Pinehurst Peregrination...Who can resist alliteration?

Copy editors influence all of us at an early age. Alliteration, not hyperbole nor hallucination, is the foremost literary device in evidence in our written lives. I utilize thesaurus.com to find the other 90 percent of words, 90 percent of the time. Ten percent of the time, I confess, I use it to alliterize or alliterate or, simply, litter.

So cometh the Pinehurst Peregrination. Six days of travel and golf as I and three chums descend on the Sandhills region of North Carolina. We’ll be staying at The Pit vacation villas, a place eminently cool for the fact that they utilize no keys. We’ve been sent a code to open our door (it is not 1234), eliminating the need to check in at some overly-busy front desk. I like that. Appropriately, our first round of golf will be over the Dan Maples-designed The Pit golf links. As a college student at Wake Forest, I heard rumblings of a unique rising phoenix, a course scooped from the remains of a sand pit in south-central N.C. The Pit was the vanguard of the reclamation trend that took hold in the 1990s and continues to this day. If there’s no good land left, cap the bad land and use it for golf!

Our second round of day one takes place on Little River Farm, another Maples track in the region. Maples is one of those Carolina guys like Clyde Johnston, who keep a fairly low profile nationally but are respected within their domain. You might have to leave to become a prophet, but you can stick around a design lots of golf courses. I expect LRF to be a bit more of a standard layout than The Pit, albeit no less challenging.

Monday is the only double-round day of the week. This can be attributed to not playing at Pinehurst Resort. We want to visit #2 Course and see the statues of the Putter Boy and Payne Stewart, along with all the places in Pinehurst and Southern Pines that James Dodson extols in his recent works. We’re golfing, sure, but we’re getting away. Tuesday finds us at a traditional course designed by the most recognizable name in the area, Donald Ross. Nope, not Mid-Pines nor Pine Needles. We’ll hit up Southern Pines, a beast that stretches to all of 6200 yards from the tips. The old gal is 99 years old but doesn’t look a day over…99. That’s exactly what we want. Lots of folks with great backgrounds in golf course architecture recommended we blow off the modern courses and make a traditional tour of it. Nahh!!

Wednesday brings the first of two successive Mike Strantz designs. We’ll tackle Tobacco Road in the morning, then cry in our beer over its teeth in the afternoon. On Thursday, we’ll head back north and play Tot Hill Farm in Asheboro on the way. Every now and again the “athlete dying young” or some other celebrity program finds its way onto the radio programming list or VH1 or some other nonesuch. Mike Strantz is the only modern example of the architect dying young. Walter Travis had many good years left in him, as did Alistair MacKenzie. Strantz passed away a few years back at age 50 from cancer. As a result, his body of individual work doesn’t even reach double figures. Go to Myrtle Beach, Pinehurst and Williamsburg (VA) and you can play 2/3 of his courses. I’ve made it a goal to play all nine of his masterpieces and am 1/9 of the way there (True Blue in 2006). After Thursday, I’ll be 1/3 of the way there.

After Tot Hill, the final leg of the trip will bisect as we make a stopover in Bridgeport, West Virginia. The final course of the trip resides there, an ultra-private, national club of great renown. It was added at the last second, yet has ascended to the throne of most-anticipated of the trip. I’ll let you play Sherlock Holmes and do a little digging. It won’t be hard to find.

Stay attuned to this column and I’ll keep you abreast of our fortunes along the Pinehurst Peregrination.