Golf wasn’t big in Augsberg, Germany, when Angela Moser was growing up. Sports was dominated by football, tennis (think Boris Becker and Steffi Graf) or Formula 1 racing (Michael Schumacher). True, Bernhard Langer was also from Augsberg, and Moser had seen him practicing, but she didn’t really grasp what he’d done (like winning the Masters in 1985, the year she was born.)
But when she was 10-years-old her parents signed her and her brother up for a three-day kids’ golf camp. Moser took to it like catnip, becoming an accomplished player in her own right. But playing led to something else, she said: “When I was 14, I had a light bulb moment during a national tournament outside of Hamburg. There was a tricky par-3 with a pin placement over water that was frustrating many players. During the round, I noticed a kicker slope on the front left that could funnel the ball toward the pin safely, avoiding the water altogether. It was a revelation to me that someone had thought through this design. It was my first conscious realization of golf course architecture.”
The die was cast. Moser took to doodling golf holes in her spare time, dreaming of creating courses that were fun, demanding and full of character.
And now she has helped create one in real time. Though Pinehurst’s new No. 10 course is a Tom Doak creation, he gives Moser plenty of credit in the conception: “Every course we work on is always a team effort. She was the captain this time.”
RELATED: Designing women
If it was a long and winding road to get Moser perched on a bulldozer in the so-called cradle of American golf, she was nothing if not determined. Once she heard about an internship offered by Doak’s firm, she began firing a series of emails to him. In 2011, he responded.
“We met in France when we were just getting started on the Grand Saint-Emilionnais course,” he says. “I told her, ‘If you’re going to work for me it’s not following me around and doing pretty drawings; it’s learning to run equipment, because that’s what I need help with.’ And she did not back down from that at all.”
Actually, running machinery and shaping holes is probably what Moser most favors. As the lead associate at Pinehurst, she had to let go of some dozer time for her supervisory role. But it’s a major leap for her, after working for Doak off and on — mostly on — for 13 years on projects in France, Scotland, Ireland, New Zealand, China, and in the U.S. in Michigan, Florida, Minnesota and then North Carolina.
“Angela was already ready to run a project from start to finish five or six years ago,” Doak says. “But I had some of the best people in the world already doing that for me and it’s hard to go away from them to let someone new have it. So she had to wait.”
Doak was committed to four other projects when Pinehurst president Tom Pashley called out of the blue, saying, “We want to build a new course and you’re the guy we want and are you available to do it?” Doak said he’d frankly love to do it, but only if it could get started quickly, as a couple of his projects had been pushed back. Pashley said, “We’ll see what we can do about that.”
Doak says, “I’ve done 40-plus golf courses and only once have I done one that started in less than a year. Pinehurst got started in seven months. That’s fast. Really fast.” Doak has also had six of his courses go under, so one of the appealing aspects of working for Pinehurst is knowing the course is going to be there forever.
Well, almost 130 years, so far, since the resort’s 1895 start. Yet if steeped in tradition, Pinehurst has stepped on the gas in recent decades, with the Bill Coore-Ben Crenshaw refreshment of the resort’s championship Donald Ross course, No. 2 in 2010; the Gil Hanse re-do of No. 4 in 2018, at the same time he and Jim Wagner did the engaging Thistle Dhu putting course and The Cradle short course in front of the main clubhouse. The Pinehurst Brewing Company is on site. And last year the USGA set up a six-acre campus on property for the relocated World Golf Hall of Fame, along with its USGA Experience.
Other than renovations, No. 10 is the first new course the resort has built since 1996, and it should only propel Pinehurst higher on a golfer’s bucket list.
There’s already talk of a No. 11 course, possibly by Coore-Crenshaw in the 900-acre Pinehurst Sandmines area — about five miles from the main resort — and the logo on the No. 10 scorecard depicts a mining wagon loaded with sand. The walking-only course opened in April, and the rave reviews were pretty immediate.
A panel of two from a late May round included Christopher Ball, visiting from London, who said the course reminded him of Prestwick. A well-traveled golfer, Mike Roth from Milwaukee, said No. 10 would immediately go into his top 10.
“We have a pretty good idea when we’re building what we’re building,” Doak says. “But you’re never really sure what people are going to fall in love with. That’s a very individual thing. But it was a beautiful site for a golf course and we had Pinehurst’s full backing. We didn’t have to worry about the budget, and they said, just build us a good golf course. So you ought to be able to do something good with that.”
So they have, the course moving through pine-bordered corridors over rumpled sandy ground with leftover mining mounds, clumps of wiregrass, wide but meandering fairways with a constant sense of unfolding drama.
“There are so many standout holes on No. 10 that it’s hard to pick just one without feeling like I’m overlooking others,” Moser says. “What I love most is the variety and balance we achieved across the course. The round starts off with an exciting blind tee shot over a crest, setting the tone for what’s to come. From there, you encounter a range of unique challenges — short, teasingly deceptive holes; long, demanding ones, and greens that require both precision and creativity.”
True enough. The short, teasingly deceptive eighth hole gets most of the attention because of a huge mound to the right of the tee, and a smaller one short left of the green.
“As we were doing the routing I was thinking ‘We’ll probably have to pull that down,’” Doak says. “But as we went on everyone in the crew was saying, That thing’s cool, we should keep it. Well, we kept working around it. One day I was walking around checking progress and met up with Mr. Dedman [Pinehurst CEO, Bob Dedman Jr.], who said, ‘Wow I like it, that’s really something.’ That was the first moment I thought, we’re going to get to keep this. And it’s a cool feature because the best line off the tee is right over the mound, which is hard to make yourself do. You don’t have to play it that way, but it really is part of the strategy.”
The course may be a little tougher than originally planned for; even from the white/green combo tees at 6,111 yards the slope is 134. The hammer comes right before the turn on number nine, and doesn’t really let up until 15, although that requires a carry over a large pond. The postcard hole is the par-3 17th, a shot over water to a tricky tiered green. According to Doak, “That pond on 17 was one of the first things we built. That’s all Angela’s shaping — no one else was there to help her yet.”
Says Moser: “Each hole offers its own distinct personality. Every blind shot, every bunker, and every contour plays a role in how you approach the course. I think what makes it special is how it presents multiple ways to tackle each hole. There’s no one ‘right’ way to play it, and that’s the beauty of it. We succeeded in creating a course that challenges players not just physically, but mentally — with lots of opportunities for risk and reward. It’s a course that reveals more of its subtleties the more you play it.”
More would be good. And there’s surely more to be heard from Moser, who in September was set to embark on a few new projects she said she had to keep under her hat for now. Might one involve a design credit? “I’m optimistic that the opportunity could arise soon — but until then, I’m keeping things under wraps.”
Pinehurst may have been the best possible proving ground. Doak was convinced. But then he had been anyway.
“Pinehurst was a huge step. I had no doubt before, but now I know Angela could go do this on her own if she wants to,” he says.