PINEHURST: JOHN MUMMERT/USGA PHOTO ARCHIVES; BANDON DUNES GOLF RESORT
trend. They came to appreciate the ground
game through direct personal experience.
As a golf-mad youngster growing up in
North Carolina, Coore would often rise
before daybreak and drive with his buddies
to Pinehurst, where for $5 they could play
all day long.
“Pinehurst No. 2 allowed me to play my
game,” Coore says. “My skills were attuned
to short shots, and I could play with the long
hitters. The golf course didn’t favor just one
kind of golfer.”
The questions he began to ask included:
What made No. 2 so interesting? What made
it so accommodating? What made it so fair?
These considerations and accompanying
thoughts are the ones that have informed his
design philosophy.
For Doak, the seminal experience was at St.
Andrews, where he caddied for several months.
“I became a fan of the links style from
spending my year overseas and seeing how
much fun the courses were for the average
senior player,” he says.
Rather than trying to conform to a
predetermined strategy, ordinary golfers at
St. Andrews could work out their own strategy
to avoid hazards and tack their way around the
course. They used their own judgment, and
they could play to their strengths.
The proper conditions for the ground
game, Doak warns, “are much easier to
achieve on sandy ground and/or windy climes
than in the southeastern United States.”
CONCENTRATION ON IMAGINATION
Still, Coore and Doak, along with many
other thoughtful, innovative American
architects, have found ways to introduce
the ground game into courses
throughout the country.
Craig Schreiner,
an architect based
in Myrtle Beach, says: “Through the air but
on the ground—that’s how I try to approach
design. What happens when the ball lands?
Where does it roll? How far does it roll?
I’ve always preferred dry courses. There’s
nothing worse that soft, wet conditions
where you don’t have any options. On some
older courses, where trees have grown in,
golf is like throwing darts.”
Schreiner has incorporated the ground
game into original designs and also into his
renovations of high-profile older courses like
Pine Lakes Country Club, the granddaddy
of Myrtle Beach golf courses. The layout
is enjoying a new wave of success since
Scheiner remodeled it, restoring shotmaking
options that had disappeared over the years.
Now, Schreiner explains, Pine Lakes not
only allows for more creativity, but it has also
become more playable.
“Not everybody hits it way up in the air,”
he notes. “It’s great to watch senior golfers
play a course with