over a lake to a huge green carefully segmented by Doak and chief design associate Angela Moser. Doak could only build this hole if Pinehurst officials were willing to build a bridge to connect the tee to the green.

“On a course full of great greens, this one ranks with the best,” Morrissett says. “While the water might spook you, the real star is the green configuration and its contours. It’s a large green at 8,100 square feet, but it can play relatively small with its different hole locations.”

“Arguably the prettiest hole on the course, this par-3 plays over water to an incredible green,” Cavalier adds. “Near infinite pin locations will have this hole playing completely differently from day to day. It’s one of those holes you’d never get tired of playing.”

Time will tell, of course, but Doak expects that to apply to the entirety of Pinehurst No. 10.

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.