OPEN COUNTDOWN BEGINs

By Lee Pace 

Designed by the renowned architect Donald Ross, Pinehurst No. 2 is a storied course. But beyond that fact, this North Carolina resort and its staff also are committed to having the finest presentation of an Open in the history of the U.S. Golf Association.

The well-oiled machine known as Pinehurst Resort & Country Club in North Carolina is humming along with all the usual accoutrements: Rounds of golf; hands of bridge; wickets of croquet; tours of the village; and trays of tea and scones late in the afternoon. But this day, beneath it all, in offices scattered around the village and resort, the far-flung elements of golf’s grandest traveling show are coming together.

It’s more than a year until the 1999 U.S. Open Championship comes to the storied No. 2 golf course at Pinehurst, but you’d think it was next month to watch the administrators, marketers, merchandisers, vendors, horticulturalists, and volunteers.

“Up until January, it all felt like long-range planning,” says Stephanie Wagner, director of creative and client services for the Open. “Now every step is critical.”

Dustin Blackwell, Pinehurst’s grounds superintendent and head horticulturalist, agrees: “To me it seemed like when they rebuilt the greens on No. 2, the starter’s gun went off.”

Major championship golf has played a key role in the life of ClubCorp affiliated properties over the years. The NEC World Series of Golf is played at Firestone Country Club in Akron, Ohio, each year, and the club has hosted three PGA Championships. In California, the LPGA Nabisco Dinah Shore is played at Mission Hills Country Club and the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic uses Indian Wells Country Club as one of four courses. And the Senior Tour visited Barton Creek in Austin, Texas, for five years in the early 1990s for the Liberty Mutual Legends of Golf. But never has a tournament of this magnitude — the national championship, open to all comers — visited the Village of Pinehurst, the state of North Carolina, or the properties associated with the company of ClubCorp.

GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY
“The most important thing is to have a great U.S. Open Championship on this golf course,” says Pinehurst Director of Golf Don Padgett. “That goes without saying. But beyond that, Pinehurst and our staff are committed to having the finest presentation of an Open in history.”

That presentation involves numerous details that fall to the staff of championship director Jon Wagner, who came to Pinehurst in 1990 as a PGA Tour employee and director of the 1991 and 1992 Tour Championships. By that time Pine Needles Golf Resort, a nearby course designed, like No. 2, by the renowned Scotsman Donald Ross, had landed the 1996 U.S. Women’s Open Championship, and the U.S. Golf Association had committed No. 2 for the 1994 U.S. Senior Open Championship. In June of 1993, Pinehurst garnered the plum it had coveted for two decades, the Open, and a full slate of championship golf was thus committed to the golf-intensive Sandhills area for the remainder of the decade. Add to it the fact that Pinehurst and Medinah Country Club in Chicago are the finalists with the PGA of America for the 2003 Ryder Cup Matches, and you have an era that rivals earlier ones in Pinehurst.

“I know the 1940s were great with people like Ben Hogan winning the North and South Open and E. Harvie Ward Jr. the North and South Amateur,” says Pat Corso, Pinehurst Resort & Country Club president and COO. “But I’m not so sure this isn’t the golden age of Pinehurst golf.”

TURNING THE WHEELS
To oversee this sparkling era, Pinehurst retained Wagner and an energetic and detail-consumed support staff to administer all the events. A year before the Open, most of the pegs are already in their holes.

“One of the reasons I stayed was to be part of the continued resurgence of Pinehurst,” Wagner says. “You can’t go anywhere now where people don’t know about Pinehurst.”

The primary spoke in the wheel of the U.S. Open is the golf course itself, and in the case of No. 2, the greens. The putting surfaces of Ross’ magnum opus have been the source of much scrutiny over the last 30 years as Pinehurst has evolved from a fall-to-spring resort to a year-round operation. At the heart of the matter in the quest for the Open, played the third week in June each year, was the dicey issue of providing members and resort guests with the best year-round putting surface — certainly, bentgrass — but still being able to get it as hard as a billiard table during a warm-weather month.

Pinehurst and the USGA agreed in 1993, upon granting No. 2 an Open, that the two parties would work together to rebuild the greens in 1996 and seed them with the most tenacious and heat-resistant strain of bent available at the time. The choice was Penn G-2, and thus far the results have been outstanding. Using old maps from 1962 found in the Tufts Archives of the local library, Pinehurst officials extended the boundaries of greens several feet in many locations. Areas that once had Bermuda collars that would halt the roll of a golf ball are now covered in a slicker, firmer strain of bent. Either your approach shot hits the middle of green or you prepare to chip, pitch, or putt from the extremities of the green complex.

“Our members and guests have really been impressed with the new greens,” says Paul Jett, course superintendent of Pinehurst No. 2. “The only complaint I’ve heard is that the ball won’t stay on the green.”

Jett made the latter statement with a wry smile creasing his face. Who knows what the world’s finest golfers will say in little more than a year? Today Jett’s staff is rebuilding each of the course’s 109 bunkers, removing decades of sand buildup to give each one a lower bottom and putting in a new 6-inch layer of sand. Beyond that, the prescription for the course is for plenty of tender-loving-care until June of ’99.

Away from the golf course, however, the pulse rate of the resort is quickening:

• Blackwell and his staff are getting ready to grow 100,000 impatiens, begonias and other annuals in a new 2,600-square-foot greenhouse for use in landscaping the hotel, grounds, clubhouse, and corporate hospitality village the week of the Open. The resort will still have to buy at least 300,000 more annuals from outside suppliers. They’ll also carve out a half-dozen Putter Boy topiaries.

“The whole world will be watching for that week,”  he says. “We want to step up the impression we make.”

• Stephen Cryan, director of retail for the resort and Open Championship, is well into a 31⁄2-year window of selling merchandise adorned with the Open logo, which features Pinehurst’s vintage advertising centerpiece, “The Golfing Lad.” The logo depicts the lad with a golf bag over his shoulders and was taken from a 1909 ad that pictured him in a train terminal — presumably New York’s Grand Central Station — with the headline “Off for Pinehurst.” Cryan will oversee a 26,000-square-foot merchandise pavilion at the Open that he is confident will surpass the Open sales record of $7.2 million set at Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1997. Among the innovative components of the merchandising plan are the creation of an official Pinehurst tartan, which is registered in Scotland, and development of exclusive Pinehurst/U.S. Open product lines by manufacturers such as Izod, Van Heusen, Bobby Jones, Polo, Cutter & Buck, and Ashworth.

“People have embraced the new mark we’ve created for the Open,” Cryan says. “It’s a nice symbol that links the history and tradition of Pinehurst with the present.”

• Stephanie Wagner is immersed in the details of accommodating the five dozen businesses that have paid a minimum of $125,000 each for hospitality space in either the clubhouse or the “Tufts Village.” The village will be located in a triangle on the first, second, and 18th holes of course No. 4. The village will look as permanent and upscale as possible. Brick pavers, wrought-iron fencing, water fountains, and intricate lattice work, for example, are on the drawing boards for walkways. Menus are being planned; accommodations are being coordinated. The championship has secured a number of private homes for rent and has more than 10,000 hotel rooms committed — 2,000 in Moore County and another 8,000 in other North Carolina cities such as Fayetteville, Raleigh, Durham, and Greensboro. Accommodations have even been secured for one CEO’s dog.

• Among the responsibilities of Reg Jones, director of operations, is getting the site wired for phones and power, securing 20,000 linear feet of chain-link fencing, and retaining some 90 buses to shuttle the 25,000 spectators in and out of Pinehurst. No spectator parking will be available in Pinehurst; golf fans will park in one of two major satellite lots just north and south of the village. Some 100 road signs are being manufactured to direct motorists on all roads leading into Moore County to the parking lots.

COUNTING DOWN
“We’re trying to get all the contracts signed, the vendors in place, the major questions answered one year out,” Jones says. “Then we’ll have one full year to iron out the details.” Jones also oversees a volunteer army of some 3,200 fans who enjoy lending their time and services to golf events that come through Pinehurst. Jones has regular meetings with Jack Venner, a retired engineer who’s chairman of the volunteer corps. As they pour over the language of a document outlining the responsibilities of 32 committees one afternoon, Venner pauses and considers his role three decades ago in helping create the aerospace technology that put a man on the moon.

“I helped build a major piece of equipment for the space program,” Venner says. “Here the fundamentals are the same. The products are different.”

It’s all in the attention to detail.

Free-lance golf writer Lee Pace, of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, says that he is diligently working to lower his current 8 handicap so that he can enter local qualifying competitions for the 1999 U.S. Open.

Tickets for the U.S. Open Championship will go on sale the Monday following the conclusion of this year’s Open in June via a lottery system. Those interested should request details and an application from the USGA at 800-336-4446. A total of 25,000 badges will be sold. Championship director Jon Wagner says he expects the tickets to be sold in one day.