Long, hot, tough with brutal greens

In their policy statement, the United States Golf Association, who run the US Open, state that they aim to make the championship "the most rigorous, yet fair, examination of golf skills, testing all forms of shot making". And, in many ways, nowhere is this policy as true as at Pinehurst No 2, a course that is considered a national institution in America and, yet, is playing host to only its second US Open championship.

Of course, the ghost of Payne Stewart hangs over this resort that has evolved in the sandhills of North Carolina. On the back of the 18th green on the No 2 course, a statue of Stewart, fist-pumping and animated, recalls his reaction to holing his final putt to win the 1999 championship here just months before he was killed when his plane crashed into a South Dakota field, a tragic postscript to his passion-filled victory.

Other ghosts, too, linger. And none more so than that of Donald Ross, the Scot who crafted this layout that is dominated by turtle-back greens.

"It's long, hot, tough and brutal around the greens. I really like it," remarked Justin Leonard, and you feel that's exactly the kind of response Ross would have wanted to provoke when he created this course.

Lured by Boston financier James Tufts, who founded Pinehurst in 1895 as a winter retreat, Ross arrived in 1900 as the resort's first head professional.

Horrified by the existing course, a hilly, unkempt mess, Ross immediately set about reshaping Pinehurst No 1 and designing a second course that would come to define both the property and his career. Ross would eventually design such legendary US Open venues as Oakland Hills in Detroit; Oak Hill in Rochester, upstate New York, and the Inverness Club in Toledo, Ohio.

But he always considered No 2 his magnum opus, and made Pinehurst his residence until his death in 1948.

Using only mules and shovels, Ross scratched the layout into the sandhills amid the long-leaf pines that dotted the property, exercising his philosophy of liberal fairways and tiny greens. It was a long process. In 1901, he laid out the first nine holes of Pinehurst No 2, and in 1907 he completed the course.

But he would tinker with it for the rest of his life, forever tweaking his masterpiece.

To many, the crowned greens and grass-faced bunkers of No 2 became Ross's so-called "signature" design. Yet, the reality is Ross built more than 400 courses in his lifetime and none of them resemble Pinehurst No 2. Ross was one of those architects who constantly refined his style, and his work has as great a variety as that of any designer who ever lived. The heart of each Ross design is a unique routing plan, which makes the most of each corner of the land available and its topography. Ross never built a course where earthmoving played a major role.

To that end, his work at Pinehurst No 2 features spacious, straightforward landing areas, a definite departure from the US Open norm. The layout is dotted with 107 bunkers (51 fairway traps, 56 greenside) but most help frame holes as much as they hurt the scorecard. And water makes just one, meaningless, appearance, a small pond fronting the 16th tee providing more of a refuge for frogs than a hazard for golfers.

But if Ross pampered players on the tee, he intended to confound them on the fairway, routinely presenting them with long-iron approaches to small, crowned greens. Until 1935, those greens were actually flat expanses of sand, until advances in agronomy made it possible to construct grass greens capable of withstanding the summer's heat. Since the rest of his architectural business had come to a halt during the Great Depression, Ross had plenty of time to supervise the work on-site every day during the construction process in 1934 and 1935.

With his prior knowledge of the region, Ross knew he didn't really have to design his green complexes to shed water far from the green, because these soils seldom flood, rain water simply percolating into the sand. But he took advantage of this in an unusual way, creating all sorts of hollows and undulations around the greens and building up the greens with the excavated material.

"I consider the ability to play longer irons as the supreme test of a great golfer," said Ross in his remarks before Pinehurst hosted the 1936 US PGA Championship.

"I also highly value precise handling of the short game . . . the contouring around the greens makes possible an infinite variety in the requirements for short shots that no other form of hazard can call for."

In essence, he was intimating that players would have to land a mid-iron approach on top of a Volkswagen Beetle or be prepared to get up-and-down from the bumper.

The contoured greens on No 2 make Augusta National's look relatively flat. Without exception, every green features a domed crown that funnels even slightly imperfect shots away from the pin and toward the shaved collection areas that surround every putting surface.

Think of it this way: at a normal tour event, players have a landing area on the greens roughly the size of a king-sized bed that will produce point-blank birdie putts. At most major championships, that landing area shrinks to the size of a full-sized bed. At Pinehurst, it's little more than a baby's cot.

The bentgrass greens merge into the shaved Bermuda collection areas where the collar would be on an ordinary layout. When the ball trickles down into these closely cropped caverns, players will be presented with numerous recovery options. Depending on the severity of the slope and the grain (usually mowed away from the pin), some players will simply choose to putt from the collection areas. Others will play low-lofted chip shots, hoping the ball releases at exactly the right point and runs to the pin. Others will try to nip the ball off the tight lie with a sand wedge, carrying the ball nearly all the way to the pin. Some will use a fairway wood to cover the ground.

So, why did it take the USGA until 1999 to take the US Open to Pinehurst? One reason was its out-of-the-way location, and another was the US Open's traditional June date conflicted with the schedule at the resort, which as late as 1960 closed in the summers owing to heat.

More recently, Pinehurst's greens (Bermuda for 60 years) lacked the speed and firmness the USGA demands from its venues. That problem was solved when Penn State's top-ranked agronomy programme took a sample from Augusta National and perfected a heat-resistant strain of bent (Penn G-2). The new green grass was implemented under the supervision of US Open agronomist Rees Jones in 1996, eliminating the USGA's final concern.

The other thing that makes No 2 so special is it seems to have evolved in response to changes in the game. Where most courses may be getting easier as players hit the ball farther, these greens have become even more repellent of short-iron approaches.

Shortly before the greens were rebuilt in 1996, under the supervision of Rees Jones, the putting surfaces were extended out to their original sizes as Ross had intended. Apparently, previous owners had been unable to cover the labour costs of hand-mowing the greenside swales.

So it is that the course is much as it was when Stewart won in 1999, the only nip-'n'-tucking being its lengthening by 92 yards and some repairs to bunkers.

On that occasion, the hardest holes proved to be numbers five, eight and 16, all par fours. The fifth played to an average of 4.54 to be the toughest of all, followed by the 16th, which played to an average 4.50. This year, the fifth will play 10 yards shorter, but will still represent a severe test.

As David Fay, the USGA executive director, put it on their policy of reducing holes that normally play as par fives to par fours for the championship (reducing the par from 72 to 70), "for the greatest players in the world, if you have a choice between a borderline ho-hum par five and a very stern par four, we'll by and large go with the four every time."

The test will be a severe but fair one, just as Ross would have intended.