A Mission: Impossible Renovation,
Pulled Off to Near-Perfection
Pinehurst No. 4
Pinehurst, N.C.
Date: August 25, 2019
Pinehurst No. 4 is a remarkable golf course, but it grows even more remarkable when you consider the impossible task that awaited architect Gil Hanse.
Build a companion course to Pinehurst No. 2 that can stand shoulder to shoulder with big brother without overshadowing it.
Return the region’s natural sandy aesthetic, but don’t make it look like a Pinehurst No. 2 knockoff.
Play through the routing’s massive landscapes, but don’t make the experience intimidating.
Pay homage to Pinehurst’s characteristic Donald Ross greens contouring, but don’t make them unfriendly.
And perhaps most impossible of all: blow up a consensus top-100 American golf course, but don’t make anyone regret it.
Golf is an inherently subjective experience, and afternoons on a specific golf course are no different. Pinehurst No. 4 — formerly a nine-hole Donald Ross track, formerly a Robert Trent Jones 18-holer, formerly a Rees Jones design, and (most recently) formerly a Tom Fazio design — had long been considered Pinehurst’s next-best thing behind No. 2, despite its complicated lineage. Today, nearly a year after Hanse’s reimagining of Pinehurst No. 4 opened for public play, the consensus is that he nailed it: Pinehurst No. 4 is a jaw-dropping, rollercoaster of a golf course that feels natural and massive but fun and welcoming. It combines Pinehurst No. 2’s more amateur-friendly elements with the rollicking ups and downs that No. 2 lacks. It is unique, yet it fits alongside its more famous relative. It is less sadistic without being a pushover. It is a worthy companion to one of America’s greatest golf courses — and, depending on your mood, might actually be the more enjoyable round.
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Plenty of terrific golf courses do things that are easily identifiable: challenging greens, or creative routings, or bold bunkering — 99 percent of the time, even a great golf course makes its greatest qualities obvious.
But for some courses, there is something more that you can’t quite put your finger on; there is something to the place that feels like more than just a golf course. Wrigley Field feels like more than a baseball park; Lambeau Field is more than a football stadium. Whatever it is, Pinehurst No. 4 has it. The routing dances along the edges of — and, eventually, through — a giant bowl that provides No. 4’s routing with the best land at Pinehurst Resort. It is dramatic and rugged, as if the place itself had just been discovered. Ironically for a course that is Pinehurst’s newest layout, No. 4 feels like it’s been there forever.
It also feels more like a playground than an exercise in brutality — which No. 2 can be. No. 4’s fairways are wider and generally flatter than at No. 2. The enormous sandy areas are more visually stunning at No. 4 than at No. 2, but they are easier to avoid than at No. 2 (although, unlike No. 3, they are more than window-dressing and do come into play).
And the contouring of No. 4’s greens, although unmistakably in the style of No. 2, are less sadistic — and, on occasion, more fun. At the par-5 second hole (512 yards from the tips, 473 yards from the white tees), the green tilts from back to front, and the back edge of the green flares slightly upward. I’d had trouble judging the speed of my putts for two days, so with about 20 feet remaining to a back pin for a two-putt par, I crushed the ball — determined either to get the ball to the hole or, alternatively, to get the ball up that flare so it could trundle back down to the hole. The ball shot past the hole, up the bank at the back edge of the green, rolled back down, and stopped inside a foot from the hole for a two-putt par. The contours on No. 4’s greens open up possibilities; at Pinehurst No. 2, the likeliest possibility is that you’ll snap your putter over your knee.
And after a so-so opening hole, the second hole gives players their first glimpse of the bulk of the course, winding back and forth through the basin beneath them. The routing takes players through the property in every direction, exposing them to the land from every possible angle, but the first glimpse of that landscape sticks with you — a dramatic reveal in the style of Royal Dornoch’s third hole.
The first few holes also introduce players to Hanse’s thoughtful use of fairway bunkering. Oftentimes, fairway bunkering becomes a thoughtless, formulaic exercise: on this hole, a bunker on the right side of the fairway, a well struck drive’s distance from the tees; on the next hole, another bunker the same distance out, this time on the left; and so on. The bunkers become less an element of strategy and more a garnish. But Pinehurst No. 4 places its fairway bunkers at varying distances from the tees, and at locations that (are you sitting down?) actually affect players’ strategic decisions. On the first hole, for instance, sand traps guard the inside of the fairway’s dogleg, thwarting all but the game’s superhumans; safety compels a tee shot away from trouble, but playing closer to the bunkers offers a shorter approach shot. At the third hole, bunkers again guard the inside of a bend in the fairway, but this time at a distance that a hammered drive could cover — luring the player into a battle between ego and wisdom. And on the eighth hole, center-line bunkering floods in from the right side of the fairway, gobbling up more than half the desired landing area; laying back is an option, but an aggressive drive to the sliver of fairway remaining on the left promises a short iron or less into the green.
If there is a figurative low point to Pinehurst No. 4, then it comes at the routing’s literal low point: along the banks of the pond at the bottom of the basin. The par-5 13th hole (529 yards from the tips, 504 yards from the white tees) wraps from right to left around the pond’s edge in the style of TPC Sawgrass’ 18th hole, followed by the long, par-3 14th (216 yards from the tips, 179 yards from the whites) with water flanking the front-left of the green. On both holes, challenging the water is not mandatory — the 13th provides plenty of dry land on the fairway’s right side, and the 14th likewise offers safe passage to the right for a player willing to sacrifice a reasonable birdie putt. But despite the fact that the 13th and 14th still demand strategy, the water hazard feels out of place on a course where sand and scrub now dominate the landscape. To be fair, this is unavoidable; water in a basin travels in only one direction, and that direction is down. The price of playing golf in a gigantic bathtub is that a hole or two must pass by the drain.
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Predictably, No. 4’s dramatic terrain makes for a tougher walk than the comparably docile land on which Pinehurst No. 2 sits, but it’s not arduous. The track demands to be experienced on foot — and since the resort allows players to take push carts on No. 4 (be warned: it is a sore subject among the caddies), the able-bodied have no excuse not to walk.
Whether Rodney was able-bodied might be up for debate, for everyone except Rodney himself.
Pinehurst No. 4’s tee sheets are slammed; since resort guests face no No. 2-style upgrade fee to play No. 4, it has been in even higher demand than the resort’s most famous course. So any group of guests consisting of less than a foursome should expect to be matched with a potluck playing partner; ergo, Rodney.
There were two keys to understanding Rodney’s personality: he was from Pittsburgh, and he was retired. His give-a-damn level corresponded. A little short, a little stocky with a grey crewcut, never more than arm’s reach from a stogie ready to replace the one currently in his mouth, Rodney was friendly without being chatty — an ideal playing partner, minus the cancer risk.
My playing partner and our caddie met Rodney on the first tee. He pointed to his golf cart; “My knees are shot,” he explained. He then walked to the tee box, pegged his Titleist, wound up into an unorthodox backswing, and crushed his drive deep into the first fairway — well past the distance of men with much younger knees. Then he padded back to his cart, fired up a stogie, and floored the accelerator.
Rodney repeated this cycle throughout the afternoon: piped drive and hurried commute to the next shot, stopping occasionally to light another cigar or reiterate the health of his knees. Even in a cart, he wasn’t allowed to drive in the fairways, though — and he kicked himself for not requesting a “disabled” flag that would allow his cart anywhere on the course. “My knees are shot,” he explained before crushing another drive, returning to his cart, and rocketing up the fairway to find his ball. At some point, we noticed that Rodney (whose prolific length off the tee was not matched by his accuracy) always seemed to be hitting from a clean lie, even in No. 4’s scrubby waste areas. So how much of Rodney’s cart-driving was rooted in medical necessity, and how much of it was driven by a desire for surreptitious lie-improvements, is likewise up for debate.
Gil Hanse has lamented what he describes as “golf at 45 miles per hour” — flying from shot to shot on a cart with no possibility of truly experiencing the place. On one par-5, Rodney blasted his second shot up the fairway, returned to his cart, drove up the path, and strolled out into the landing area just as I was launching my own second shot. On a short par-3, Rodney instinctively lighted from his cart and walked to the tee box with his driver; he hadn’t even glanced up at the hole ahead. He was in his own world, oblivious to everything (including the world-class golf course) around him. He putted out on the 18th hole while we were still off the green, and he bid us adieu before we putted out. Perhaps he found the experience fulfilling. But it didn’t look like fun to me.
The next day, we ran into Rodney in the village during the lunch hour. He excitedly told us that he had an afternoon tee time on Pinehurst No. 2. Later that afternoon, beers in hand on the clubhouse’s back patio, my partner and I spotted a cart — adorned with a red “disabled” flag — streaking up the 18th fairway. Rodney knocked his ball on, putted a couple of times, and then picked up his ball and left. He had driven through one of the world’s greatest golf courses in under three hours.
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Golf is an inherently subjective experience, so although it is difficult to imagine why No. 4 would go over like a lead balloon, it isn’t difficult to imagine whether that sentiment exists — because it does.
After our round, we crammed ourselves into a resort shuttle bus headed for the Holly Inn after a 36-hole day. Passengers made small talk, which at Pinehurst inevitably turns to the day’s schedule. Someone offered that they had played No. 4. My ears perked up. A silence washed over the bus. Finally, someone broke it: “It killed me what they’ve done to that course.”
And it was as if someone had suddenly given the passengers permission to speak their minds. One after another, the passengers lamented No. 4’s makeover. “It was a beautiful golf course,” one bemoaned. “They already had No. 2! Why’d they have to do that to No. 4?” asked another. In its previous iteration, Pinehurst No. 4 had a distinctly Augusta National flavor to it. I was blown away by No. 4, and I generally prefer its wild, rugged look to pristine, manicured fairways — but one can understand how locals and longtime visitors would develop deep sentimentality for the course’s old look. It was what they knew. Anytime you mess with what people knew, some blowback is inevitable. Bringing No. 4 into homogeny with the No. 2 course was the right call. But the dissenting voices further underscore that, no matter how well Gil Hanse succeeded with his redesign, his task truly was, ultimately, truly impossible.
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