As a child in the 1960s, when I owned a putter and 5-iron and was playing only in our yard, I became aware of Donald Ross. Around Christmastime each year my hometown newspaper, The Pilot—which we bought weekly for a dime from a fellow outside the post office in Southern Pines— announced that a junior golf tournament in Pinehurst named for Ross would be held, then reported the results in a subsequent edition. Many future PGA Tour players have competed in the event and a smattering have won it, from Leonard Thompson to Chip Beck to Keith Mitchell. As a teenager in the 1970s, I played in the Donald Ross Junior several times, my mediocrity assuring I wouldn’t make the paper, but by that time I possessed a general understanding that he had been a big-deal golf architect and was a major reason Pinehurst was Pinehurst, among his deep contributions to the game.
Later, I found out that Ross died in 1948, at age 75, in the hospital where I was born. I was fortunate to play many times at one of his special creations nearby, Mid Pines. The course is never boring and always fun. Like so many Ross designs, including Pine Needles across the road and Southern Pines Golf Club a few miles away, it has given golfers pleasure and challenge for a long time. As Charles Price wrote in his 1962 book The World of Golf, Ross was “a man of vision who knew how to build permanent values into a course.”
I have known people who knew Ross, including Johnny Bulla, Pete Dye and Peter Tufts. The fact that the legendary course designer in their memories apprenticed under Old Tom Morris at St. Andrews before coming to America in 1899 and designing some 400 courses here always gave their recollections additional resonance. It was a treat to be in Pinehurst three decades ago in the presence of Ross’ daughter, Lillian, when a statue of her father was unveiled by the 18th green of No. 2 Course.
If I were in Pinehurst today—the 150th anniversary of Ross’ birth in Dornoch, Scotland—I would visit the life-size bronze by artist Gretta Bader, who, as The Pilot noted in 1991, “paid close attention to detail in sculpting Mr. Ross, from his wire rim spectacles to the turned-up toes on his shoes, indicative of an avid golfer.”
Sculpture of Donald Ross at Pinehurst. (Photo by Bill Fields)
The sculpture dedication came during the playing of the Tour Championship, the first PGA Tour event on No. 2 since 1982. Pinehurst, such an important piece of American golf during the game’s early decades in the United States, was about to be rediscovered in a huge way. That tournament, and the savvy investments by the resort’s owner, led to a rebirth. The first U.S. Open at Pinehurst was held in 1999, followed by championships in 2005 and 2014 (when the U.S. Women’s Open was there too in a historic major double). Four more U.S. Opens—2024, 2029, 2041, 2047—are scheduled on No. 2. The USGA considers Pinehurst an “anchor site” for the Open, and the governing body is building an outpost there. Pinehurst is hot. Donald Ross is hot, with restorations of his courses a popular movement in this century amid a flurry of interest in golf’s Golden Age architects.
On the Ross sesquicentennial, it is natural to wonder what the man himself would think of it all—not the least of which being how No. 2’s greens and their surrounds differ from what he created, and how much faster putting surfaces are everywhere compared to what was the case in the late 1940s.
Peter Tufts, a great grandson of Pinehurst founder James Walker Tufts and godson to Ross, took on the question in 1999. “I think he realized changes would be made in almost all courses, his and those built by others,” Tufts told The News and Observer. “It’s difficult to say what he might not have liked and what he might have liked. I imagine some things might disturb him, but probably not everything.”
As I wrote for golfdigest.com following the 2014 U.S. Open, “Smart golf minds will debate the speed/firmness/convex-shape equation of No. 2’s greens forever.”
Indeed, such conversations had occurred since the earliest days of grass greens on Ross’ masterpiece design. In the spring of 1936, months before the PGA was held, The Pinehurst Outlook reported, “Few complaints on the part of the visitors as to the way the surfaces putted and the only criticism later, was that the undulations of the greens were too severe in relation to the length and hazards of the course.”
But those undulations were not what exist at Pinehurst No. 2 today or, for that matter, that have been a trademark of the course over the last half century or longer. The severity experienced in 1936 and throughout the rest of Ross’ lifetime was of a much different nature than the “turtleback” surfaces with so many fall-away slopes that have come to be considered the soul of No. 2.
Ron Whitten, who was the longtime architecture editor for Golf Digest, drew attention to this evolution of the No. 2 greens in a 2005 article in advance of Pinehurst’s second U.S. Open. Pete Dye, who played the course a lot in the 1940s, always made the case that the putting surfaces were much different years later than they had been during that period. Whitten attributed the dome shapes to an agronomic practice—top dressing—in the late 1940s through the 1950s.
W. Dunlop White III, a design buff who has studied Ross extensively, wrote in a chapter for Golf Architecture: A Worldwide Perspective in 2009: “In fact, today’s turtleback greens at Number Two do not resemble their original identity, nor are they even in the ballpark of what the Scottish-born architect ever intended.”
During the restoration of No. 2 by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw a decade or so ago, the focus of which was returning acres of turf off the fairways to natural, sandy spaces, Crenshaw told The Charlotte Observer: “There’s a lot of evidence the greens are higher now than they were when they were built, but they are magnificent. At firm and fast speeds, they are terrors.”
I checked in with Ross biographer Bradley Klein (Discovering Donald Ross, 2001), who also works as a design consultant, on the evolution of the No. 2 greens. “The turtle-back shapes they acquired came long after Ross was dead,” Klein said. “And they came from excessive top-dressing and from various waves of reconstruction in the 1970s and 1980s. Coore & Crenshaw deliberately chose not to undo them in their restoration because they had become acquired traits, but they are not Ross’ intent, and they certainly are not characteristic of Ross greens anywhere else.”
Back in 1988, right after one of those construction re-dos, I was playing No. 2 Course with three friends. On one hole, one of my playing companions hit a green with his approach but left himself a testy putt down a slope. Fletcher Gaines, one of Pinehurst’s legendary caddies, gave my friend his putter and a wedge for his walk to the green. “You’re going to need it,” he said.
Since then, as surfaces have gotten even faster, getting “Ross-ed” or hearing that “Donald got you” after putting off a green has become even more of a thing. Golf course architect Richard Mandell, author of The Legendary Evolution of Pinehurst, said in a 2005 interview with the website Golf Club Atlas: “Ross never intended for those greens to roll a nine, ten, eleven [on the Stimpmeter]. Those contours were intended for much slower green speeds. End of story.”
During the 2014 U.S. Open, the USGA sought to have No. 2’s greens rolling 12.7 to 13.1. That’s a far cry from what I remember from playing No. 2 during the 1970s and from what tour pros faced in events at Pinehurst throughout that decade. Using the Stimpmeter, the USGA measured green speeds at 1,500 American courses in 1976-77. The average pace was 6 feet, 6 inches, with Pinehurst (6’ 10”), and Winged Foot (7’ 5”) not much faster than average. Only Oakmont (9’ 8”) flirted with the kind of speeds that were to come with advances in mowers and turf. I was invited to play Wannamoisett Country Club, a Ross design in Rhode Island, in an event commemorating 1931 PGA champion Tom Creavy some years ago and the members were delighted the greens were running 14 for the event. At the end of Ross’ life, greens at their most frisky probably were rolling 5 or 6, whether in New England or North Carolina. It is worth remembering that Ed Stimpson invented his greens-measuring device after believing the Oakmont surfaces for the 1935 U.S. Open were too fast, not too slow.
While revamping Pinehurst No. 2 as he installed turf on the greens, Ross paid much attention to the ground beyond the edges of the putting surfaces, telling The Pinehurst Outlook the surrounds were “cunningly devised in dips and undulations with bunkers and apparent divergence in contour.” As White explained in his excellent 2009 appraisal of what had been and what remains on No. 2, Ross intended a fairway cut around the greens, not a shorter, collar-type presentation. He wanted golfers to have to chip the ball from among the artfully created and visually appealing hollows and mini-mounds close to green. The relationship between the putting surfaces and the surrounds was altered when the greens became higher because of top-dressing—exactly how much being up for debate—and changed even more in the early 1970s after the Tufts family sold the property to the Diamondhead Corporation. “In an attempt to integrate the evolved green forms with their surrounds,” White writes, “Diamondhead sliced off the topsoil ledges with a bulldozer and shaved away Ross’s authentic articulations. In doing so, they carved away more than perimeter green surfaces.”
In thinking about Ross, I find myself agreeing with White’s conclusion about Pinehurst No. 2: “However extraordinary and special Pinehurst’s greens are—some would even say magical—they don’t reflect the craftsmanship of master architect Donald Ross.”
Ross could be very bold as a designer, and he certainly intended Pinehurst No. 2 to be more brute than cakewalk. The walk remains sublime. Yet when it comes to the greens on arguably his most famous course, they are megachurch to the original chapel, and there is too much shouting from the pulpit.