Count to Ten: Top Pinehurst Area Courses

Ten was the Pythagorean symbol of perfection or completeness. Humans have 10 fingers and 10 toes. The Associated Press ranked 10 teams (not 20 or 25) in its weekly college football rankings from 1961-67. Talk show host David Letterman regaled viewers nightly with his Top 10 lists. Bo Derek’s curves and long legs were deemed the sum of 10 in a 1970s movie. And there are not nine Commandments, now are there?

Top 10 lists are always fun. Here is the first of three in the Sandhills golf universe to kick off 2025 based on one man’s humble opinions.

Top 10 Courses

1. Mid Pines Golf Club (Donald Ross architect, 1921) — If the Big Man said you’ve got one round of golf left, I’d plant the peg in the ground and go for a ramble around these sacred acres conceived more than a century ago as a quiet outpost from the kinetic core at Pinehurst. It’s compact, not too long and after the Kyle Franz restoration in 2013 reflects the wispy, sandy character of the region.

2. Pinehurst No. 2 (Donald Ross, 1907 first opened, 1935 final routing) — Frankly the difficulty of the slopes on the edges of the uber-firm greens can make for a long day. But still the genius of how 18 holes fit the ground so perfectly and the ghosts of a Who’s Who in golf having walked these very steps elevate the appeal of one of the world’s more revered layouts. You can’t lose a ball. There’s no water in play. Just hit it and go find it like Ouimet and Sarazen and Snead before you did.

3. Forest Creek North (Tom Fazio, 2005) — What Donald Ross was to golf design in the early 1900s, so too has Fazio been in the modern era. This club opened in 1996 and is blessed with two Fazio designs, the South having a svelte green look of Augusta and the North the disheveled patina of Pine Valley. The North builds to a crescendo of finishing holes 15-17 around a lake.

4. Country Club of North Carolina Dogwood (Ellis Maples/Willard Byrd, 1963) — Maples grew up tagging along behind Ross and his father Frank, who was Ross’s construction chief, and had golf design and construction in his bones. The Dogwood was the centerpiece of the town’s first true private club, and the back nine with seven holes kissing against Watson’s Lake is the feature.

5. Dormie Club (Coore & Crenshaw, 2006) — Bill Coore remembers his first trek around a piece of land just northwest of Pinehurst earmarked for a new private club. “We just laid out the holes out in a very traditional, old-fashioned method of playing from high point to high point over lows,” he said. He delivered the taut playing surfaces, the intricate green settings and the jagged look to the course that mirrors what Coore knew from playing Pinehurst No. 2 as a boy in the 1950s.

6. Pine Needles Golf Club (Ross 1928) — A young husband and wife who both loved golf and wanted to be in the business began leasing Pine Needles in 1953, and later Peggy and Warren Bell would purchase the club and turn it into one of the Sandhills’ most popular venues. The course has much the look and feel of Mid Pines just across Midland Road and has been the site for four U.S. Women’s Opens. Holes 11 through 14 on the far extreme of the property ensconced in ancient pine forests and no real estate are particularly memorable.

7. Pinehurst No. 10 (Tom Doak 2024) —Pinehurst owner Bob Dedman Jr. sat on land he owned south of the village in Aberdeen for two decades before moving in late 2022 to hire Doak to build a new course for a resort that needed more than nine golf courses. The new walking-only course opened in April 2024 on rugged ground once mined as a sand pit and offers a secluded experience different from anything in town.

8. Mid South Golf Club (Arnold Palmer/Ed Seay 1993) — Ed Seay was “the man” behind the Palmer-Seay design tandem and had a special attachment to the Sandhills because he lived in Moore County from 1964-68 while working for Maples’ golf-design company. The signature feature of the course is the double-green complex that serves the par-five ninth hole and the par-four 18th. “This is a dynamite golf course,” Seay said. “It’s everything a golfer could want. It’s one of the best we’ve done.”

9. Tobacco Road Golf Club (Mike Strantz 1998) —What a perfect name for a golf design company: Maverick Golf Design. Mike Strantz was exactly that. He stood 6-foot-5, sported shoulder length hair and a mustache and rode a horse around the property and made intricate sketches of every hole. What a visually stunning course he created in the late 1990s from a sand pit 30 miles north of Pinehurst.

10. The Cradle (Gil Hanse 2017) — Never before have 789 yards of golf created such a buzz. The short course at Pinehurst opened in the fall of 2017 and has been the epicenter of the core resort experience. Club officials removed the first holes of courses No. 3 and 5 and reconfigured them within the existing routings on the west side of Hwy. 5 and gave that 10-acre parcel to Hanse and partner Jim Wagner. Holes range from 48 to 120 yards long and green settings are varied and intricate and sit on ground where the first golf holes were laid down in 1898 — hence “The Cradle” name.

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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.