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COURSE OF THE WEEK · PINEHURST, NORTH CAROLINA
Donald Ross designed more than 400 golf courses across his lifetime. Of those 400, only a handful occupy the conversation about his greatest single work — and the two that almost everyone agrees on are Aronimink, which we profiled last week, and Pinehurst No. 2, which we are profiling now. Aronimink was the course Ross said was his masterpiece; Pinehurst No. 2 was the course where he actually lived. He moved to Pinehurst, North Carolina in 1900 as the club’s first professional. He stayed for fifty-eight years. He died there. The course evolved continuously under his ongoing attention across decades, and the version that exists today is, in a real sense, the only course Ross ever designed that he kept refining for his entire career.
The Sandhills Setting
Pinehurst sits in the Sandhills region of North Carolina — a band of sandy, longleaf-pine-covered terrain that runs across the state’s central interior. The geology was created by an ancient ocean retreat that left behind deep sand deposits and the kind of well-draining soils that produce excellent golf turf with relatively low maintenance demands. The Tufts family, who founded the resort in 1895 as a health retreat for wealthy Northerners seeking a winter climate, recognised early that the land was extraordinary for golf and committed to building courses that took full advantage of it.
Donald Ross was hired in 1900 to teach golf and tend to the small course that already existed at Pinehurst. By 1907, he had begun the design of what would eventually become Pinehurst No. 2 — initially a routing across mostly flat sandy terrain, with greens that Ross built deliberately on small natural elevations to create the visual variety the land otherwise lacked. Over the next three decades, Ross continuously revised the course, raising and shaping the greens into their now-famous turtleback profile, refining the bunkering, adjusting the routing to incorporate the maturing pine forest that grew up around the holes. The course as we know it today is essentially the version that existed by the late 1930s, with periodic restoration work over the decades since to maintain Ross’s original architectural intent.
“Pinehurst No. 2 is the most American golf course in existence. Every great course you’ve ever heard of in this country has, somewhere in its DNA, an inheritance from what Ross built here.” — A leading golf architecture historian on Pinehurst No. 2
The Turtleback Greens
The defining feature of Pinehurst No. 2 is its greens. They are crowned — domed in the middle, sloping away on all sides — to a degree that makes them functionally smaller than they appear. A player can hit what looks like a perfect approach shot, finishing pin-high and apparently safely on the green, only to watch the ball release down a subtle slope and roll twenty feet into a closely mown chipping area or, worse, into one of the sand-and-pine-needle waste areas that border every hole. The course is famous for producing scenes where the world’s best players, in major championship pressure, hit what looks like a routine approach and then watch the ball drift away from the hole and into a position where getting up-and-down requires both skill and luck.
The strategic implication of the turtleback design is one that every player who visits Pinehurst has to internalise: you cannot afford to be aggressive at flags. The miss is not into the rough; the miss is off the green entirely. The premium is on hitting the centre of greens, leaving yourself uphill putts, and accepting that par at Pinehurst is a genuinely good score. The U.S. Opens held at Pinehurst No. 2 — 1999 (Payne Stewart), 2005 (Michael Campbell), 2014 (Martin Kaymer), and 2024 (Bryson DeChambeau) — have produced winning scores that have rarely strayed below single-digit under par. The course resists scoring. That is the design intent. That is what makes it great.
The Coore & Crenshaw Restoration
In 2010, Pinehurst No. 2 underwent a major restoration by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw — the architectural firm that has become the modern custodian of Donald Ross’s design philosophy. The restoration removed many of the maintained-rough areas that had crept into the course over decades and replaced them with the sand-and-pine-needle waste areas that Ross had originally specified. The fairways were widened to their original generous Ross-era widths. The bunkering was returned to ragged, natural shapes rather than the manicured pristine ovals that mid-century maintenance practices had imposed.
The result is a course that looks, today, more like the course Ross knew in the 1930s than the course it became in the 1980s. The aesthetic is rugged. The waste areas are home to wiregrass, pine cones, and natural vegetation. The course is harder in some ways and more interesting in every way. Coore and Crenshaw’s restoration is widely considered one of the most successful major-course restoration projects of the modern era, and Pinehurst No. 2 is the canonical example of how to honour Donald Ross properly: by returning the course to the version Ross would have recognised.
The Pinehurst Experience
Pinehurst is one of the great American golf experiences. The resort has nine courses, of which No. 2 is the headline act but several others — No. 4, No. 8, No. 10 — are genuinely outstanding in their own right. The village of Pinehurst, designed in part by Frederick Law Olmsted, has the feel of an early-20th-century planned community that has aged without losing its character. The Carolina Hotel, the resort’s main lodge, has been welcoming guests since 1901. Walking from the hotel to the first tee of No. 2 in the morning, through the village and past the pine groves and the practice ground, is one of the few experiences in American golf that comes close to the rhythms of a great Scottish or Irish links resort.
If you have not played Pinehurst No. 2, it should be on your list. It is one of the very few American major championship courses that operates as a public-access resort — you can book a tee time, you can walk it with a caddie, you can experience the course exactly the way the world’s best players experience it in a US Open week. The walk is long. The greens are punishing. The pine air is unforgettable. This is the spiritual home of American golf, and the course that more than any other defined what American golf could be. Donald Ross spent fifty-eight years here for a reason. The land understood him. He, in turn, understood it as well as any architect in the history of the game has ever understood a single piece of ground.