Pinehurst No. 10 Review
Intro
With the addition of Tom Doak’s Pinehurst No. 10, the resort now completes the list of the “big 3” architects of the decade to have built or restored one of its golf courses. The other two of course being Coore and Crenshaw’s 2010 restoration of the resort’s jewel, No. 2, and Gil Hanse’s 2018 restoration/renovation of No. 4. While this idea of a “big 3” is unofficial, I can’t imagine too many naysayers and in comparison to Pinehurst’s competitive set, a Doak course is highly additive to the offering.
To make it excessively simple off the bat, No. 10 is good. Very good. It’s fun, the land is interesting and varied without being a bear of a walk, and the aesthetic is in line with some of the key projects of the region as of late. Notably, Ohoopee Match Club, Old Barnwell, and Tree Farm all come to mind when searching for comparisons on the scrubby pines and underbrush, sandy soil and aesthetic appeal, and complete divorce from traditional rough. Perhaps the best thing about No.10 is some of the land movement, particularly on the back nine. While No. 2 and No. 4 are not completely absent land movement by any means, it is not their defining feature either. No. 10 starts out with subtle, yet interesting land movement on a number of the first 7 holes, the course’s best stretch for me, goes hog wild (in a good way) on the 8th where the hole was built on the old Pinehurst sand mines, and then settles into a pleasant amount of topographic diversity on the back nine. For those who are familiar with the Pinehurst/Southern Pines golf landscape, I would say Pinehurst No. 2 and 4 are average land movement courses. Mid Pines and Pines Needles are above average to good, and Southern Pines Golf Club is excellent. No. 10 sits just below Mid Pines and Pine Needles on the land scale.
While the land is the first thing to call out on No. 10, there is more to it than just that. My 3 core takeaways on the golf course and what it means to Pinehurst as a whole are as follows.
My 3 core Takeaways:
The first 7 holes are excellent, 8 is a novelty, and the last 10 leave a bit to be desired.
Holes 1-7 show restraint, 8 is wild yet restrained , and the last 10 show restraint to the max.
I believe the course is a work in progress as many of the holes I was a bit underwhelmed by have easy paths to further work that will take them up a notch.
Point 1:
Tee shot on the 1st.
The golf course gets good before you even make your first swing. I am open to a handshake opener, but I also love when you have to hit a shot from jump. No. 10 is in the latter camp. A 450yd par 4 opener that goes a bit up and to the right of a ridge and then to a green that all runs front left to back right. You don’t have to play it perfectly to make a par, but you have to hit real shots straight away. The way the hole traverses a natural up and over, left to right canting piece of the land sets the tone immediately for the recurring theme of simply using the land as it was as opposed to building too many features into it.
Approach into the 1st.
The second is a nice mid iron par 3, followed by a strong but reachable par 5 at the 3rd, and a quasi drivable par 4 at the 4th. I really enjoyed this start to the golf course from a basic variability standpoint. You will likely have already hit a wedge, a short-mid iron, a mid-long iron, and a 3 wood into greens all by the 5th tee.
The 5th green was one of my favorite ones on the course with a subtle yet discerning ridge running through its middle that is just enough to make it such that your short iron-wedge approach needs to be fewer than 10 feet off line to yield a good look at birdie. Further, the seamless transition of green to 6 or so feet of fringe to sandy waste area is a beautiful aesthetic that is best captured by the 5th green.
From short of 5 green site.
5 green, from above.
The 6th is one of my top holes on the course. It is the first of 4 very real par 4’s the course presents with holes 6, 9, 13, and 16 all playing as par 4’s between 475 and 510. The hole bends to the right and has one centerline waste feature that forces you to decide to hug the dogleg to the right or play safe to the left and contend with trees on your approach. The green is framed by one large bunker in its front right section and sits into the left to right land that the entire hole is situated on very crisply. It is large enough and interesting enough to keep you on your toes, but matches the length of the hole.
The 6th
7 is a short par 3 that almost plays a bit like a short template given the size of the green and the number of different ways and lengths it can play based on the day’s hole location. Another example of the course having wonderful variety in the types of holes you are playing. 6 is a long iron, and at the 7th you’re right back to something short.
The 7th - greensite.
Number 8 will be the most controversial hole on the course. The tee ball is blind, as Doak associate Angela Moser wanted to leave a 50+ foot sand mound about 150 yards from the tee that obscures the view to the fairway from the tee. The fairway has as much going on as the fairways of St. Andrews, and the green reminds me much of nearby Tobacco Road. What ties the hole together for me though is that all of these pieces of the hole come together strategically and work. The green is situated right to left behind another large sand dune of the old pinehurst sand mines to its front left such that if you choose safety to the left off the tee, you will be blind into the green, so to have a clear view on your second, you must hug the more dangerous right side of the fairway. The hole is for sure meant to be an ode to the site and by its very nature is meant to have some zane, but I find it all comes together and works well.
The 8th!
On the way in, while the land gets more interesting than the early stages of the course, a couple common themes emerge that were not my favorite parts of the course. I very much enjoyed each of the par 3’s that come in the final 10 holes in 11, 14, and 17. 11 is just hard. 185 middle with very little width and a lot of penalty for missing left. It’s a 55 yard field goal kick. Just have to strike a good one. 14 is a long downhiller with an awesome green site built back into a slope that helps you work the ball into the middle from front right to back left. From the back box this one tapped 250 to a front pin… 17 is maybe the course’s most photogenic with a downhill mid iron over water and 2 different bunkers that the green shapes itself around, presenting a variety of shot types that present different difficulties, depth of green you hit to, etc. Solid action.
The par 4’s and 5’s coming in show a lot of good and traverse interesting land, but leave me wanting more. I’ll explore more in section 2, but I walked off most of the inward 10 holes, exclusive of the par 3’s, saying to myself “good hole, but not yet a great hole.”
Point 2:
Minimalism, restraint, naturalism, etc etc are all words and styles of golf course design that have been very much in vogue in recent history. I, for the record, am a big fan of this movement. There has also been a somewhat more recent push towards a maximalist approach by certain architects. King Collins and Kyle Franz in particular come to mind as recent architects to have done really cool work on the higher end of the human intervention scale. The aforementioned “big 3” of Doak, Hanse, and Coore&Crenshaw all fall more in the minimalist camp, but are all at different times inclined to diverge from that path when they see fit. At Pinehurst No. 10, Doak went with a largely minimalist/restrained hand, and at times excessively so in my opinion.
A look at the 9th.
The first 7 holes use the movement of the land and the attractiveness of the terrain to make interesting golf. The bunkers that were built were done sparingly but in an additive way to each of the holes they reside on. The greens are large enough and have plenty going on to resist too many putts being made but continue the theme of letting the high quality land that the course was built on be the star of the show rather than adding artificial elements. What I think Doak does as well as anyone is create greens that don’t present as being too excessive, while also creating tons of different and interesting hole locations. This is so crucial because it gives his golf course’s staying power and a ton of value to a client because people are going to enjoy playing them over and over. The last thing you would want either as a private or public facility is to have a course that people play one time and feel they have seen all they want. I can think of countless Doak courses where I feel I need a dozen cracks just to scratch the surface from a hole locations standpoint. The first 7 hit all these notes with grace. Great land, not overcooked with features but also not underdone, and green sites that tie each hole together.
The 8th! Again!
The 8th hole is fascinating. To me, restraint means that an architect does not excessively intervene with what was already there. Maximalism is the movement of a significant amount of dirt to achieve a certain product. Seeing as the 8th was built on the core sand storage location of the pinehurst sandmines, there is a good argument to be made that if the 8th on its current plot of land was flatter, and simpler, it would not be restrained because a lot of dirt, or in this case sand, would have needed to be moved to flatten it. While it is one of the more wild holes I have played, my understanding is that save for some of the features on the green, it was all there, Doak and Co simply decided where to plant the grass. Speaking of the green. The 8th being more wild than some of the rest keeps it in context with the rest of the hole which makes more sense than if it were a simple one. While the 8th hole in sum may be out of character in certain ways for the course. The hole itself I find to be strong soup to nuts.
The 9th green
The 9th green is the first example of a handful in the final 10 holes where I feel like the restrained style went a bit far and made for a few bland green sites. I found every green to be enjoyable to putt, but my biggest takeaway was that some of them such as the 9th, 12th, 13th, 15th, 16th, and 18th were guarded by a single side or not at all by bunkers or features of any kind. This is not to say every green needs 8 bunkers around it, that is not how I feel. The biggest thing I was longing for on a number of these approach shots was greater context on the approach shot. In Pinehurst you can always pick a pine tree in the distance to aim for, but it is preferable to have something tangible around the greens to help guide you which is the one aspect I found No. 10 to be missing. It’s part of what makes No. 2 so brilliant. Despite not having a single hazard on the course, every shot clearly defines to the eye what your confines are. Even though the confines are almost way tighter than you wish, it is what I enjoy so much about the tee to green play at the deuce.
14th green
With a certain amount of natural topography such as what is seen on the 14th on No. 10, or intermediary features, greens can get away with not having much that surrounds them. But, when you have 100+ yards of short grass leading into a flattish and not overly accessorized green, the course can begin to feel a touch bland.
Now, don’t take this as me not liking No. 10 or thinking it can’t improve. I really like it, and it can improve. In my final point I will dive further into what I think can and likely will happen with the course longer term.
Point 3:
Particularly with the modern day ease of construction, it is more of a thing now than ever to consider golf courses as evolutions as opposed to finished products immediately upon delivery. No. 10 is a very good example of this. Much like a piece of food, you can always add salt. But, if you go too heavy on the salt in the cooking process, it is a much more difficult task to make a dish edible by trying to save it from there. Simple and restrained is the way to cook, and then once the dish is on the plate or nearly done cooking, you polish it up and get it right where you want it. Golf courses should be viewed the same way. Going nuclear on holes 1-18 and then trying to put the toothpaste back in the bottle later on is something I have seen with a few courses lately and is not the route I would want to take if I owned a club. In the case of Pinehurst No. 10, I would be elated with the product if I were a Pinehurst executive. The land is awesome. The aesthetic of the course is bang on. By my judgement, at least 12 or so of the holes are done, dusted, and in great shape. And finally, as I’ve been leading on, the fact that the other 6 could potentially use one or two minor touch ups to improve is precisely the spot you want to be.
As an illustration of my point, take for example the 17th and 18th greens. 17 having a couple bunkers that inform the approach shot and 18 being absent of any bunkering or things of the like. 17 to my eye is just a more attractive approach shot that I will enjoy hitting to tons of different hole locations whereas 18 is more monotone and from a flat level of approach is going to look like a pretty similar shot regardless of hole location. Now, it’s important to note that the 18th tee ball is a great one and the land the hole is on is a reverse of the first given that it runs right alongside it. The first goes up and over a left to right piece of land and doglegs to the right, the 18th goes up and over from right to left and doglegs to the left. Both of these are great holes and the 18th is the vast majority of the way there, I would just love to see a little something added around the green.
I could call out a few more examples of this, but it would be overkill as the narrative would be the same. Solid golf holes that left me wanting a little more, but the opportunity for those additions to be made is abundantly available. When dosed properly, approaching a golf course project with restraint is not only a good way to build, it has been proven to perhaps be the best way to build. That being said, when restraint begins to feel like it is being done on holes for its sole purpose as opposed to it being the best thing on that specific hole to create the best hole possible, it is worth asking the question of if there is another path for that specific hole that would make it better.
Conclusion:
A lot of people have and will continue to ask whether No. 10 is better than No. 4. I’ll get there in a moment, but I do want to start by saying that there are still too many people that also place No. 2 in that conversation. While I’m never going to argue with someone on the topic of “where they would rather play” because that includes a host of considerations such as enjoyment of the round, ease of walk, etc. But, if we are just talking about the best courses at the resort here, No. 2 is the King and the Queen. Please, let’s get that straight. On the topic of what comes next. As of right now I need to see No. 10 age a bit more before I can really make that decision. No. 4 is also a strong golf course and it and No. 10 sit in a different camp to No. 2, but also a different camp to all the rest, in my opinion.
Pinehurst now has 3 really wonderful courses and a 54 hole itinerary has become quite a bit stronger with the addition of the 10th course. It’s a must play if you make the trip and I think that notion will only be accentuated as time goes on for many of the reasons I have laid out in this piece.
Thanks for reading,
HS