In the rapidly expanding world of destination golf, one area qualifies as a bonafide American classic: Pinehurst.
Even as Pinehurst No. 2 basked in Bryson and Rory’s historic spotlight this summer at the U.S. Open, a groundswell of epic golf was bubbling to the surface just outside the resort gates. In August, as Pinehurst’s red-hot summer reached a sweltering point, GOLF editors James Colgan and Josh Sens visited the region to find “everything else” — the great golf that ISN’T No. 2, the cool spots that not enough tourists visit, and yes, even a local-favorite Martini (or three).
This is the second part in that series, following up conversation on the area’s other legendary major championship host: Pine Needles.
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I played Pinehurst No. 10 for the first time in April and almost immediately regretted it.
To be fair, the fault was mine alone. Pinehurst’s newest golf course was everything it’d been billed to be: interesting, creative, eye-popping and thought-provoking. I thought its contours were friendlier than anything I’d encountered in the Pinehurst area, and found its variety unusually beguiling. In my mind, it easily achieved the difficult feat of being totally distinct to anything in the (already loaded) North Carolina Sandhills region.
There was just one problem: It was too damn long.
To the naked eye, that seemed impossible. Pinehurst No. 10 was a par-70 golf course with a pair of drivable par-4s and a pair of near-100-yard par-3s. But as I turned to the back-nine with a nifty score, I stumbled upon a concerning development in my scorecard: This par-70 golf course with a pair of drivable par-4s and a pair of near-100-yard par-3s was also somehow more than 7,000 yards long from the tips.
Where was the distance? I was about to find out.
The five holes that followed — holes 10-14 — proceeded to beat me senseless. In order of intrigue: a 265-yard par-3 (almost everyone plays driver), two 500-yard holes, a 600-yard par-5, and a 180-yard par-3 where “anything left is dead,” said course designer Tom Doak.
By the time the stretch was over, it occurred to me that I hadn’t played anything shorter than a 6-iron in more than an hour.
“It’s a par-70,” Doak said with a maniacal grin. “But we’ll get those two shots back one way or another.”
Unfortunately, I didn’t give myself much time to enjoy Doak’s commentary — I was silently stewing over the state of my golf game, and the sheer number of high-leverage, long-distance shots I’d tried and failed over the last 90 minutes.
My day on the blue-white combo tees — nearly 6,600 yards — had given me a glimpse of all the great things No. 10 had to offer, but it’d also taught me something else: I was glad to be there, but I wasn’t having fun.
It didn’t take long to realize how self-evidently stupid that mindset was. I was playing one of the coolest new golf courses in the world, for my job, and I could grasp conceptually what was cool and enjoyable about it. Why was I letting the pride of playing from the blue-white combo tees bludgeon my enjoyment out of me?
I walked up the 18th fairway, looked back at the wild property around me — its towering pines and imposing dunes, its funky bunkering and subtly dramatic contours — and silently made a pact with myself.
If I ever make it back here, I said, I’m going to play this differently.
Thankfully, it took all of four months before the opportunity arose again. This time, I was back at Pinehurst No. 10 with Josh Sens, GOLF senior writer and maddeningly gifted old-guy golfer, and we were tasked with a mission: See the best that Pinehurst has to offer outside of No. 2.
As we drove up to the course, I explained my plan for the day to Josh. Pinehurst No. 10 is a sprawling piece of property with a half-dozen possible tee options on any hole, I said, so our goal was simple: maximize fun. Play a match against one another with the goal of playing the most enjoyable, exciting hole imaginable — be that from the forward tee box on a short par-4, or the tippy tips on the mammoth 600-yarder.
And so, for the better part of the three hours that followed, that’s exactly what the two of us did — poking through the various contours of the golf course with little thought for anything other than our own entertainment. We played the 14th, the 265-yard par-3, from the tips, blasting drivers down the chute in the hopes of landing one on the green. We played the 4th, a short par-4 with two thimble-like bunkers in the fairway, from the forward tees, turning it into a true risk-reward shot when accounting for a waste area up the left side.
On the 17th hole, a tricky par-3 over some of the only water on the course, we angled our tee box to incentivize a hero-shot to prolong our match. On the 16th, a par-4, we picked our spot based on the shortest walk from the previous green.
It was curious to think of golf in this way; as a pursuit in enjoyment and leisure rather than one based purely in competitive integrity. But it was also oddly comforting. The stakes of our match were no less serious, but our intellectual connection to our round was much greater. (In fact, match play incentivized this structure, since we were both playing from the same tee boxes anyway.)
By the time my second round on No. 10 ended, I was fairly certain I’d had more fun there than any golfer alive. It was a hell of a turnaround from the experience I’d had just four months earlier, but I couldn’t say it was a surprise. As we walked off the course on that August morning, Josh summarized it nicely.
“If you’re in Pinehurst, you’re probably here with friends, and you’re probably here for fun,” he said. “I hope more people do what we did.”
And what did we do?
We did fun.
