Preparations for Pinehurst

A few years ago I joined a group of local golfers on their annual golf trip over our university's spring break. Like so many players from this part of the country, they used to go to Myrtle Beach every year. By the time I joined them, however, they had switched to playing courses in the sandhills of North Carolina around Pinehurst. So I remain probably the only golfer within a 100 miles radius who has never set foot on a Myrtle beach golf course. I know.. it's nothing to be proud of.

The snow cover here in the New River Valley looks to be with us until probably April or even until our new clubhouse at The Pete Dye River Course is completed which will likely be after the second coming so there will be someplace to drink after we are left behind. Pinehurst is in a week and we are all rustier than the floorboards of the cars we drove when we were young. So four of us drove three hours south on Sunday to play a course east of Charlotte called Eagle Trace and try to warm up a bit.  Warm up is a relative term, of course, and the round was played in 20 mph winds which when added to the 40 some temperatures and the necessity of buggy riding had my partners turning on me for picking this course before we had even hit the first tee. Strategically placed hazards of all kinds and shapes on the first couple of holes had me agreeing with them.

Eagle Trace is a Tom Jackson designed course in Marshville, North Carolina.  You would think the land around a town like that would be flat, but this course played more like a mountain course- lots of elevation changes and lots of uphill shots into the wind- why does it always work that way?  So a course that was only about 6000 yards from the white tees played much longer- or maybe we were just playing that badly?  I finished with an 87, the same score I had my only other round played in 2010.  The fairways were the normal dormant bermuda.  The greens were pretty decent, though several had slope that would be brutal in the summer. Overall, I liked the course, but it's one that would be much better the second time around.  The clubhouse had its own cat, which I took to be a good sign.

I played with a set of MacGregor colokrum irons from the 50s that had been rechromed and reshafted with dynamic gold s300s.  I guess it was too expensive to restore the copper face of the originals, so the faces are just sandblasted.  But they look pretty cool. They actually held up pretty well, but my driving was awful- I was using a mix of my regular Honma persimmon and a Joe Powell persimmon that I got recently.  I like the looks of it, but I was leaving it to the right (when I hit it) and then when I would go back to the much lighter Honma, I would be lucky to make any contact at all.  I think I will keep these clubs for Pinehurst.  My putter is going to be a Nicklaus Muirfield which is one of many copies of the George Low Wizard 600.

A couple of weekends ago, a few of us got together at Joe's house with our wives to talk about our trip to Scotland this summer. A week at St. Andrews and a week in Dornoch up in the highlands. This trip has been in the making for a very long time, but it is actually almost within sight now and we are getting pretty pumped up.

On to Pinehurst.. if it doesn't snow too hard this week.