'Every Hole At'
An exclusive drone tour of Pinehurst #10 reveals how the new course takes the resort to the next level
Time doesn’t seem to move much in Pinehurst. That timelessness and sense of permanence make visiting feel like a homecoming and an experience that can be passed down through generations of golfers. At Pinehurst you can dine and drink in the same establishments where the country’s early titans of industry closed down each evening and play where every great from Walter Hagen to Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods have played.
That doesn’t mean Pinehurst rests on its laurels. Over the past 15 years the resort has been in a constant state of improvement and expansion. It acquired the #9 course and built the wildly popular Cradle short course and Thistle Du putting course. It completed historic renovations of the venerable #2 course, ranked 29th on America’s 100 Greatest Courses list, as well as the #3 and #8 courses, and completely transformed the No. 4 course (ranked #171). It also constructed the new home for the World Golf Hall of Fame and hosted three U.S. Opens.
But the debut of the new #10 course in the spring of 2024, just ahead of the U.S. Open, hits different.
Pinehurst #10 gives the resort a course that’s cut from the same cloth as “newcomers” (almost every course is a newcomer relative to a Pinehurst timeline that dates to the late 1890s) like Bandon Dunes, Sand Valley and Streamsong. Designed by Tom Doak, #10 is big, rugged and sprawling. It looks like it was simply ripped open and revealed from the pine barrens where it’s built, the bunkers and caverns gouged from the earth with fescues and wild grasses blending the course into the surrounding sandscapes. Though its footprint is similar in size to courses like Pinehurst #8, #10 feels vaster, its broad fairways roaming a seemingly endless parcel of land with no competing development.
The 900-acre parcel on which the course sits is not endless, but it gives the resort the room to continue down the same path as Pinehurst #10, a design that represents a new, forward-looking direction for the resort (a #11 course, to be located next to #10, is rumored to be in the planning stages, with Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw the architects). When all is said and done, Pinehurst will continue to do what it has always done: move forward by continuing to build on a timeless legacy.
Watch the video below for an up-close, hole-by-hole look at Pinehurst #10: