Donald Ross - Revered, Respected, Remarkable across North Carolina

By: Dave Droschak

Who has the most bronze statues or busts in the Tar Heel State? Not Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson or James Polk - all presidents from North Carolina. Not famous sports stars Michael Jordan or Dale Earnhardt. Not evangelist Billy Graham or actor Andy Griffith.

Give up?

How about Donald Ross, the diminutive Scottish-born golf course architect who constructed - most with mules followed by drag pans - more than 40 of his 400 or so layouts across North Carolina.

Heck, Ross has two statues within a five-minute walk of each other in Pinehurst - one overlooking his famous work at Pinehurst Resort's No. 2 course and another peering down a sightline of a brick sidewalk in the Village of Pinehurst.

There is also a bronze bust of Ross at Sedgefield Country Club in Greensboro, the home of the Wyndham Championship, and another in front of the golf shop at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville … and on and on and on.

The fascination with Ross in North Carolina as some sort of "folk hero," especially in the golf industry, is truly remarkable and has lasted now for more than 65 years. Say "we're a Donald Ross course" and instant credibility is bestowed upon your green pastures.

So, I guess it was fitting that the 25th anniversary gathering of the Donald Ross Society was held in early November 2014 at Pinehurst. The society was formed to help secure the legacy of Ross, and to protect his most prized possessions - his golf courses - from architects who want to "trump up" his layouts with ill-conceived hazards and new greens complexes.

The most dangerous people to the hierarchy of the Donald Ross Society are club presidents with 23 handicaps who don't quite understand, or for that matter, take the time to comprehend the intent of Ross or his work at their particular course.

"The society was created on the basis of 'let's put a couple of ads in some golf magazines and tell people for $100 we would send them a bag tag and that we would go out and restore all the Donald Ross courses,' " laughed Michael Fay, one of the four "founding fathers" of the Donald Ross Society. "Of course, we had no idea what we were doing. But we got up to speed pretty quick.

"There were quite a number of his courses that were being tinkered with by numerous architects," Fay said of the Ross legacy. "The guys that really got it, that really understood it, were easy to pick out because you would go and see their work and it was nice."

Over time, Fay estimates that the Ross Society has been involved in 150 to 160 restorations … and counting.

"We were never the main force behind them, just the guys that gave clubs or architects as much background as we could find on a golf course, plans, correspondence or whatever," Fay said. "We kind of work with the architects, saying we want to see this restored, not something altered. The whole premise is if you have a 6,300-yard golf course and no additional land what would you rather have: a Donald Ross golf course or a Donald Ross/Jim Smith golf course? And it struck a note. There were a lot of people who jumped on board right away."

Once with a paying dues membership of around 750, that number has dipped to 400, with some members "aging out." Fay, himself now 65, was just 40 years old when his "nerve was struck" at his home club of Wampanoag in West Hartford, Conn.

"Unfortunately, in the late-1980s my club hired someone to come in and work on our Ross golf course and he butchered it, completely messed up five holes, wrecked a couple of greens, and never took any responsibility for what he did," Fay said. "That's water under the bridge; that was 30 years ago. There isn't much you can do about it now, but we wanted to prevent that from happening over again."

So the Donald Ross Society was born.

There were some ill feelings at first from the American Society of Golf Course Architects as the Ross Society hand-picked architects they wanted to team up with to restore Ross layouts.

"We kind of sidestepped the issue and told them we had an agenda and our agenda is something a lot of people are signing on to," Fay said.

Kris Spence, a Greensboro, N.C.-based architect is one on the "approved" list, and has worked on the restorations of Grove Park Inn, Sedgefield and Mimosa Hills in Morganton, N.C.

"It is really brilliant the way Ross routed the golf course at Grove Park to fit it on that property, which is only 82 acres," Spence said. "It is one of those golf courses that dangle a feeling that you can just shoot lights out and you just never seem to get there. You can have a great round, strike the ball well and you don't score as well as you should. Ross was extremely good at dangling that carrot out there in front of you."

North Carolina is basically paradise for Ross lovers, with 46 courses from Wilmington to the western North Carolina town of Highlands, and everywhere in between.

"I have played 43 or 44 of them, and many still have the Ross flavor," Fay said. "A few have been reworked by guys who didn't know what they were doing and they have kind of ruined them, but I would say 40 or so of them have been restored the way they should have been and they are a lot of fun to play. People like them. It's just that simple. Why change something that is working."

Golf-memorabilia collector Robert Hansen - with some of his remarkable items dating to the 1650s - moved to Pinehurst in 2001 and stumbled across an opportunity that wasn't planned. A gentleman living along the third fairway at Pinehurst No. 2 suffered a stroke and was not going to be staying in the area. Hansen asked his real estate agent to introduce the two since Hansen was looking for a home. It just so happened to be Ross's home, built in 1925.

It is from that piece of property that Ross would constantly massage No. 2, actually working on the layout for an estimated 45 years until his passing in 1948.

So, Hansen wakes up every morning in Ross's home. How cool is that for a golf lover?

"We really marvel at just how enjoyable it is to live in the shapes and the rooms that Ross created," Hansen said.

The five-bedroom, 5½-bath house remains as much a piece of history as Ross's courses.

"The walls on the inside have a very, very unusual plastering method that you see in Scotland with families who could not afford master plasterers," Hansen said. "The walls have a series of what almost look like divots because the lower-price plasterers could do these walls quicker and not have to shape them out perfectly smooth. There is a view of the golf course from the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, the library, and two upstairs bedrooms, including his master bedroom."

Ross grew up in a caste system in Scotland, and served his apprenticeship under Old Tom Morris.

"Ross's personal life philosophy was rather seen in most of his golf courses," Hansen said. "Donald Ross believed because of the way he was raised in Scotland - socially and culturally - that you get up in the morning and you go down the middle of the road and you don't ask for too much. So his golf courses reflect this destination-driven style of play, where you eyeball up where your first move is going to be, get yourself there and then from that point you strategically pick the best way to get to the next destination and complete your travel."

Most of the Ross courses built prior to World War II did not have water hazards, and disaster awaited any golfer who hit an approach shot over the green. He also got to places like Minnesota and Illinois to build golf courses in the early 1900s - a remarkable feat in itself during those times. Fay likes to note that if there are not old train tracks near your course, it's not a Ross design since he mostly traveled by train.

"He laid out his golf courses like he saw life," Hansen added. "When you are raised in a caste system you really are raised with a certain level of instinctive limitations. Ross basically always believed there were certain limitations, and how you got through life was by not offending yourself and not offending others, and moving yourself along in the best possible way, yet not afraid to attack a target when it was appropriate.

"He built his golf courses in the same sort of manner. If you look at his golf courses they all ask you to hit it in the best side of the fairway, so that you can approach the next shot - and if you don't have great skill you don't attack a corner of the pin, you attack the middle of the green so that you then leave yourself an opportunity."

The translation is all levels of golfers can play Ross layouts. They don't look intimidating to the high handicapper, yet challenge the hell out of scratch players.

"His courses have always been user-friendly; they were pretty to look at, yet very strategic," Fay noted. "And you could play the same course five days in a row and you would never play the same course. People really fell in love with the architecture more than anything else. And I don't think anybody built any better greens overall than Ross. No flat spots, there is a lot of movement all the time, but nothing unfair. You can always get from point A to point B, but you have to have some talent."

While Fay is now a senior citizen, there is hope on the horizon for those who cherish the Ross designs and want to keep them historically relevant. Kyle Franz, an architect in his early 30s who built the Pinehurst No. 2 bunkers for Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw for their remodel before the 2014 men's and women's U.S. Opens, and subsequently restored Mid Pines Resort down the road in Southern Pines, has become a quick study of the Ross style. Franz, during No. 2's downtime, shifted through countless drawings of Ross at the Tufts Archives in the Village of Pinehurst.

"Kyle became a very big student of Ross in a very short period of time," Fay said. "A guy like Franz is the kind of guy who is going to keep the Ross spirit alive. But there are other architects who have done fabulous jobs with Ross restorations, looking at the original plans or photographs and putting it back to where it was. And there are others out there that take the attitude that I know more about it than Ross did. Well, Ross has 23 of the 100 spots in the (best) classical golf courses for Golfweek magazine and some of these other guys are nowhere to be seen.

"But it really doesn't lie in the hand of the architects; it lies in the hands of the people who are members of the clubs. I told every club that I've worked with that we're going to put their course in a position that the only thing they're going to have to do over the next 25 years is cut the grass. That has been pretty much true.

"Is there a more perfect 6,300-yard golf course than Mimosa Hills? I mean, come on."

Is there a more perfect North Carolina architect that Donald Ross?

David Droschak has covered golf in the Carolinas for three decades, mostly with The Associated Press, where he worked for 20 years as AP sports editor in North Carolina prior to launching Droschak Communications, a full-service marketing and PR firm based in Apex, N.C.

Dave, 53, has covered numerous major golf tournaments, including the 1999 and 2005 U.S. Opens at Pinehurst Resort, and is a longtime member of the Golf Writers Association of America. Dave will represent Cybergolf to provide coverage of the historic back-to-back 2014 U.S. Men's and Women's Opens at Pinehurst No. 2 in North Carolina's Sandhills.

Dave was honored with the Sports Writer of the Year award in North Carolina in 2005, and is currently editor of Triangle Golf Today (www.trianglegolf.com), a print and online publication regarded as the "No. 1 Source for Golf News in North Carolina." He is also golf editor for Pinehurst Magazine, an award-winning glossy publication.

Dave grew up in Penn Hills, Pa., about five minutes from famed Oakmont Country Club and was introduced to the game of golf as a caddie at Green Oaks Country Club in nearby Verona, Pa. Dave was the co-captain of the 1978 Penn Hills state championship baseball team, was a pitcher for the 1982 Atlantic Coast Conference champion University of North Carolina Tar Heels, and pitched professionally for two years in the St. Louis Cardinals organization. He is a member of the Penn Hills High School Sports Hall of Fame, which also includes NBA coach George Karl and former four-time Pro Bowl offensive lineman Bill Fralic.

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