Gentle Ben On How Pinehurst Is Going To Play

Mark Williams interviews Ben Crenshaw about the Pinehurst restoration work he was apart of and which wil dominate the discussion at the U.S. Open(s).

Ben, waxing...

Charlie Price, the great writer, he’d say Pinehurst in his day was fairways, and the fairways were oases within sandy country. The wispy rye grass, pine needles and sand, the little tufts of ground, that’s what Pinehurst was.

It will be pot luck out (off the fairways). You can have a recoverable lie, or you can get a poor lie and have to chip out. It's all natural, though.

It will probably make you try a lot of shots that you wouldn’t have been able to. If you can put the club on the ball, you can try a lot of things. I think that’s going to be exciting for a lot of people and obviously different for a U.S. Open. I think that’s especially exciting because people who know Pinehurst and have played it forever know it’s one of the great second-shot golf courses in the world. How you maneuver your ball up onto those greens is a lot of playing Pinehurst, knowing when to try to get a ball a little bit closer and when to play away from a flagstick.

I’ll be offering some observations after an early glimpse of the course Monday morning on both Morning Drive around 8:45 am and Golf Channel’s Live From coverage in the 2-3 pm ET coverage. And of course, Twitter and GolfDigest.com's The Loop.