Sam’s Playground — RANDOM WALKS

Author’s Note: Now that my “Good Walks” book is out and available in bookstores and on-line from UNC Press, I’m tweaking this blog to offer (hopefully) more frequent posts built around short shots on things that interest me in golf—courses, architecture, practice, style and accessories.

The names Ross and Raynor, MacKenzie and Maxwell roll off the tongues of golf design wonks in the Carolinas with ease and abundance. Not so common are the names Wayne Stiles and John Van Kleek.

Both were landscape architects from the early 1900s who formed a golf course design partnership in 1924, Stiles focusing on courses in his native Massachusetts and New England and Van Kleek operating from an office in St. Petersburg, Florida. Stiles and a prominent Greensboro lawyer, developer and state senator named Alfred M. Scales got together when Scales conceived a residential community four miles west of downtown.

Architect Geoffrey Cornish observed that Stiles often spent “weeks and weeks” walking the grounds to “lay out the course with his eyes. He was a master at routing a golf course.” Stiles’ Greensboro course originally opened in 1930 as Hamilton Lakes Country Club, but Scales lost his dream and the property during The Depression.

History abounds in the hallways at Starmount Forest, including these shots of Sam Snead and Ben Hogan from the mid-1900s.

Eventually the golf course came into the hands of Edward Benjamin, who renamed it Starmount Forest and welcomed the PGA Tour in 1938 with the inaugural rendition of the Greater Greensboro Open. Starmount and Sedgefield Country Club were co-venues through 1960, and Sam Snead thrived at Starmount and Sedgefield in winning eight GGOs. Starmount was also the venue in 1947 for the second U.S. Women’s Open.

Over the years, the course has undergone upfitting and tweaking from architects George Cobb and Lester George. The par-71 course stretches 6,725 yards from the black tees and 6,258 from the whites. Twenty-four hours after a recent visit, the holes rolled back into my memory bank easily, a good testament to their variety and distinctiveness. Left-to-right, right-to-left. Uphill and downhill. It’s compact and an excellent walk, though quite hilly on the back nine.

“This course is all about angles, it’s a shot-maker’s course,” says Starmount member and noted golf author Jim Dodson. “That’s why Snead was so good here. It fit his eye. He had a lot of fun here.”

The entry drive to the club is named Sam Snead Drive, and the hallway outside the golf shop is adorned with framed sports section pages from GGO days and photos of Snead, Ben Hogan and other mid-1900s PGA Tour luminaries.

Sedgefield four miles to the southwest gets the limelight during the PGA Tour’s annual visit to Greensboro, but Starmount Forest quietly basks in its own historical glow ninety-one years after opening.