LADIES OF THE LINKS
From June 2 to 5, women golfers will take over the fairways at Pine Needles Lodge & Golf Club in Southern Pines, N.C., for the 77th U.S. Women’s Open. The course was designed by the revered Donald Ross, who started as greenskeeper at the birthplace of the modern game, Scotland’s St. Andrews, and created more than 400 golf courses by the time he died in 1948. It’s just 8.6 kilometres from another storied Ross creation, Pinehurst No. 2, which opened in 1907. The golf-course architect – who lived in a cottage near the third hole – called it the fairest test of championship golf he had ever designed. The true champion of his 7,000-yard (6.5-kilometre) Pine Needles course, which opened in 1928, was LPGA charter member and golf instructor Peggy Kirk Bell. A staunch defender of a woman’s right to tee off, Bell died in 2016, but her family still owns the property she and her husband, Warren Bell, bought in 1954. pineneedleslodge.com