Where the grass really is greener

When Boston businessman James Walker Tufts spent about $1 per acre for 5,800 acres of ravaged Carolina timberland to create a health retreat in 1895, many questioned his judgment. Tufts wanted to make a place where fellow New Englanders could recuperate from the ills of the Industrial Revolution, and he secured Frederick Law Olmsted’s landscaping firm to create a typical New England village as the resort’s centerpiece.

That quaint hamlet still exists, and it still looks as though it had dropped out of the Vermont sky, but the focus at Pinehurst shifted a long time ago. Within a few years of Tufts’s purchase, guests were whacking golf balls around a cow pasture and a rudimentary golf course was added to the existing recreational pursuits of horseback riding, hunting, polo, lawn bowling, and archery.

Tufts then made his most astute hire, enlisting Donald Ross to improve the golf course. Ross would go on to design or remodel more than 400 courses in an unparalleled career as a golf architect, but he made his home at Pinehurst, and the No. 2 course here is his acknowledged masterpiece. There are now eight 18-hole courses at Pinehurst, four designed by Ross, making it the United States’ largest golf resort as well as its first. All the best players in the world have tested the greens of No. 2, which are famous for their tricky approach angles and -- once you land on them -- their hidden breaks. Payne Stewart once mastered the line of a 15-foot putt on the 18th hole here and bagged the 1999 US Open title, a moment preserved beside that green with a statue of Stewart exulting in his one-shot victory.

A rare treat is the opportunity to take a caddie when you play the No. 2 course (around $75, including tip). On a trip last fall, my brothers and I, all of whom caddied as youngsters, had the benefit of the Pinehurst caddies’ inside knowledge and the camaraderie that accompanies a walk on the course, as opposed to riding in a cart separate from your playing partners. A bonus was the presence of caddie Willie McRae, 77, a Pinehurst legend who toted the bag several times for Donald Ross before Ross died in 1948.