By Alex Podlogar
Special to The Pilot
Phil Lockwood planned the trip. Every summer, a subset of his friends gather for a small golf trip.
From Palisades, New York, Lockwood typically plans those trips to center around the Northeast. But Lockwood turned 40 in April, and he wanted to go big. So he booked Pinehurst Resort.
“I had to build a waiting list for guys,” Lockwood says. “Everybody wanted to come to Pinehurst.”
One of them was Anthony Mussari, a friend who lives in Hickory. Mussari made the buddy cut, and on this trip, he found he was facing rounds not only on historic Pinehurst No. 2, but also No. 10, No. 9 and The Cradle.
And, a day after it reopened following a three-month project to restore its greens, Pinehurst No. 4.
No. 4 reopened on Aug. 7, 80 days after the course closed on May 19. The decision to close Gil Hanse’s redesign of No. 4 for much of the summer was necessary when the greens did not respond to the warmer spring temperatures.
“When we looked in the spring of 2025 and realized they weren’t going to be able to come back, we made the hard decision to close the golf course and redo the greens to make sure we would get the proper playing conditions that our guests and members deserve,” said Matt Barksdale, Pinehurst Resort’s vice president of golf.
Instead of skimming off a top layer of grass and reseeding the new greens with sprigs of bermudagrass — the typical way to build greens in this region — Pinehurst, with the assistance of LaBar Golf Renovations, went deeper.
“It wasn’t just ripping up the grass and putting grass back down,” Barksdale explains. “We went down to the base layer. We updated all the drainage on all the greens. We put a gravel layer in, a sand layer in, plus the mix layer in, then on top of that made sure that Gil signed off on all the contours of the greens.”
Restoration of No. 4’s greens was meticulous and designed to have the new greens play as matured, 2-year-old greens.
“The first step of the process was to laser record the greens’ elevations with scans,” says Bob Farren, Pinehurst Resort’s director of golf course maintenance. “The bottom of the green is an exact replica of the top surface. So you build it up in layers. It’s like building a cake, to replicate the final surface of it with the final laser scan.”
Instead of sprigging the grass and waiting eight weeks for it to grow in, Pinehurst put down sod for the greens’ top, playing layer.
“The greens are more receptive than what they would have been had they been grassed with sprigs versus sod,” Farren says. “The greens are essentially 2 or 3 years old now, versus growing in greens like we did with Course No. 8.
“Once the sod’s laid, on the next day or the next week, then you start managing it like you would any other green. Because, well, it is like any other green.”
That, though, would be left up to the players to decide.
“Those greens, you would never know they were like, fresh,” Lockwood says, reflecting on his trip as he drove to RDU. “You would not know it was closed.”
