PINEHURST, N.C. – The humble Texas Wedge gets no love.
Reaching for the putter from off the putting surface is often considered an effort of last resort for weekend hackers who can’t muster much muscle control to hit a proper chip or pitch. Just surrender to your inadequacies and grab that flat stick, so the stigma goes.
That all changes at this week’s U.S. Open.
The Donald Ross-designed Pinehurst No. 2 is no ordinary Open test, and many of the shots and decisions required will be entirely different than those typically employed by tour professionals. The layout is ranked by Golfweek’s Best as the No. 1 public-access course in North Carolina, the No. 3 resort course in the U.S. and the No. 18 Classic course in the U.S.
It’s not just the chipping – or putting – onto No. 2’s notoriously domed greens. Open contestants will be met with acres of sandy scrub, where luck holds great influence on outcome. Additional wiregrass was planted in the sandscapes just off the fairways for this U.S. Open, adding even more intrigue as any ball bounds off the firm but ample fairways.
Wayward pros might find their next shot sitting pretty atop a clear patch of sand. Or in a footprint. Or plugged at the base of an ill-willed plant. Is it fair? That’s not the point, and this week’s winner will be one of the few to withstand that kind of fair-not-fair mindset. Players need not worry about the randomness of bad lies and wiregrass that lurk away from the fairways if they keep their shots on short grass, of which there is plenty.
This will be an Open of survival. Of finding a way, regardless of convention. Of swallowing pride to ensure no worse than a bogey. An Open at Pinehurst is frequently less about great shots and more about minimizing the impact of bad swings and poor decisions, even more so since a 2011 restoration by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw took No. 2 back to its raw, sandy, bouncy roots.
In an era of big swings dominating golf, Pinehurst No. 2 puts a premium on small-ball sensibilities. Of knowing when to pitch out sideways, when to play to the front of a green, when to leave the 60-degree wedge in the bag. Martin Kaymer proved as much in winning the 2014 U.S. Open by eight shots, deftly relying on his putter from off the greens.
The resort caddies at No. 2 don’t talk much about greens hit in regulation. Instead, they laugh about “greens visited in regulation,” so common it is for balls to scatter away from the crowned putting surfaces. Great shots will find favor, as they always should. Mediocre and even seemingly good shots, however, are subject to No. 2’s audacious greenside roll-offs.
Those slopes running off the putting surfaces frequently grow steeper and the bunkers more threatening the deeper a shot is played into a green. Ross, who lived for years off No. 2’s third fairway, mentioned the smart option of playing to the front of any of these greens, then putting uphill to the hole. It’s a sound strategy that doesn’t promise many birdies. Such a tactic would require a seismic mental shift for most tour professionals keen to attack.
It’s all decidedly old school – thinner grass on the perimeters of the fairways, bad lies in unpampered sand, a little dirt in the socks and no weak-kneed emphasis on equitable outcomes. May the most deserving player win. Pinehurst is a classic destination, and this Open has the potential for a return to classic sensibilities in which the game’s governing body never believed course conditioning was meant to meet any modern definition of fair or perfect.
The return to a classic ethos was the focus of the restoration by Coore, who fell in love with No. 2 while still a boy. But by the end of the second U.S. Open at No. 2 in 1999, much of the Ross had been replaced. Acres of manicured grass had appeared, and increasingly precious water was blasted all about the property to keep it green. The more perfected No. 2 was much less perfect by classic standards.
“I grew up in North Carolina and I played golf at Pinehurst as a kid, and I remembered it from what it was in the 1960s, and I just knew from my own memory that it had changed dramatically through the years,” Coore said in describing the motivation for his and Crenshaw’s restoration. “Ben and I certainly never would have gone there and said you need to change this, you need to restore this. All that influence came from the Pinehurst people, who said we’ve been listening and studying that this course is not the way it used to be.”
Coore and Crenshaw wanted to put the Ross back into property. That meant sandy expanses straddling dry and bouncy fairways, with more natural bunker shapes and balls rolling endlessly across firm, tight turf. Work crews removed 40 acres of grass and reduced the number of sprinkler heads on the course from 1,200 to 450, following the still-buried original irrigation pipes as a guide. Coore and Crenshaw stretched the fairways considerably wider, but they frequently play less so because golf balls can trundle along across dry ground until they reach trouble in the waste areas.
It all made for a vastly different U.S. Open in 2014, which was the third at the course but the first after the restoration. Previous iterations had featured acres of lush rough to catch errant shots, but Kaymer won on a baked-out version of No. 2 with magnificent displays of grit from both the course and eventual champion. The USGA that year embraced the slogan “Brown is beautiful,” even if not every player, onsite spectator or TV viewer agreed. It all made for one of the most memorable Opens in recent history.
The USGA has dropped much of the attention on brown conditions for this year’s Open, and the course is some three shades greener overall than in 2014. But one notable change will keep things interesting: The putting surfaces were recently converted from bent grass to Ultradwarf Bermuda, a warm-season grass that requires less water during a North Carolina summer. That means drier greens, bigger bounces and more roll-offs. The new green surfaces fit in perfectly with Coore and Crenshaw’s restoration efforts to No. 2.
“It had become a very manicured golf course … it didn’t look like a Sandhills course,” Coore said more than a year ago in the run-up to the Open. “Things had happened over the years, and the courses had evolved and all that, and we just said … we need to be true to some sort of aesthetic, the Ross aesthetic.”
Ross’s artistry will be in full effect this week, especially if the dry and hot weather forecasts prove true and the course plays to its fiery potential. No. 2 has the firepower to be the star of the show, and the players must accept that.
Even if it means humbly reaching for a putter from off the greens.
