The walking man

ABERDEEN, NORTH CAROLINA | Bill Coore, bundled into a layered all-black outfit to hold off the Carolina cold, grabbed himself a cup of coffee on this chilly January morning and walked out to the crest of a hill to look across the golf course he is bringing to life from the remnants of a long-ago sand mine.

What will be Pinehurst No. 11, sitting shoulder to shoulder with Tom Doak’s No. 10 course, is still being roughed in and the heavy equipment, most of it a muted shade of yellow, is scattered down the slope as another day of shaping and debris removal comes to life.

Behind Coore, what had been the clubhouse for The Pit Golf Links still stands. The Dan Maples-designed course, over which part of No. 11 is being routed, opened in 1985 and closed in 2010, the years of neglect showing in the building’s faded exterior.

The old building will be gone soon enough, replaced by a new one on what Pinehurst Resort calls its Sandmines property, located four miles south of the main resort. But Coore is looking across the landscape, not behind him.

Five holes, including the first and 18th, are visible but, at this point, they look more like construction sites than golf holes. For Coore and his longtime design partner Ben Crenshaw, this is where the ideas and concepts are converted into a tapestry, creating 18 different holes that become more than the sum of their parts.

The Coore & Crenshaw magic has been built on allowing the land, whether it’s in the Nebraska sandhills or near the Front Range of the Rockies outside Denver, to reveal itself and by using what is there more than creating something different.

That’s where Coore is a master, having an almost mystical sense of what goes where. It is why he walks whatever property he’s working on time after time, often alone, feeling the ground, sensing the flow and seeing through forests.

Even now, as Pinehurst No. 11 comes to life, Coore continues to walk the still-rugged land daily when he is on site, checking on the work being done by the team, and he will do it again this day.

However, with the smell of woodsmoke in the winter air from a clearing project nearby, Coore is focused on the ninth and 18th greens, which sit just below the old/new clubhouse site. The morning light is perfect for Coore to study the contours of both greens, and this isn’t a place for big undulations.

While Coore leaves much of the actual construction to the team of artisans that works for Coore & Crenshaw, this morning he hops on a Sand Pro vehicle and goes to work on the ninth green. The Sand Pro allows Coore to methodically shape the putting surface, making pass after pass across the area, cleaning any lingering debris while also tamping down the sand, like a potter’s wheel on the ground.

For three hours, Coore works the Sand Pro, grooming the surface. By the time he breaks for lunch, Coore’s black outfit is covered in a light brown layer of dust, and what will be the ninth green has begun to take shape.

“It’s extraordinarily unique. I refer to it often as weirdly wonderful. I’ve never seen two more different sites (Nos. 10 and 11) anywhere in the world that touch each other.” — Bill Coore

Coore, who played The Pit years ago, has been walking this property for more than a decade, conjuring up at least five different routings. Doak took the land on the west side of the property and Coore and Crenshaw took the east.

The land Doak used for Pinehurst No. 10 is flatter, more expansive. No. 11 bumps and bends and rolls through property where a rail line ran. Decades ago, sand that would be used to build the Blue Ridge Parkway was scooped out and loaded into railway cars, then the line would move another 50 yards and start it all over, leaving more than a dozen ridges where the excavation work was done.

Coore and Pinehurst owner Bob Dedman had been studying the land for so long that both tell the same story of another delay years ago that prompted the owner to put his head on the table and say of the architects, “What if they die?”

When Coore found himself in an emergency room in Montana a while back, he laughed to himself about the long-ago conversation with Dedman.

“To this day, when I see Bob, I say ‘I’m still here,’” Coore says.

Feeling spry again, Coore has a twinkle in his 79-year-old eyes when he talks about No. 11.

“It’s extraordinarily unique. I refer to it often as weirdly wonderful. I’ve never seen two more different sites (Nos. 10 and 11) anywhere in the world that touch each other,” Coore says in his gentle Southern voice.

It’s lunchtime at Station 21, the new restaurant that sits between the two courses at Pinehurst Sandmines, and Coore orders an Arnold Palmer and a bowl of brisket and short rib chili.

“Don’t forget the chopped onions,” Coore reminds the server after asking her name and making small talk with her.

“He’s really a Southern gentleman. He has such great manners and treats everyone with such kindness,” says Crenshaw, whose personality mirrors his partner’s.

Their partnership began more than 40 years ago when they were introduced to each other after Coore had talked his way into working for Pete Dye. Their sensibilities aligned and, after some initial reluctance from Coore, they entered the course design business together in 1985.

“People ask me what Ben is like. The best way I know to tell them is to look at the name for our company. We started in ’85 and he had just won the Masters the year before and he puts my name – someone nobody has heard of – first.” –Bill Coore

Among their many projects together, their work restoring Pinehurst No. 2 more than a decade ago to its scruffy and sandy former glory ranks among the best, artfully bringing back its original features while reaffirming the Donald Ross layout’s place among the game’s most masterful designs.

It was a project that demanded vision, trust and a degree of reverence for the place, traits that run through their partnership.

Ask Coore about Crenshaw and he tells the story of their early days.

“People ask me what Ben is like,” Coore says. “The best way I know to tell them is to look at the name for our company. We started in ’85 and he had just won the Masters the year before and he puts my name – someone nobody has heard of – first.”

Crenshaw considers himself the lucky one.

“It’s one of the great decisions of my life. I just think the world of the man. I have a connection with Bill that is just precious to me,” Crenshaw says.

Coore is the point person for the Pinehurst project and, as such, he will make monthly visits until the course is ready later this year.

He grew up an only child to a single mom on a dirt road in Davidson County, about 60 miles west of Pinehurst. “Not in any town,” he says. Coore was introduced to Pinehurst by caddying for a friend at No. 2. He played golf for a brief stint at Wake Forest and came to know and appreciate Pinehurst and Old Town Club, the Perry Maxwell design near the university, fostering his fascination with course design.

It was a drastic detour from Coore’s academic life at Wake Forest, where he earned a degree in classical Greek, a path he followed because there was no line when he was signing up for a foreign language requirement one semester. It led him to Dr. Carl Harris, whose influence on Coore was profound.

“Probably the most amazing human I have ever met,” Coore says. “He was truly extraordinary, a brilliant guy. Just the fact that I was a country boy from North Carolina but he accepted me as equal though we were not even remotely close to equals.”

Studying classical Greek meant learning the alphabet for a dead language. It meant reading Plato and Aristophanes and, at times, it meant being the only student in Harris’ class, leading to extended discussions between the two of them about philosophy once the lesson of the day was complete.

Folded in with the lessons he learned from his mother, Clara, Coore’s views on humanity were molded by his time with Harris and his wife.

“The things he was taught, they really come through in the way he thinks and the way he acts. He’s not impulsive. He doesn’t arrive at a conclusion quickly. He’s pensive about things. He’s a deep thinker and he is resolute in his decisions. I’ve seen it a million times,” Crenshaw says.

Among the long-ago lessons that guide Coore are moderation and attention to detail. In course design, it is the placement of a small mound, understanding the prevailing wind and imagining how a good player will think about the hole he is playing.

It is conceptual until it becomes real in the ground.

As Coore works his way through his chili and a second Arnold Palmer, the conversation jumps from topic to topic. He shakes his head about a video crew that spent a cold day trudging across the sandy hills and slopes, particularly the guy lugging a camera for hours.

That evening, the crew asked Coore to sit by an outdoor firepit and sketch out a green site as if looking from above. Coore, who prefers to gently deflect attention, went along with it, apologizing for his artistic efforts.

“I can’t see what I’m doing and it’s not very good and this guy is filming it. Then he hands me a beer. … I love beer but I’m not sure this is a good visual, though it was probably pretty accurate,” Coore says with a gentle laugh.

Course designers, by nature, tend to be self-confident, to put it mildly. They are proud of their work and willing to say why. Coore is the antithesis of that, as soft, rich and understated as good cashmere.

He tells the story of one of the principals involved at Rodeo Dunes, the highly anticipated Coore & Crenshaw design outside Denver that is generating plenty of online chatter among course design aficionados, and how proud the person is of the Colorado land where the new course sits.

“He said how does [the Pinehurst No. 11 site] compare to the site at Rodeo Dunes, and I knew this guy thought Rodeo Dunes was really, truly special and it is,” Coore says. “I said, I think the site for No. 11 is equally interesting to Rodeo Dunes. He goes what? There can’t be a site in Pinehurst that is that good. …Well, it’s pretty good, pretty good,”

High praise from Coore.

Having finished lunch, Coore pushes back from the table and looks outside where the midday sun has warmed away the January chill.

“Let’s go get dirty,” he says, pulling his gray wool cap over his white hair.

Standing in what will be the first fairway at No. 11, Coore looks up toward the green site in the distance where a slightly leaning flagstick is dug into the ground. There is a substantial rise in front of the green that includes a pair of dug-out holes that will become ragged-edged bunkers to stop shots that come up short from rolling back down into the fairway.

Coore remembers wondering if some – owner Dedman included – might think the hill on the first hole was too much. He got his answer when Dedman looked up from the fairway and told him, “I love the second hole at Pine Valley and this is nowhere near that severe.”

It is like a house in the framing stage, a skeleton of lumber waiting for walls and all of the finishing touches. The roughed-out fairway was the driving range for The Pit years ago and the bulldozers have unearthed a few old practice balls, whitish gray with red stripes around them. When a shaper took down a nearby cedar tree, he found approximately 40 old range balls in the debris.

The ground is imprinted with tracks left by the heavy equipment and, in places, the sand crunches like stepping on dry cookies as Coore walks. He marvels at what the crew and their machines can do, deflecting much of the creation credit to them, saying he and Crenshaw feel more like editors than authors at times.

Except for a handful of corridors where golf holes were years ago, this golf course is being carved out of an overgrown sand mine, property freckled with humps and bumps where trees have grown up from waste piles and, in other spots, where there was little more than unspoiled pine forest.

“He is constantly looking for a site that is different. That’s why he is so excited about No. 11. It has all these random mounds. I don’t know if there’s ever been a course built like that,” says Ryan Farrow, a design associate who has been with Coore & Crenshaw for nearly a decade.

“Whenever we are out here, he is so whimsical in a way. He doesn’t want to repeat himself so he’s pretty slick.”

This is where Coore summons an organic artistry, seeing through the trees and beyond the ridges, creating more than computers and maps can.

“It’s a little like trout fishing,” Dedman says. “You can be out there for hours and see the beauty of it.”

Coore pauses and looks around, offering a quick aside about why the layout follows the path it does, explaining there is a patch of “uninteresting” land near the fifth and sixth holes he wanted to avoid.

“We have [topographical] maps but we’re still pretty much dinosaurs in that regard,” he says. “You can read the topo maps and you can get some conceptual ideas from those but, more than anything, it’s just coming out and walking through the woods, particularly during the winter when there are no leaves on the trees.

“There’s an app with GPS that tracks where you go and you can drop little pins if you find interesting spots and if you don’t know where you are. For us, it’s still pretty much the old-fashioned way. You walk through there and say this feels like a golf hole.”

No. 11 begins to show its character on the second tee.

“Right here, it’s like ‘hello,’” Coore says with a small smile. “This is where you see the randomness of nature.”

The second hole will be a gentle dogleg right playing around a ridge line that intrudes at the corner of the dogleg. Not far away, there will be small mounds that will ask players to go right, left or over them before approaching a green tucked in among more mounds and ridges that will retain their scruffy, natural look when the course eventually opens.

Coore calls it engaging with the more interesting land.

“Out here walking, you get a sense,” he says. “You start to connect the dots with no preconceived notions, oh it’s got to be a par-4 or a par-5, it has to be a par-72. You go find what you think, and it’s a judgment call, [what] are the most interesting holes and let the golf course play out, par-70, par-73, whatever.

“A lot of people do it on computers and you can visualize with 3D. For me, I’m just old-fashioned. I like to see what’s behind it, not just what’s right here. What’s in the distance? What do you see?

“The idea is here, nestled down in these piles. It’s what people look at.”

As Coore walks on through the front nine, he points out low sandy spots that, once a couple of trees are removed, will become bunkers. He points to sharp ridges, some that remained there when the sand around them was dug out and others that were the result of debris that was left in a stack, only to regenerate with trees and ground cover through the years.

“We didn’t create the landforms. We found the landforms and tried to make the golf course fit within it.” — Bill Coore

“Bill reminded me of the French sculptor Maillol who, between the world wars, was able to capture classic beauty in design with female nudes,” Dedman said. “Bill harkens back to classic design features, back to Old Tom [Morris] and [Donald] Ross. I love that we are moving back to the classic style.”

It’s those random features that will ultimately separate No. 11, quirky landforms that were never intended for a golf course but will now define one like birthmarks. Coore stands and wonders aloud about one day finding a piece of land and turning a group of guys loose on bulldozers, telling them to make a mess of the place and then letting the property sit untouched for 25 years before coming back to build a golf course.

“In some ways, this is a little like that,” Coore says. “We didn’t create the landforms. We found the landforms and tried to make the golf course fit within it.

“Through the decades these trees have grown out of the piles. That’s what makes it amazing. If it weren’t for the trees and the vegetation, you could look at some of these landforms and go, oh they made that … they wanted to go make something super dramatic and they wanted to make it look like it was Ireland. We didn’t make that.”

Coore will sketch out the idea for each hole but “once we get out here we don’t use it,” Farrow says. “So much of it is a reaction to what he sees.”

Subtraction becomes addition in places.

“Really the worst thing you can do is to try and force the golf course into some preconceived notion,” Coore says.

Because Crenshaw is less inclined to travel these days, Coore does much of the on-site work. They share the same design sensibilities and rarely have strong disagreements. When they do, one will always give in to the one with the strongest conviction.

Coore recalls, early in their work together, getting a call from Crenshaw, who had toured the site of what became Kapalua’s famous Plantation Course on Maui. It’s one of the most spectacular sites anywhere with 460 feet of elevation change as the course plays up and down a mountain and along gorges.

“I remember Ben calling saying he’d been there with Mark Rolfing and they had a couple of Coronas sitting where the clubhouse now sits. I asked him what the property was like and he said, ‘It rises gently from the sea,’” Coore says.

“When I finally went out there and actually saw the (famously hilly) property, I said to Ben, ‘How many Coronas did you guys have?’”

Together, they found a way to turn a pineapple farm into one of the most dramatic layouts in the world.

During one of Crenshaw’s visits to their new course in Pinehurst, they arrived at what will be the 17th hole. When Crenshaw asked where the hole would be, Coore admitted he wasn’t sure.

“Somewhere through these thousand piles of stuff,” Coore said.

That’s how it happens. Walking the property then walking it again and again and again until it reveals itself.

“He has an art, a trait that not many people have,” Crenshaw says. “He can assess a piece of property pretty quickly and he arrives at a conclusion that this is the way we should go. He has an unbelievable capacity to route natural golf holes across a property.”

As the sunlight begins to slant across this elaborate work site, Coore has returned to the ninth green where he spent most of his morning. He studies the edges of what will be a green, considering where to pull the edges out and pull them in. He decides to soften a portion near the middle of the putting surface but that can wait until tomorrow.

Standing near the old clubhouse, Coore can see down the hill into the first fairway where a big truck loaded with debris is making its final trip of the day in the dying light.

As the truck drives away, it leaves behind a cloud of dust in the wind.

And Bill Coore, his black outfit dusted from the day, watches it go.

Top: Bill Coore on a chilly morning at what will become Pinehurst No. 11 (Ron Green Jr., GGP)

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