PINEHURST NO. 10 Photo: Pinehurst Resort had been outflanked. Mike Strantz’s Tobacco Road, not far from Pinehurst, took a lot of the themes of the Pit and amped them up: more blindness, deeper bunkers, bigger slopes in the greens. Suddenly, the Pit didn’t look quite so radical, and eventually it went bust. Pinehurst sat on the Pit for a long time. To be truly honest, the resort had no pressing need for new golf until the impact of the pandemic on the game started to be felt. Once the post-Covid boom in the game started to feed through, the redevelopment of the Pit property started to gain some urgency, and Pinehurst boss Bob Dedman signed off on the resort’s tenth course. Course No. 10 – as it has not, until now, been officially known, though it has always seemed an inevitable and necessary name – will be something unlike anything else the resort has to offer. It is designed by Tom Doak, and built by a crew headed by regular Doak associate Angela Moser, the German’s first job as site lead. It is an incredibly rapid build: the team mobilised on site at the very start of 2023, and much of the course was grassed when GCA visited in early June. It will be completed by early autumn, and will open in 2024: such is life when you are in as much demand as Doak’s team is at the moment, and you have the priceless advantage of working with warm season grasses, which grow in at a frankly terrifying speed. Course No. 10 is fairly obviously a Doak design. The architect is one of the greatest routers of courses that has ever lived, and the journey that No. 10 makes is complex. The beautiful seventeenth hole, which plays over a substantial lake to a rather wonderfully located green might well have been routed by any old architect, but it would not, surely, have been executed so well. Although the Pit was renowned for its eccentricity, I would say that No. 10 is, by Doak standards at least, mostly rather sane. Golfers will not encounter wild hole after wild hole: yes, there are greens that are relatively severe – the first hole, for example, whose approach is significantly downhill, and whose putting surface creates a definite ‘infinity’ effect, features a green that slopes front to back in a dramatic way. Frankly, the green appears to fall off a cliff. Given that the tee shot is essentially blind, it is a brave opening hole without doubt, though it is, typically for Doak, beautifully routed and essentially natural. No. 10 does not occupy that much of the ground that previously was home to the Pit holes. Mostly, the course explores parts of the thousand-acre property that were previously virgin, and indeed, an additional course (No. 11!) will eventually share the property. But there is one hole that has to be viewed as among the boldest the architect has ever built. 60 Tom Doak and design associate Angela Moser, site lead for the Pinehurst No. 10 project
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NzQ1NTk=