Funky Fortnight

By Bill Fields June 15, 2009

The USGA will make history when it plays the men's and women's U.S. Opens in consecutive weeks on the historic No. 2 course at Pinehurst (N.C.) Resort and Country Club in 2014. Such a double scoop of major championships is unprecedented, but it isn't the first time this mecca of American golf has been home to two straight weeks of top-level professional action.

But the previous two occasions weren't without their oddities, to say the least.

Pinehurst's North & South Open was a de facto major championship during the first half of the 20th century, a prestigious event that was won by players such as Walter Hagen, Macdonald Smith, Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan, Sam Snead and Cary Middlecoff. As time went on, Pinehurst president Richard Tufts, whose real love was amateur golf, didn't appreciate the game's growing commercialism. He also didn't like it when the PGA began to stipulate a minimum purse size of $10,000.

In 1951, Tufts' philosophy and golf's change of direction were on a collision course. The Ryder Cup matches were played for the first time at Pinehurst No. 2 on Nov. 2-4, with the North & South Open scheduled for the following week. The United States, led by a stellar performance by Jimmy Demaret, scored a comfortable victory over Great Britain.

The next week, though, Demaret, Hogan, Jack Burke Jr. and Lloyd Mangrum -- disgruntled about Pinehurst's ambivalence toward the pro game and the substandard prize winnings on offer -- didn't stay in town for the North & South. Sam Snead withdrew after the first round. Tommy Bolt registered a three-stroke victory over John Barnum, but Tufts had had enough of the pros.

Professional golf didn't return to the Sandhills area until 1971, for a brief, two-year run of the U.S. Professional Match Play Championship at the Country Club of North Carolina (Dewitt Weaver won the first playing, Jack Nicklaus the second).

The Tufts family had sold the resort to Diamondhead Corporation by 1973, when the new owners, who were also busy selling as many condos as they could, decided to make a splash by holding the world's first $500,000 tournament. To play for that bountiful a purse, including the $100,000 winner's check, there was a catch: The 1973 World Open would be 144 holes, conducted over two weeks in November -- six rounds on No. 2 course, two rounds on No. 4 course, recently remodeled by Robert Trent Jones.

Jack Nicklaus, Johnny Miller, Lee Trevino and Tom Weiskopf took a pass. Weiskopf cited an elk hunt, Miller the flu. Once the tournament began, a whopping 41 players withdrew at one juncture or another. "We tried to do something different and worthwhile for golf, and nobody cared," Diamondhead president Bill Maurer told Sports Illustrated. "I'll argue with anybody who says we did it strictly to sell land."

People might not have joked about it being "The End of World Open" if not for the second curveball, the weather. Golfers have always flocked to Pinehurst in the fall, but it but it isn't immune to a cold snap and 1973 was one of those years. During the first four rounds -- particularly an icy third round when starting times were delayed because an icy frost -- turtlenecks were the rule on No. 2's turtleback greens, which also created a lot of conversation because they were thin and bumpy.

"Players bundled up in the freezing temperatures," Dick Taylor wrote in Golf World, "and [Jim] Jamieson looked like a green sundae with a moldy maraschino on top, which was his toboggan cap."