A rare bright spot during the eye of the pandemic came in early September 2020, when the United States Golf Association named Pinehurst Resort and Country Club’s legendary No. 2 course as its first “anchor site” for U.S. Open Championships.
Noted golf writer, author and blogger Geoff Shackelford had not been to Pinehurst in the decade since the 2014 U.S. Open was held on No. 2.
Final groups of the U.S. Open at Pinehurst No. 2, a quarter-century apart.
Payne Stewart in 1999 needs a par to hold off playing partner Phil Mickelson, but his tee shot on the uphill, par-4 finishing hole misses the fairway to the right. He’s in five inches of suffocating rough, the grass wet on a cool, misty day. He punches out, has 78 yards to the hole, hits a three-quarter sand wedge to 18 feet short of the back-right hole location.
It’s been 10 years since the last U.S. Open at Pinehurst No. 2. What’s different about the golf course and infrastructure in one decade? So much. But then again, so little.
The United States Golf Association (USGA) today officially opened Golf House Pinehurst, its seven-acre campus located footsteps from the Pinehurst Resort & Country Club main clubhouse. The new location includes the organization’s equipment-testing and research facility, the visitor-friendly USGA Experience, an outdoor educational landscape feature and the recently relocated World Golf Hall of Fame, as well as administrative offices.
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.
Pinehurst No. 2 has once again secured the top spot as the best golf course in the state as determined by the North Carolina Golf Panel. Pinehurst Resort will host the 2024 U.S. Open at the venerable Donald Ross course for the fourth time, June 13-16.
The Pinehurst elixir is two-fold. The village and club offer a blend of history and aesthetics and devotion to the game of golf that set a perfect table for such a competitive feast.
A vintage photograph showing Pinehurst owner Richard Tufts seated on a bench beside architect Donald Ross taken in the 1940s had long captured Tom Pashley’s fancy. Here was Tufts, third generation of the Pinehurst founding family and a giant in American golf administration circles in the mid-1900s, alongside Ross, the native Scotsman and architect of four golf courses at Pinehurst by 1919 and nearly 400 nationwide through his death in 1948.
The Pinehurst Resort wanted to open its 10th course around the time Donald Ross’s masterpiece No. 2 hosts its fourth U.S. Open in June 2024. Tom Pashley, the resort’s president, contacted Doak in mid-2022, and if that Open were a year later Doak most likely would have passed.
