Bill Coore conjures design magic by strolling the land time and again
By RON GREEN JR.
ABERDEEN, NORTH CAROLINA | Bill Coore, bundled into a layered all-black outfit to hold off the Carolina cold, grabbed himself a cup of coffee on this chilly January morning and walked out to the crest of a hill to look across the golf course he is bringing to life from the remnants of a long-ago sand mine.
What will be Pinehurst No. 11, sitting shoulder to shoulder with Tom Doak’s No. 10 course, is still being roughed in and the heavy equipment, most of it a muted shade of yellow, is scattered down the slope as another day of shaping and debris removal comes to life.
Behind Coore, what had been the clubhouse for The Pit Golf Links still stands. The Dan Maples-designed course, over which part of No. 11 is being routed, opened in 1985 and closed in 2010, the years of neglect showing in the building’s faded exterior.
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The old building will be gone soon enough, replaced by a new one on what Pinehurst Resort calls its Sandmines property, located four miles south of the main resort. But Coore is looking across the landscape, not behind him.
Five holes, including the first and 18th, are visible but, at this point, they look more like construction sites than golf holes. For Coore and his longtime design partner Ben Crenshaw, this is where the ideas and concepts are converted into a tapestry, creating 18 different holes that become more than the sum of their parts.
The Coore & Crenshaw magic has been built on allowing the land, whether it’s in the Nebraska sandhills or near the Front Range of the Rockies outside Denver, to reveal itself and by using what is there more than creating something different.
That’s where Coore is a master, having an almost mystical sense of what goes where. It is why he walks whatever property he’s working on time after time, often alone, feeling the ground, sensing the flow and seeing through forests.
Even now, as Pinehurst No. 11 comes to life, Coore continues to walk the still-rugged land daily when he is on site, checking on the work being done by the team, and he will do it again this day.