"You'll Never Play Golf Here." Pine Valley Article.

[HipCheck]

by Michael J. Fensom, NJ Star-Ledger

I thought I'd share this article from a NJ newspaper on Pine Valley. Full credit to the author: http://www.nj.com/inside-jersey/index.ssf/special_reports/youll_never_play_golf_here.html


You'll Never Play Golf Here.
by Michael J. Fensom, NJ Star-Ledger
The trains that used to shuttle between Atlantic City and Philadelphia don’t run through Clementon much anymore — merely once or twice a day during odd hours, hauling freight instead of passengers. There used to be a station called Sumner at the end of East Atlantic Avenue where folks would debark into a wild tangle of scrub pine trees, not far from Clementon Lake, dotted with squat vacation houses, and the Clementon Amusement Park with its famed Jack Rabbit rollercoaster.

Beginning in 1964, the swarms of Philadelphians who migrated each summer to Clementon and its neighboring towns along the White Horse Pike began to ebb. The new Atlantic City Expressway, which offered a more direct route to the vacation hubs along the Shore, started sapping the life out of the Route 30 pike towns, as they’re known to locals.

Today, the White Horse Pike, which splits Camden County from Philadelphia and extends east to Virginia Avenue in Atlantic City, is a rolling panorama of gritty suburbia, where you can’t haul back on a five iron without hitting a gas station, fast food joint or auto parts store. The area’s natural beauty — the western wisps of the Pine Barrens — has been supplanted by the nondescript signs of staid suburban life.

“This is a road that time forgot,” says a local resident standing at the terminus of East Atlantic Avenue. So, considering the setting, a reasonable person might not expect to find — not more than 20 paces away, over the tracks — the entrance to the most exclusive 184 acres in all of New Jersey: Pine Valley Golf Club, the world’s best golf course.

Only twice, since 1985, has Golf Digest magazine failed to rank Pine Valley as the nation’s top course. And, as rankings have expanded to include courses around the world, Pine Valley consistently ranks atop those lists, as well.

What is so special about Pine Valley?

It’s a place where the game is undiluted — a battle between man and nature played on a pristine slice of land that channels golf’s European roots. Pine Valley extends beyond geography. It is a place that lingers in the mind of every golfer who has played the course, as well as in the imagination of many who haven’t.

“The mystique of playing there is partially because of the reputation,” says Ernie Ransome, a Pine Valley member for 56 years and the club’s president from 1977 to 1988. “You get nervous and excited in anticipation a few days before. Then you go down that road, and wonder if you’re in the right place. And afterwards, most people remember every shot for days.”

Most people, that is, who either are members of the club or invited guests. Getting an invitation to play Pine Valley is about as likely as being summoned to a private dinner at the White House.

While many top courses are open to the public, such as the Old Course at St. Andrew’s, in Scotland, or Pebble Beach Golf Links, in California, Pine Valley is a private club, perpetually out of reach to non-members. There is no swimming pool, no tennis court, no banquet hall or catering facilities.

Little is known about the pathway to membership at Pine Valley, except that you can’t beg or buy your way in. You must be a strong golfer (a 20 handicap is considered the threshold) and an invitation usually comes with an unexpected phone call.
“We don’t want to be a rich man’s golf course,” says Ransome, now retired and living in South Carolina. “We want people of all kinds.”

In full swing, only about 135 golfers play the course each day. Guests must be accompanied by a member at all times. The club does not permit women to join. They may play the course, but only on Sundays as guests.

“I don’t take it personally as a female,” says Val Skinner of Bay Head, six-time winner on the LPGA Tour. “There are plenty of great courses in the U.S. and internationally that have the same rules because they are private. If you do get an invite, you go out there and dust them. That speaks volumes.”

Membership at Pine Valley is as much a mark of achievement in golf circles as a title on the PGA Tour. The club’s roughly 1,000 members understand that much of the club’s mystique is drawn from its extreme exclusivity.

The first, and in most cases insurmountable challenge at Pine Valley, is merely getting inside its gates. The public so rarely experiences the club, that stories about how it operates have become folklore, stories that are told as fact, but could just as easily be fiction.

Like the story about the time Tom Watson, a eight-time majors champion, showed up unannounced to play a round and was turned away because he didn’t have a tee time.

Asked to confirm the story, Ransome just chuckles.

The concept for Pine Valley was the singular vision of George Arthur Crump, a man with a searing passion for golf and the outdoors, two interests financial security afforded him. Crump’s family succeeded as hoteliers and architects, designing and owning properties in Philadelphia and New Jersey. Crump was a fixture at golf clubs stretching from Philadelphia to Atlantic City, a member of at least five of them, and a decorated competitor. Still, he lamented that Philadelphia golfers lacked the pedigree of those reared in New York and Chicago, where players routinely claimed the country’s top amateur competitions.

Crump sold part of his family’s property holdings, and after a trip to Europe in late 1910 to play and observe the outstanding courses of Britain and elsewhere on the Continent, he set out to purchase land on which he would begin constructing a crucible — 18 holes to test the mettle of any golfer, but particularly sharpen the skills of the area’s finest players.

The story of how Crump found the land on which the course now sits — rolling terrain of dense sandy soil, studded with low-lying cacti, oak trees, knifing bodies of water and pines shooting toward the sky — is one of ambition, determination, tragedy and, ultimately, triumph. It blurs the line, romantically for those affiliated with the club, between history and mythology.

“It was a labor of love, first and foremost,” says Ben Crenshaw, a Pine Valley member who has won 19 times on the PGA Tour and twice at the Masters.

By some accounts, Crump became smitten with the site hunting the land for quail and other small game, perhaps even as a boy. Others have heard Crump envisioned the course through the frame of a train window as it rolled to and from Atlantic City along the old Reading Railroad tracks that today hem Pine Valley’s northern boundary.

The legends dovetailed in the fall of 1912, when Crump decided upon the site, surveyed it and purchased the 184 acres on which the course sits from a local wealthy landowner named Sumner Ireland.

The scope of the project was astoundingly ambitious. Although Crump and his friends — among them A.W. Tillinghast, who would become one of America’s foremost course architects — were devoted players and students of the game, Crump had never designed a course before, let alone one with such grand aspirations. He would spend months camped out on the site in a canvas tent, trudging the land to decipher the course’s layout. Evenings were spent hunched by candlelight, configuring plans and marking maps.

With construction under way in 1913, Tillinghast, in particular, began to tout the course’s vision to subvert the definition of an American golf course. Crump solicited advice from friends in the Philadelphia golf community as well as preeminent course architects of the time, notably Harry Colt, the British architect known for his artistic touch, who exhorted the land during a visit in May 1913.

Crump paid Colt to help arrange the course, and by November 1914, newly recruited members of the club were allowed to play 11 completed holes. In Pine Valley mythology, Crump is viewed as a primary architect, but it is possible he acted more as a producer, ceding authority in executing the holes to Colt.

Then, with just four holes left to complete during the fall of 1917, problems began to set in. Crump’s ambition soon slipped into obsession as the project went from dream to nightmare. There were difficulties inducing grass to grow on fairways and greens, which frustrated Crump and drained his coffers. By spring, construction came to a halt after the United States entered World War I. Suddenly, Pine Valley was being called “Crump’s Folly.”

Ultimately, Crump’s ambition outstripped his checkbook — and his lifespan. Reportedly broke after sinking $250,000 ($3.7 million in 2012 dollars) into his beloved golf course, Crump shot himself in the head at his family’s home in Merchantville on the morning of Jan. 24, 1918.

Crump’s friends collaborated to fund and complete the final four holes in his memory, a process that concluded four years after his death.

To tee off at Pine Valley is a deeply personal experience, say those who have played some of the world’s top-rated courses.

“I’ve played over 750 courses in my life,” says Hank Gola, a New York Daily News golf writer who has played Pine Valley once. “It was one of the greatest days of my life.”

“For people who experience golf in a real way, it’s a transcendent experience,” says Tom Yellin, president of the Documentary Group, a New York production company. Yellin, a top amateur who estimates he has played 120 rounds at the course as a guest. He also has competed for more than 20 years in the club’s annual Crump Cup, an invitational tournament regarded as one of the world’s top amateur events.

“There is something virile about the experience of playing there that is profound,” he says. “It makes you appreciate hard work, a sense of privilege, the outdoors, skill, luck.”
Says Crenshaw: “It’s been a great honor in my life to be there, study and absorb the place. I could study it for a lifetime.”

As with all of the game’s great courses, golf’s cognoscenti have flocked to Camden County to play Pine Valley. Although only a handful of pro golfers are members (Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer among them), Crenshaw recalls that on the pro tour, Pine Valley is an object of desire.

Before Northern Irishman Rory McIlroy, a top-ranked world player, shot a U.S. Open record 268 at Congressional County Club in Bethesda, Md., last year, he spent an afternoon at Pine Valley, preparing his game, employing the course as Crump intended. Tiger Woods is perhaps the only member of pro golf’s elite not to have looped the course.

Those who have gained notoriety in fields outside of golf also have been captivated by the club’s charm. Celebrities and athletes, from Babe Ruth to Bob Hope to Michael Jordan, have sunk their tee into the Pine Valley turf.

Former President George H.W. Bush is a member, as is former Vice President Dan Quayle. Those who grew up around the course, along East Atlantic Avenue, recall how in the 1960s Bing Crosby would head up the road to the club in his limousine.

But whether a dignitary or a duffer on a day trip, a central tenet of Pine Valley is that once past the guard house entrance, everyone is treated as an equal. Privilege does not derive from wealth or fame achieved outside the grounds. Rather, everyone is privileged because they get to indulge in the world’s purest golfing experience.

As one Pine Valley official says: “The course is always the first star.”

That person asked not to be identified by name because “Pine Valley is not about one individual. The motto among the staff is to create the greatest golf experience anywhere. Nowhere is more welcoming.”

Just past the yellow daffodils and rhododendron lining the entrance to Pine Valley Golf Club sits Steininger Hall, a modest one-story white building with green shutters that serves as headquarters for the borough and its police.

The borough of Pine Valley, just under one square mile of pine forest and golf course established in April 1929, features 23 houses, three of which are owned by the club. There are 12 year-round adult residents and one high-school student younger than 18, according to the 2010 Census. Only Tavistock, another country-club town near Haddonfield, has fewer residents.

According to the club charter, the proprietor of each home in the borough must be a member of Pine Valley, and the houses, built on land leased from the club, are sold back to the club should the owner decide to leave.

Four full-time and two part-time officers share Pine Valley’s lone police car, usually parked out back. And a board of three commissioners, including the mayor, run the borough.

“Our government is the same as any local municipality,” says deputy clerk Bob Mather, who has worked for the borough or club since 1969. But, he adds, “Pine Valley’s government and club are hand and glove.”

Another aspect of the borough that isn’t the same as other towns is its otherworldly vibe.
“There is a sense of being transported from the real world,” Yellin says. “You drive down a goofy road, cross the tracks and you’re there in Shangri-La. There is a sense of otherness, which is what other clubs try to attain.”

While Pine Valley’s “otherness” obviously derives from the course, it also has to do with its relentless adherence to absolute secrecy.

Asked to define the typical Pine Valley member, Ransome describes a man not unlike Crump.

“He loves the game of golf, he is not a smart-a**, he respects the club and he guards the course like it was his baby.”

Members are selected by the admissions committee, the only committee and decision-making body other than the board of trustees and club president. It is a system that has kept Crump’s vision for the club intact and produced startlingly little controversy.

The president, currently James Davis, who owns a home in the borough, is charged with overseeing improvements to the club and executing them in accord with Crump’s original outlay. For example, when some tee boxes needed to be moved to compensate for high-tech clubs that could diminish the challenge of play, officials consulted notes taken during the original construction of the course to preserve the strategic intention of each hole.

And when an unsettling moment does arise, it is up to the president to find a solution.
“Once during my tenure,” Ransom recalls, “a member wanted to bring a politician as a guest and a number of other members did not care for the guy and expressed their opinion. I said to the member: ‘You can bring him, but if he takes one mulligan on the fairways, you’re out’ (as a member). Later that week, the member called in to say his guest couldn’t make it.”

When asked about the club, most members will say they’re proud to be affiliated with Pine Valley. But they will offer little other information about a club that shuns all publicity.
Pine Valley has never staged a professional golf event and it never will. It’s about staying true to Crump’s committment to amateur golf, which during the turn of the 20th Century was considered more honorable than professional golf.

The Walker Cup, a match play tournament pitting top amateurs from America against counterparts from Great Britain and Ireland, has been held at Pine Valley twice, in 1936 and 1985.

And the final day of the Crump Cup, usually a Sunday in late September, is the only day the public is permitted on the course. Crowds often swell to 5,000, mostly for the opportunity to get a rare glimpse of the famed Pine Valley.

Sitting at the 5-foot-long conference table in the borough hall on a sunny afternoon in March, Mather looks through the window panes at the club’s entrance, where daffodils have sprouted.

It’s silent outside except for the twittering of birds and the occasional hum of a golf cart motoring along the first fairway, which runs behind the building. Even though the course has been open all winter, the grounds crew is fluttering around like hummingbirds, preparing the course for another spring and summer.

“When you see how things are done, you see that you have to handle yourself right,” Mather says. “People come here, and because of what the place is, they want to be part of it. So, they go along with the standard of what the club is. It’s all golf.”

Mather, who lives in Pine Hill, grew up on Erial Road, not more than a mile from the club. The conversation floats beyond the gates, to the changes, many for the worse, that have come to the surrounding area.

“Things change,” he says with a shrug. “That’s the way the world is.” He pauses. “Except here.”

[sharkiesj]

Nice read. Thanks for sharing.

Of course, you could have been Jack Nicklaus, who, the day after winning the US Amateur, drove up to the gate at Pine Valley and said, "My name is Jack Nicklaus, I just won the US Amatuer and I'd love to play your course.

Minutes later the gate opened and he was allowed in and played his first round of golf at Pine Valley.

[Llortamaisey]

With a 1,000 members, a huge amateur tournament, and up to 135 rounds a day, maybe the article should have been titled 'You might not play here'.

An even funnier title is 'Tiger could care less about playing here'. Hahaha.

[Chilidog]

Played there 12 times. It is nice but not worth the ranking in my opinion. Like Whistling, Ocean Course, Merion and Bandon Courses a lot better.