The Scariest Green At Pinehurst No. 2? l The Hole At l Golf Digest

Welcome to ‘THE Hole At’, where Golf Digest’s Derek Duncan (our go-to for all things golf course architecture) breaks down the hidden histories behind the most famous holes in golf. In this episode, Derek dives into the long, but getable Par-5 5th hole at Pinehurst No. 2 (Host of the 2024 U.S. Open). From its original routing as a hole on the employees course, to the addition and subtraction of rough along the fairways, to becoming one of the most feared and challenging greens on the course, Derek explores the fascinating history behind one of Pinehurst’s most challenging golf holes.

Host: Derek Duncan
Producer & Editor: Ben Walton
Cinematography: Ben Walton & Will Fullerton
Audio: Mike Kelly
Executive Producer: Christian Iooss

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hello I’m Derek Duncan I’m the architecture editor at Golf Digest today we’re looking at a single hole from one of the country’s most original and influential courses Pinehurst number two and the hole we’re going to examine is the par 5 [Music] fth selecting a standout hole at Piner number two is a little like focusing on a single Arabesque pattern in a large repeating tapestry that analogy feels apt for number two a course that’s rhythmic and continuous with one Motif flowing into the next the architecture presents A procession of gently sloping land corridors of pine Sandy native areas and the trademark turtleback greens one after the other though in different heights and shapes all with uncompromising edges that spill into low chipping selles chipping and pitching is more than half the battle at Pinehurst and shooting a high score at number two is rarely the result of knockout punches but rather Death By A Thousand Cuts so why the fifth hole let’s take a look yeah measures 576 yards for the pros during tournaments and somewhere in between 508 and 417 yards for everyone else so it’s not a particularly long hole the drive placs over a slightly cresting Fairway that obscures the landing area down through a valley and then back to a green that bubbles up in a hillside Cove the middle third of the hole tilts from high right to low left toward a No Man’s Land of sand and wire grass that stretches all the way from the te to just short of the green what makes the fifth hole so Le lethal is the green and its pernicious slope the perimeter of the putting surface dips into shallow gutters of Short Grass behind and to the right but the first third of the green is a false front and the left Edge curls away down an incline you can see here the degree of right to left tilt internally and the severity of the edges shots that don’t make it all the way onto the flatter part of the middle section of the green that’s the blue and green section which denotes a 1 to two perhaps 3% grade we’ll either roll back off the front of the green or to the left anything that’s red orange or pink in this case is unpin and denotes that a ball is going to slide off the edges that doesn’t sound like a terrible thing given how typical it is for Pinehurst but left and short left at number five are two of the worst misses on the course everything on the left Falls steeply away from the green once a ball starts rolling this direction there’s nothing to stop it in dry conditions and number two is kept dry and fast it might roll 60 or 70 ft getting worse and worse by by the second all the way down to the fourth t 10 or 15 ft below the level of the green incoming shots to the front that don’t make it at least 15 Paces onto the putting surface will also reverse course and slowly tumble backwards into bunkers or sand or the pine straw it’s routine to watch Resort players take two or three shots to get back up to the Green from down there they may hit a shot here and watch it tumble back to down to their feet hit another one and do the same thing before they finally get it all the way back on onto the green the Fairway is nearly 50 yd wide over the crest and 35 yd in the long roll out area so the drive isn’t that taxing the professionals and top amateur can get around the Green in two shots without much problem but everyone else needs to favor the right side you’ll notice in these older photographs from the 1990s that the Fairway is bordered in thick Bermuda rough this is how number two came to look in the 1970s when the resort sded grass to replace the natural sand buffers that had always distinguished Pinehurst the course looked overly gardened and there was even a little tree back here behind the green that’s since been removed in 2010 Pinehurst hired Bill K and Ben kensaw to return the native sand and toughed grass look and the Bermuda rough which had given the course a monochromatic color was Stripped Away corn crenchaw also rebuilt the bunkers flashing the sand slightly up into the faces based on what the course looked like in photos from the 1930s and 40s the restoration brought back a much needed texture and contrast it also returned a rub of the green element to playing number two as shots that drift into the native areas May yield a clean lie or a ball styed by a patch of thick Wire Grass if you play the hole with discipline the fifth is a straightforward par five but imagine if it was a par 4 instead and players were compelled to hit long irons and even Woods into that green that’s what it was prior to the 2014 US Open before then the fifth was long regarded as one of the country’s toughest but most admired par fors playing up to 483 yards the green was no easier to hold than it is today perhaps even harder given the old firm bouncy Bermuda grass putting servfaces but the extreme penalty for missing it was the same pineur has made everyone who’s played it Wonder at least once who would build greens like this especially one as severe as the fifth the default answer is the architect Donald Ross but the more accurate answer is perhaps no one did how is that so the original nine holes which no longer exist were built in 1901 they were laid out over the current first and 18th holes and the area in between them in 1907 Donald Ross Pinehurst head professional and do everything man for 48 years starting in 1900 removed those very short rudimentary holes and expanded the course outward into a full 18 though it was only about 5700 yd long from 1908 through the end of the 1920s Ross modified the holds at number two almost yearly making them longer adding and removing bunkers deleting some holes and replacing them with others and reconceptualizing the strategies as his views on architecture developed in 1923 for instance he added the current third and sixth holes on new land to the Northeast as you can see here this is number three the short dog leg right par 4 and the par 3 Six coming back the other way by this time Pinehurst had an unprecedented 72 holes of golf available and more courses planned in 1928 Ross even built a new nine-hole course designated for non-resort play it was simply called the employees course on land that continued into the woods along midl Avenue beyond the third and sixth holes in this diagram you can see again here’s the third hole of number two and the sixth hole the par three playing back but through all this tinkering and expansion there wasn’t much he could do with the greens no one had yet figured out how to grow consistent Turf in the nutrient pore soils of North Carolina Sand Hills and Pinehurst greens were essentially rectangles and small Circles of hard clay and therefore flat and lifeless it wasn’t until the early 1930s after years of testing and experimentation that Ross and Greenkeeper Frank Maples found the right combination of soil amendments seed and fertilizers to grow grass and they slowly began to convert areas of the Pinehurst courses to the new Bermuda around the same time the last pieces of the modern number two course were put into place early economic Pains of the Great Depression forced the resort to close the short-lived employees course but instead of a abandoning all of it Ross realized that its first and Ninth holes running parallel to each other traveled over some of the property’s best terrain he knew they were as good if not better than the other holes so he adopted them as the number two course’s fourth and now our fifth hole in 1935 in preparation for the 1936 PGA Championship Ross and Maples reconstructed and grasped For the First Time Each green of the number two course unfortunately almost without exception there are no records exactly of what these greens look like Beyond a handful of old photographs as you can see they’re quite different from what the greens have evolved into today they’re lower to the ground and possess nice wavy twisty internal movements these particular photographs were taken in 1935 and during the 1936 PGA Championship so this is what they looked like immediately after Ross and Maples grassed and contoured them let’s visit the pineur country club home of the famous north south championship course and from the Vera of the clubhouse house we view Maniac Hill where golfers tune up their shots before they tee off almost every champion in America has pushed a ball around this practice green Ross normally Left Behind detailed whole by- hole sketches notes and green elevations for the courses he designed around the country they look like this this is an example from East lak’s number two course that was built in the 1920s you can see how specific he was with notes and elevations these functioned as blueprints so contractors and Associates could carry out his ideas when he wasn’t around and as the architect of as many as 400 courses across the US he often wasn’t around but he was at Pinehurst where he lived in a cottage off the third hole because he was on site each summer to oversee the constant Renovations he didn’t need to draft blueprints or at least if he did they don’t seem to exist anymore records show that during the late depression the lean years of World War II and following the war Pinehurst was aggressively top dressing the greens with sand top dressing is a routine maintenance practice that helps firm and smooth out the greens that every course in the world does once or twice a year if not more Ross’s green sat much lower in profile than they do now if we look at a what would be a cross-section of one of his greens it might come in level have a little Contour an internal movement a wave and then perhaps it had one larger Crest on one side the grass would have come up close to the edge of the green and even though it might have been kept at Fairway height the Fairway Heights in 1930s and 40s and even 50s what much longer than it is today so it would come up to the edge and kind of hold balls onto the putting surface or they wouldn’t drift off too far if a ball landed here and went off it might stop right there the top dressing was applied though only to the putting surface so as they started to layer sand on top of it to help firm and smooth out the greens you’d get in a slow accumulation to buildup another year a couple goes by starts to look like this next thing you know after 10 20 even 30 years you have a green that has much more exaggerated Contours than it does now now you have a green that looks like this which was much more modestly contoured before as Turf and maintenance equipment evolved as well and superintendents were able to cut the fairways at a shorter and shorter Heights This Grass now which used to be long and held up was now shaved down so that ball that used to stop here isn’t going to stop here anymore it’s going to P all the all the way down once it gets over this Edge it’s going all the way down this Edge as well so as you can see over time the putting surfaces Rose the surrounding areas remain the same even though the grass became tighter moving balls farther away from the putting surfaces on missed shots golfers often talk about prototypical Donald Ross greens what they really mean are the blister shapes we find at Piner number two but he didn’t design greens like this there may be a null or Plateau style Greens on many of his courses but not 18 of them and not to the degree of this curvature if you look at the available designs and sketches of courses in his portfolio you won’t see this kind of recurring concept other old courses may have evolved in similar way for the same reasons due to sand buildup but it was not Ross’s intention to make greens like we see here Piner number two is unique because the greens slowly evolved into these shapes from versions that were designed to sit much lower in profile then over time the greens became at first accepted and later after years of play and study sacred Bill core and Ben kenar realized how unique and profound these greens are and they left them as they were when they worked on the course in 2010 the fifth Green in particular is an apex example of their Sublime tenacity the slope on the left and to the front influenced how approach shots are played as well as recoveries and tactics all the way back to the te during the 1999 US Open the fifth was the most difficult hole on the course in relation to par and the fifth most most difficult on tour that year averaging 4.55 Strokes at the 2005 open it was the third most difficult so why change it to a par five as with many things in contemporary golf it has to do with the distances players are driving the ball during the 1999 and 2005 opens the fourth measured 565 yards about 10 yards less than the fifth does now and it played shorter because of the downhill drive but there was no way to make the fourth any longer to keep it relevant for tournament play the tea had already been pushed back as far as it could be and created some pace of Play Issues by making players walk from the third green all the way back here and if they tried to push the te back any farther it would be in somebody’s backyard here making the fifth longer was also not an option until about 20 years ago the building that housed the World Golf Hall of Fame which opened in 1974 stood just behind the fs boxing them in as you can see it was a unique piece of architecture designed in a Washington D DC like Monumental style the structure existed there until the early 2000s when it was torn down after the Hall of Fame moved to St Augustine Florida incidentally the Hall of Fame moved back to Piner in 2024 but in a different location when the structure disappeared there were suddenly nearly 100 extra yards of land to play with behind number five and new back tees were constructed in 2012 the fifth became a par five and the fourth was converted to a 529 yd par 4 incidentally playing as a par five in the 2014 US Open the fifth delivered roughly the same stroke average as the fourth had as a par five in 2005 and the fourth as a par 4 was only marginally easier than the fifth was as a par 4 they essentially swapped places with little impact on scoring the truth is if Pinehurst or the USGA wanted to they could probably name their score on these two holes by pushing the t’s back as far as possible and putting the flags in sadistic ho locations especially on the fifth green if you can play these two holes in a combined nine Strokes you’ve done well no matter the combination of numbers however I’d argue in this case that par does make a difference due to the psychological effect of making birdies and Bogies knowing on the fifth hole that you can get up and down around the green for a birdie is an entirely different mindset than knowing you must get up and down to make a par and that change defangs one of the country’s great tough two shot holes that extra stroke even if it’s just ink on a card removes the psychological Edge the hole always possessed and transforms the fifth into a fairly basic three shot par five golfers still fear the green but they don’t fear the hole like they once did still at the end of the day whether it’s a two- shot or three- shot hole a par 4 or a par five what hasn’t changed at Pinehurst number two’s fifth hole is the same old cardinal rule don’t go left thanks for watching if there’s a famous hole you’d like to see us break down in the future let us know in the comments section below hellow [Music]