Golf Digest South Africa - June 2024

2

Pinehurst No 10 Several holes of this Tom Doak design, which opened in April 2024, plunge through old sand quarries, including the turbulent eighth where players will want to pop a motion sickness pill before tackling fairway swells you could surf across. No 10 feels like a world apart from the resort’s tight cluster of primary courses and symbiotic surrounding village. The grandeur of the isolated holes roller coasting through quiet sand barrens five kilometres to the south creates tension between the sublimity of the environment and the heroism of the architecture, demonstrated most intensely in the uninhibited green shapes, many of which are bowl- shaped and heavily segmented.

3

Pinehurst No 4 No 171 America’s Second 100 Greatest Golf Courses No 28 America’s 100 Greatest Public Golf Courses

Like a football team searching for the right coach, the resort could never settle on the right identity for the No 4 course despite a series of major alterations by different architects. It found its match when it hired Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner to carry out a full-scale blowup and rebuild in 2018 that brought back the sweeping sand and pine character we identify with Pinehurst while initiating a style of shaping in the greens and bunkers that’s confident and distinctly its own.

44 GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA

JUNE 2024

Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator