Donald Ross Golf Trail

T&L Golf, 9/05

The Genius of Pinehurst
Follow the Donald Ross Trail from New Hampshire to North Carolina to truly appreciate his subtle brilliance.
FROM T&L GOLF SEP 2005
by Bob Cullen

Pinehurst is no stranger to accolades—in our last Reader Survey, for example, the North Carolina resort finished first in its region and third overall. And it's pretty easy to account for its leap to the top this year: the attention it garnered as the host of the U.S. Open on Donald Ross's masterpiece, Pinehurst No. 2. When it comes to the resort's appeal—spectacular spa notwithstanding—this course is at the core.

Indeed, if the measure of a golf architect is the number of important events staged on his designs, this has been another great year for Ross. The U.S. Open in June was the 111th national championship or Ryder Cup to be held on a Ross layout. So many of his courses host majors or appear on various top-100 lists that a few questions beg to be answered: What did Ross understand about design that eluded other architects? What brings crucial events back to Ross courses so often? And why do average players love them so?

Ross himself was laconic and modest when he spoke of his own talent. He shunted the credit to nature. "Give me some slightly rolling terrain and sandy soil, and I'll give you the best courses," he wrote in Golf Has Never Failed Me, which was published in 1996 from a partial manuscript and various notes he left when he died in 1948.

But that doesn't answer the questions. Other architects have worked in similar conditions to much lesser effect.

Ross designed many famous private courses (Seminole, Oak Hill, Aronimink, Oakland Hills) but also created resort layouts that remain faithful to his intent and are accessible to all golfers. They stretch from New Hampshire to North Carolina and could be said to form an unofficial, but very playable, Donald Ross Trail.

So I hit the highway, in search of something I wasn't sure I could find. Devotees of Donald Ross insist there's a subtle genius in his courses. They challenge good players. They accommodate beginners. They're fun. They're unique. Along the trail, I hoped to discover why.

Panorama Course
Balsams Grand Resort Hotel
Dixville Notch, NH
One of the things you'll read about Donald Ross courses is that they lie gently on the land. Sometimes this praise is delivered faintly—it's said that he had no other choice but to use the terrain he was given because he worked, by and large, before the era of bulldozers. Ross was born in Dornoch, Scotland, in 1872 and trained as a carpenter. His skills with wood led him into club making, in those days the mainstay of a golf professional's livelihood. After apprenticeships at St. Andrews and Carnoustie, he became the pro at Dornoch, a job he held until the prospect of earning $60 a month led him to the U.S. in 1898, where he found Americans interested in hiring him to lay out courses. And it's true that when Ross came to the uplands of New Hampshire in 1912 to design the Panorama, his crews worked with shovels, mules and scrapers.

But walking down the third fairway of the Panorama course, I saw something to suggest that there is more than happenstance in the way Ross courses blend with their surroundings. Number three is a 403-yard par four that plays down the western slope of Keazer Mountain. It has a large bunker in the fairway about sixty yards shy of the green. As I looked at the bunker, then at the horizon beyond it, I saw a bit of Ross's art. The horizon line is dominated by the green peak of Mount Monadnock, whose profile is echoed perfectly by the contour of the bunker's lip. Beyond the bunker to the left, the back of the green complex perfectly echoes the ridgeline to the left of Monadnock. After my round, Steve Barba, formerly the general manager, told me: "You almost always see the horizon behind the green if you're hitting your second shot from the right spot."

The Balsams, like most of the stops I would make on the Ross Trail, is a resort that speaks of another age. Little girls in summer frocks frolic with fathers in blazers on the lawn in front of the veranda. When Barba took over the place in 1971 the hotel was in a state of genteel decline and half the golf course had reverted to pasture. But Barba remembered every hole, because he had caddied here in the 1950s. Under his direction the course was restored, and the resort regained prosperity.

Despite its antiquity, the Panorama still charms and challenges hotel guests, largely because of the way Ross used the mountain slopes to make his greens deceptive. "People had difficulty reading the greens when I was a caddie. They still do," Barba said. "The course is set up to allow for a wide variety of drives, and the bunkers are not that close to the greens. But once you're on them, it's tough to make par." In New Hampshire, Ross was all about terrain and how to use it—harmoniously.

BALSAMS PANORAMA: 800-255-0600, thebalsams.com. Yardage: 6,804. Par: 72. Slope: 136. Greens Fee: $60.

The Sagamore
Bolton Landing, NY
Ross has a fan club—the Donald Ross Society—that was founded in 1989 by some members of Wampanoag Country Club in West Hartford, Connecticut, who were unhappy with a renovation of their 1926 Ross course. The Society, which has grown to about 1,400 members, funds scholarships, helps preserve the records of Ross's designs and fights against architects who want to "renovate" Ross's work rather than carefully restore it.

A recent summer meeting of the society was held at the Sagamore, a white frame hotel on the shores of Lake George, a few hours southwest of the Balsams. The course, which sits on a plateau about a mile above the lake, begins with a par four that gives the player a view of a checkerboard fairway that falls away and then rises to a distant green. Beyond is Lake George, dotted with rocky islands, and beyond that lie low green mountains. On an August morning when the mist rises off the water and the sun gleams on the fairway, there are few prettier sights in golf.

This opening hole epitomizes one of Ross's design tendencies. Many of his par fours begin, like this one, with an elevated tee that drops off to a valley fairway, then rises again to a green perched on a ridge. I heard a story about this hole, though, that suggested Ross was quite capable of deviating from his standard ploys. Tom Smack, the Sagamore's director of golf, told me that in 1986 he was visited by Ross's only child, Lillian Ross Pippitt. She recounted how, as a teenager, she had accompanied her father to the area in 1926. (By that time, Ross was well established as an architect. Five U.S. Opens had been played on his layouts, as well as two on courses he had renovated.)

In a car, Ross and his daughter scouted the hills above Lake George, looking for likely golf terrain. Finally, Ross came upon the property where the Sagamore Golf Course now sits. He set off on foot, leaving Lillian in the car. In about an hour, he came back and told her he had found the course. One can easily imagine Ross, dressed as usual in a three-piece tweed suit, returning to the car with a sheen of perspiration on his mustache and a few burrs on his trousers, quite pleased with himself.

He showed his daughter where the first hole was going to be. Like most architects, Ross tried not to lay out a first hole facing east, lest golfers would have to squint into the morning sun. But the first at the Sagamore does. "I can't start it anywhere but looking right out at that lake and those mountains," Lillian remembered him saying.

Part of Ross's skill, evidently, was knowing when to break the rules.
THE SAGAMORE: 800-358-3585, thesagamore.com. Yardage: 6,821. Par: 70. Slope: 137. Greens Fees: $105–$135.

East Course
Pocono Manor Golf Resort & Spa
Pocono Manor, PA
One thing Ross courses have that Pete Dye's and Tom Fazio's cannot have, at least not now, is decades of history. This is true even when a course is not as well preserved as the Sagamore or the Panorama. For example, Pocono Manor's East course, opened in 1919, is showing signs of neglect. There are mounds and grassy depressions along the fairways that were once sand bunkers. Several yards from the smallish greens, it's easy to spot contours that Ross intended to be part of the putting surfaces. Greens have a tendency to shrink over time due to careless mowing, and those areas are no longer in play.

I went to Pocono Manor because of its history, which I heard about from its head pro, Greg Wall. His father, Art Wall Jr., won the Masters in 1959 using his unique ten-finger grip. At the peak of his career, in the fifties and sixties, Art Wall Jr. represented Pocono Manor as a touring pro. A lot of the greats of that era played here. The course can still be seen on cable reruns of the old All-Star Golf series, featuring players like Sam Snead, Tommy Bolt and Cary Middlecoff.

Pocono Manor has eccentric holes that show how wedded Ross was to maximizing available land. He built each one, he wrote, so it "wastes none of the ground at my disposal and takes advantage of every possibility I can see."

That thinking produced some short holes here that would most likely not be built today. The third is a 194-yard blind par three, with a green in a depression twenty feet below the level of the tee. But the seventh is even odder, a seventy-seven-yard par three. The tee towers over a tiny green set behind a creek. It's like tossing a ball into a well.

"You have to hit it like it's a thirty-five-yard shot," Greg explained to me. "A lot of people swing for seventy-seven yards and wind up in the woods behind the green."

I followed his example and took half a swing with my lob wedge. The ball arced away, dropped forever, and finally landed on the putting surface with an audible splat. I made an easy two-putt par.

"I remember one time when I was a kid, Dad and Arnold Palmer played an exhibition here," Greg recalled as we walked off the green. "Palmer hit it into the creek, messed around a little and made five."

It's not often you can hit an easy lob and go two shots up on the King.
POCONO MANOR EAST: 800-233-8150, poconomanor.com. Yardage: 6,565. Par: 72. Slope: 118. Greens Fees: $30–$40.

Linville Golf Club
Linville, NC
It's sometimes hard to identify a real Donald Ross golf course. As I worked my way south along the Trail, I found many a place that advertised itself as a Ross course, but upon investigation, it turned out that he may have only redone the bunkering on someone else's layout.

Some of Ross's real work has been destroyed over the years by green committees, resort owners and architects. There are ostensible Ross courses with "modernized" greens that feel akin to a Frank Lloyd Wright house covered in pink vinyl siding. The process of restoring a Ross course is a complicated one that calls for sensitive judgment by all involved. It helps if they are like Hugh MacRae II and Bobby Weed, the patriarch and the architect, respectively, engaged in the reclamation of Linville Golf Club.

MacRae, 80, was a toddler when Ross first arrived in Linville, a resort village in the mountains near the North Carolina–Tennessee border. A few years later, Ross came back to tinker with the course, adding a new, elevated tee to the ninth hole. MacRae remembers that second visit.

"He was dressed in tweeds and knickers and smoked a pipe. He had a nice twinkle in his eye," MacRae recalled. "He walked over the ground for a day or two, then a few weeks later you got your plan and your crew did the best they could to follow it."

The course Ross designed for Linville is a marvelous example of the way he preferred to use water. A stream called Grandmother Creek meanders through the valley in which the course lies. It touches fourteen holes but never gets close to a green. When it must be carried, the carry is short. It's in play for horrid shots, and it can grab bold shots by big hitters trying to reach a par five in two. But the average golfer can readily stay clear of it.

When Linville decided to restore the course, the club selected Weed to do the work, in phases each winter. Weed told me that for the first two years he worked at Linville (1997–'98), he didn't move so much as a shovelful of earth. Instead he played the course and talked to older members like MacRae. Weed also studied old drawings and photographs to distinguish between what Ross had intended and what time had wrought. Only then did he start making changes, removing several hundred trees, opening up the driving areas on many holes and restoring some of the strategic options Ross liked to incorporate into his holes. Weed rebuilt some tees and also added new ones, both farther back and farther up. He enlarged most of the greens, which had shrunk, re-creating their original contours.

On the third, one of Ross's great par fours, Grandmother Creek oxbows in the fairway about 150 yards from the green. This enabled Ross to design a hole that embodied his philosophy about the par four. "My aim is to lay out an alternative route on practically every hole," he wrote. "That is, the scratch player or long hitter has one way of getting home in two shots—he must place his drive accurately to do so—and the high handicapper or short hitter has another route to reach the green in three."

Originally 414 yards long, Linville's third provides precisely those alternatives. The terrain is such that a drive of 210 yards or less from the original tee left a long shot to the green from a hanging lie. It behooved the weak hitter to lay up somewhere over the oxbow and pitch on in three. But the player who could carry his drive perhaps 230 yards on the correct line was rewarded with a downhill carom and an approach from a flat hollow just short of the creek. Weed's new back tee restored those strategic alternatives, though now the hole stretches to 472 yards and the optimal tee shot might have to carry 270.

Weed and the club still faced some difficult choices. Ross's tenth, for instance, has a two-tiered green built into a mountain slope. When Ross designed it, greens were cut at about a quarter inch. Now they're cut to half that height and are much faster. A ball putted from the upper tier to a pin on the lower tier will not stay on the green. Should the green be reshaped so the slope is less severe? There are good arguments on both sides (ultimately the club elected to leave the green intact). Some might say that Ross never intended for all putts from the upper tier to roll off the lower tier. Others might say that the entire hole plays shorter than it did in the 1920s—a decent player today can reach the green with a sand wedge second—so Ross might well think that a player who can't hit the correct part of the green with a sand wedge deserves a bogey. After all, he once wrote, "A course that continually offers problems—one with fight in it, if you please—is the one that keeps the player keen for the game."

LINVILLE: Yardage: 6,952. Par: 72. Slope: 139. Greens Fee: $90. To play the course, visitors must stay at Eseeola Lodge: 800-742-6717, eseeola.com.

Mid Pines And Pine Needles
Southern Pines, NC
It was time to go to Pinehurst. Ross first saw the place in 1900, when he was hired by James W. Tufts to become the golf professional at what was then a new resort in an area of sandy soil and towering pines that had previously been utilized for producing turpentine. For the rest of his life, Ross called it his home.

In addition to four courses (he also started a fifth, which was eventually abandoned) for what would become the Pinehurst Resort, he did several others in the immediate area. It was a good canvas for his art. "Soil conditions should be of the very first importance" when selecting a golf course site, he wrote. "A sandy loam is by far the best golfing soil." The Pinehurst area had that in abundance.

Pine Needles, which Ross designed in 1927, and Mid Pines, which he built in 1921, are a little short for championship competition among men these days, but they're both sterling examples of Ross's Sandhills style. The holes are routed through the framing pines, up and over the hills that gave the region its name. Their greens tend to be convex, shrugging off inaccurate approaches and shunting them down into tricky chipping areas.

All in all, the courses are solid, demanding tests of golf. Pine Needles has hosted a couple of U.S. Women's Open Championships and will do so again in 2007. The courses are both owned by the Bell family, whose matriarch, Peggy Kirk Bell, was a charter member of the LPGA. She welcomes players of both genders, but she makes a specialty of teaching women.

All of which was enough to make Mid Pines seem like a good place to give my wife, Ann, a chance to play a Donald Ross course for the first time—and to test the axiom that Ross courses are friendly to beginners. My wife is a good athlete who kicks butt in her weekend tennis foursomes, but she's a novice golfer.

Ann hit the beginner's quota of tops and shanks, but Ross was gentle with her. The third hole was typical. It's a short (for women) par four with a broad fairway, and she got near the green with a couple of her better shots. From there she took five more, but it was an interesting seven. When she tried to chip up to the green, the contours defeated her—as they have many players before her. "It's like trying to make the ball stop on top of a basketball," she said.

But she never had a forced carry. She was always able to divide a hole into manageable pieces. When the round ended, she had a cheerful look and the same ball she'd started with.

It was time for Ross's final examination.
MID PINES: 800-747-7272, pineneedles-midpines.com. Yardage: 6,528. Par: 72. Slope: 127. Greens Fees: $70–$145.
PINE NEEDLES: 800-747-7272, pineneedles-midpines.com. Yardage: 7,015. Par: 71. Slope: 135. Greens Fees: $90–$190.

Pinehurst No. 2
Pinehurst, NC
Pinehurst No. 2 was Ross's magnum opus. He worked on it for much of his creative life. The basic routing was set by the early 1900s, but Ross didn't create the green complexes till the 1930s, when agronomists finally figured out how to grow putting turf that wouldn't die off in the hot Carolina summers.

Ross was a master of undulating putting surfaces. "Nature does this sort of thing best," he wrote. "It can be done artificially, but it must be done with the highest skill of the golf architect, else disappointment will ever be attendant." At Pinehurst No. 2, Ross had the time, the soil and, toward the end of his career, the knowledge to create greens that, though artificial, mimicked and surpassed the finest that nature had done in Scotland.

Unlike most of Ross's resort courses, No. 2 was never intended to be a congenial venue for hackers and pros alike; the resort had other courses for the less skilled. No. 2 was intended from the start to challenge the best, which it did most recently at the 2005 U.S. Open, won by Michael Campbell at even par.

I didn't play the course from the championship tees. I'm not that stupid. I played from the whites. The generous fairways meant that I always got my ball in play and usually had a reasonable iron into the greens. I hit fifteen of the eighteen greens in regulation—but stayed on only nine.

When I did manage to hold the green with an approach, nothing was certain. I hit two good shots to make the green at the fifth, a 431-yard par four. My ball barely stayed on the surface, settling against the collar. I lined up my forty-foot putt.

"Looks fairly straight to me. Might break a little left at first, then back to the right at the end," I said to one of my playing partners, Dutch Stromberg, a Pinehurst resident who marshaled on the fifth at the '99 Open.

"Hit it right at the stick," he said, tending it. I tried to. The ball started breaking left and never stopped. By the time it came to rest, it was ten feet off-line. My only consolation was that Stromberg, who watched the pros play this green for four days, misread it as badly as I did.

I had the chance while I was in Pinehurst to talk to a man who had watched Ross create his infamous greens. Peter Tufts, 79, grew up in Pinehurst when his family owned the resort. He remembers Ross as a kindly, formal man who spent his off-hours tending his roses. "He was just the club manager when I was growing up. He had an accent, not a thick one. He called me 'Pie-ter.' I never saw him in a sport shirt. He and my father [Richard Tufts, a former president of the USGA and CEO at Pinehurst] both wore ties when they played golf."

Peter Tufts remembers that when Ross built a green, he would stand in the middle of the future putting surface. A mule, guided by a laborer, would walk around the circumference, pulling a drag pan. "He'd watch them walk, and he might say, 'Okay, now cut and scoop, now drop.' Sometimes he worked from plans in his hand, sometimes not. After the drag pan, he'd shape with rakes, hoes and shovels. And he took his time. Architecture was in the details, he thought. It came naturally to him."

I had, by then, learned a fair amount about what makes Donald Ross courses so special. Ross generally made it easy to get the ball in play but hard to get it into the hole. His designs often look modest, but they always work harmoniously with their surroundings and take full advantage of the land. They offer strategic options to players of all levels. These are the same virtues that all good architects practice. Ross simply practiced them more consistently, more subtly and more imaginatively.

Finishing my round on No. 2, I followed my second shot up to the eighteenth green remembering the seventy-second hole of the '99 Open. It's hard not to at Pinehurst. In addition to statues of Ross and Richard Tufts by the clubhouse, there's one of Payne Stewart behind the green, frozen forever in his moment of jubilation, fist in the air, knickered right leg thrust behind him. Moreover, this was a Sunday, and Pinehurst has cut the hole every Sunday since 1999 near the same spot it was in for the last round of Stewart's Open. (The hole location was cut just a foot or two to the left for Campbell's championship Sunday this year.)

My ball lay just off the front edge, and I chipped up to about three feet. "That's the line Stewart was on," a caddie informed me. So there it was. To finish with a par, I had to roll in Stewart's winning putt, or at least the last three feet of it. I looked it over from behind the ball and behind the hole. I plumb-bobbed it. I decided it had to break slightly to the right. I stroked it exactly as I wanted to. The ball curled inexplicably left and slid past the hole.

I looked up. Payne Stewart was still triumphant. Behind him, I could see a small and quiet smile playing on the bronze lips of Donald Ross. •

PINEHURST NO. 2: 800-487-4653, pinehurst.com. Yardage: 7,274. Par: 72. Slope: 135. Greens Fees: $150–$345.