Coore remembers wondering whether some – including owner Dedman – might have thought the hill at the first hole was too high. He got his answer when Dedman looked up from the fairway and told him, “I like the second hole at Pine Valley and this one isn’t nearly as serious.”
It’s like a house in the framing stage, a skeleton of wood waiting for the walls and all the finishes. The rugged fairway was the driving range for The Pit years ago, and the bulldozers dug up some old practice balls, whitish gray with red stripes around them. When a shaper took down a nearby cedar tree, he found about 40 old distance balls in the rubble.
The ground is littered with ruts left by the heavy equipment and in places the sand crunches like stepping on dry biscuits as Coore walks. He marvels at what the crew and their machines can do, deflecting much of the creation credit to them, and says that he and Crenshaw sometimes feel more like editors than authors.
With the exception of a handful of corridors that were golf holes years ago, this golf course is carved out of an overgrown sand mine, a terrain littered with lumps and bumps where trees have grown from waste piles and, in other places, where there was little more than pristine pine forest.
“He’s always looking for a terrain that’s different. That’s why he’s so excited about No. 11. It has all these random hills. I don’t know if a course like that has ever been built,” said Ryan Farrow, a design associate who has been with Coore & Crenshaw for almost a decade.
“Every time we’re here, he’s so erratic in a way. He doesn’t want to repeat himself, so he’s pretty slick.”
This is where Coore evokes an organic artistry, looking through the trees and beyond the ridges and creating more than computers and maps can.
“It’s a bit like trout fishing,” Dedman says. “You can be there for hours and see the beauty of it.”
Coore pauses and looks around, briefly putting aside why the layout follows the path, explaining that there is a patch of “uninteresting” land near the fifth and sixth holes that he wanted to avoid.
“We have [topographical] maps, but we’re still pretty much dinosaurs in that respect,” he says. “You can read the topo maps and get some conceptual ideas from them, but most of all it’s just getting out and walking through the woods, especially in winter when there are no leaves on the trees.
“There’s an app with GPS that keeps track of where you go and you can leave little pins if you come across interesting places and don’t know where you are. For us it’s still kind of old-fashioned. You walk through it and say this feels like a golf hole.”
No. 11 starts to show his character on the second tee.
“Here it’s like ‘hello,’” Coore says with a small smile. “Here you see the arbitrariness of nature.”
The second hole will be a soft dogleg that plays right around an edge line that intrudes into the corner of the dogleg. Not far away there will be small hills that will ask players to go right, left or over them before approaching a green, nestled among even more hills and ridges that will retain their scruffy, natural look when the course eventually opens.
Coore calls it busy with the more interesting country.
“You get an idea when you walk here,” he says. “You start connecting the dots without any preconceived ideas, oh it has to be a par-4 or a par-5, it has to be a par-72. Go after what you think, and it’s a judgment call, [what] are the most interesting holes and let the golf course play, par-70, par-73, whatever.
“A lot of people do it on computers and you can visualize with 3D. To me, I’m just old-fashioned. I like to see what’s behind it, not just what’s here. What’s in the distance? What do you see?”
“The idea is here, nestled in these stacks. It’s what people are looking at.”
As Coore walks through the front nine, he points out low sandy spots that, once a few trees are removed, will become bunkers. He points out sharp ridges, some that were left there when the sand around them was excavated and others that were the result of rubble left in a pile, then regenerated over the years with trees and ground cover.
“We didn’t create the landforms. We found the landforms and tried to make the golf course fit into them.” –Bill Coore
“Bill reminded me of the French sculptor Maillol who, between the world wars, captured classical beauty in design with female nudes,” Dedman said. “Bill goes back to classic design features, back to Old Tom [Morris] And [Donald] Rose. I love that we’re going back to the classic style.”
It’s those random features that will ultimately distinguish number 11, idiosyncratic landforms that were never intended for a golf course but will now define one as birthmarks. Coore stands up and wonders aloud if he found a piece of land one day and set a group of guys loose on bulldozers, told them to make a mess of it, and then let the property sit untouched for 25 years before coming back to build a golf course.
“In some ways this is a bit similar,” says Coore. “We didn’t create the landforms. We found the landforms and tried to make the golf course fit into them.
“Over the decades, these trees have grown out of the piles. That’s what makes it amazing. Without the trees and the vegetation, you might look at some of these landforms and think, oh, they made that… they wanted to make something super dramatic and they wanted to make it look like it was Ireland. We didn’t make that.”
Coore will sketch the idea for each hole, but “once we get here, we don’t use it anymore,” says Farrow. “It’s largely a reaction to what he sees.”
Subtraction becomes addition in some places.
“The worst thing you can do is try to bias the golf course,” Coore says.
Because Crenshaw is less inclined to travel these days, Coore does much of the work locally. They share the same design sensibilities and rarely have strong disagreements. If they do, one will always give in to the one with the strongest conviction.
Coore recalls that early in their collaboration, he received a call from Crenshaw, who had toured the site of what would become Kapalua’s famous Plantation Course on Maui. It is one of the most spectacular locations in the world, with a height difference of 140 meters as the track goes up and down a mountain and past gorges.
“I remember Ben calling and saying he’d been there with Mark Rolfing and they had a couple of Coronas where the clubhouse is now. I asked him what the site was like and he said, ‘It rises gently from the sea,’” says Coore.
“When I finally went outside and actually saw the (famous hilly) property, I said to Ben, ‘How many Coronas did you 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 become the 17th hole. When Crenshaw asked where the hole would be, Coore admitted he wasn’t sure.
“Somewhere in these thousand piles of stuff,” Coore said.
That’s how it happens. Walking the terrain and then walking it again and again and again until it reveals itself.
“He has an art, a quality that not many people have,” Crenshaw says. “He can assess a piece of property quite quickly and come to the conclusion that this is the path we should take. He has an incredible ability to route natural golf holes through a property.”
As sunlight begins to shine over this extensive work area, Coore has returned to the ninth green where he spent most of his morning. He studies the edges of what will be a green and thinks about where to pull the edges out and in. He decides to soften an area in the middle of the putting surface, but that can wait until tomorrow.
Standing at the old clubhouse, Coore can look down the hill to the first fairway where a large truck full of debris makes its last run of the day in the dying light.
As the truck drives away, it leaves a cloud of dust in the wind.
And Bill Coore, his black outfit dusted off from the day, sees it happen.
Above: Bill Coore on a cold morning in what Pinehurst No. Will Be 11 (Ron Green Jr., GGP)
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