In This Part of North Carolina It Isn’t Called Pasture Pool Anymore : <i> Golf was born in Scotland and lives in Pinehurst. </i> --Laurie Auchterlonie, former St. Andrews, Scotland, professional

Down here in the Sandhills region of North Carolina, far from places where city folk live and work, they call this rural community the golf capital of the world. That sounds pretentious, but on second thought, it might be correct.

Pinehurst, which has a population of 3,421, has 10 full-size golf courses--or one for every 341 citizens. Contrast that with Los Angeles, a city of 3.1 million, which has 16 courses--or one for every 193,750 residents.

Here, six of them are part of the same golf resort, and all are within walking distance of the Pinehurst Hotel. In Los Angeles, it’s 30 miles between, say, Hansen Dam and Western Avenue or Bel-Air.

As long ago as 1919, when Pinehurst No. 4 was opened, it was the first resort in the world to offer its patrons 72 different holes. Today, with Pinehurst No. 6 in play, it is the largest complex of its kind. A seventh course is under construction, and three more are scheduled by 1990.

The only thing close to it is Bethpage State Park in New York, a five-course public complex on Long Island, about 35 miles east of downtown Manhattan.

Pinehurst is 35 miles from nowhere, unless you count Southern Pines, pop. 6,000; Aberdeen, pop. 1,600; Carthage, pop. 1,050, or Laurinburg, pop. 8,900. The nearest major airports are in Fayetteville, 40 miles away; Raleigh, 80 miles away, and Charlotte, 125 miles distant.

Why Pinehurst?

It started about 1895, when James W. Tufts, a Boston philanthropist who was president of the American Soda Fountain Co., wanted to escape the harsh New England winters and, in those days before automobiles and airplanes, considered Florida too far away.

Riding in a carriage through central North Carolina, he came across 5,000 acres of sandy wasteland, a once-flourishing forest where the pines had been harvested for lumber or left to die after being slashed for turpentine. When Tufts paid about $1 an acre for the whole thing, the locals laughed at his extravagance.

But he brought in Frederick Law Olmsted, the man who had designed New York’s Central Park, to landscape the barren land and create a New England-type village. It was called Tuftown at first, but later the name was changed to Pinehurst, after Tufts had had 225,000 trees planted.

Golf was the newest craze among the wealthy in America before the turn of the century. The first course of six holes was built in 1886 at Yonkers, N.Y., and, once introduced, the game spread rapidly. When Tufts’ friends came South for the holidays, they wanted a course.

Tufts asked a golfing friend, Dr. D. LeRoy Culver of New York, to lay out nine holes. It had sand greens, barren fairways and was only 2,561 yards long. It was the epitome of what the not-so-rich called golf in those days, pasture pool.

In the summer of 1900, the most significant event in Pinehurst’s long history occurred when Tufts hired a young Scottish professional, Donald J. Ross, to direct operations.

Clubs and balls were imported from England and Scotland to fill needs of the golf-hungry Americans, and soon there was an invasion of Scottish golf pros. Ross, who had studied under Old Tom Morris at St. Andrews, had come in 1898 to be head pro at the Oakley Country Club in Boston, where he met Tufts. Ross worked at Pinehurst during winters for a couple of years, then moved there permanently in 1900.

His first task was to rebuild the lackluster nine holes and add another nine. That led to his becoming the country’s first full-time golf course architect. Although Ross remained at Pinehurst until his death in 1948, he designed and built more than 400 courses, the best of which is Pinehurst No. 2. It’s on everyone’s list of the top 10 courses in the country.

Ross also designed Seminole in North Palm Beach, Fla.; Oak Hill in Rochester, N.Y.; Inverness in Toledo, Ohio; Oakland Hills in Birmingham, Mich., and Scioto in Columbus, Ohio, all among America’s best.

Ross also built the first driving range in America, a piece of grazing land that became known as Maniac Hill because no one before had ever heard of anyone hitting golf balls to an open field without playing a hole.

After completing the No. 1 course, which today measures 6,158 yards and is a favorite among the women of Pinehurst, Ross set about to built second, third and fourth courses.

At first, all were nine holes, with sand greens, but through the years he built a hole here and a hole there, interchanging the courses until the 1930s when grass greens began to replace sand. Pinehurst was one of the last to make the switch because the sand greens designed by Ross and maintained by Frank Maples were considered more playable than the newfangled grass putting surfaces.

It wasn’t until 1935 that No. 2 was completed as it plays today, although Ross never really considered a course completed. Until his death, he was changing the shape and position of bunkers, putting a new mound in a strategic place or planting another tree.

The course is deceptive. It has wide-open fairways, their corridors easily defined by tall stands of cedar, long-leaf pine, oak, maple and flowering dogwood. The deception starts about 50 yards from the greens where golfers run into Ross’ trademark--raised putting surfaces with undulating approaches, usually including only a single bunker, strategically positioned. It has a reputation as the most difficult chipping course in the country.

“Most players, even the pros, call Pinehurst No. 2 one of the toughest in the world from within 50 yards of the green,” said club professional Mike Sanders.

What they usually face is a narrowing of the fairway as it approaches small, sloping greens, deep bunkers, loose sandy soil and a rough dotted with a grass as frightening as its name--eragrostis carunta. The natives call it love grass, which is not a term of endearment. Love grass looks like clumps of bamboo knotted together, stuck haphazardly into soft sand, defying anyone to hit a golf ball.

Arnold Palmer, who went to college at nearby Wake Forest, played most of his amateur golf at Pinehurst, battling such players as Frank Stranahan, Harvie Ward and Billy Joe Patton in the North and South Amateur, one of the oldest tournaments in the country.

“I have always liked Donald Ross courses, and Pinehurst No. 2 may be his monument,” Palmer wrote in his book, “Arnold Palmer’s Best 54 Golf Holes,” in which the 440-yard fifth hole is included. “The first time you go around it, the subtleties may be concealed, yet the more you play the course, the more you realize the demand for placement and position, as well as length. There are many great holes there but, to me, the fifth could be the best par-four of its kind.”

The fifth--the course’s No. 1 handicap hole--calls for a blind tee shot to a fairway sloping to the left. The second shot requires a middle-to-long iron to a green bunkered both left and right. A curving green tucked in among crab apple trees can make for extremely difficult pin positions.

The fourth hole is the most picturesque. A 547-yard par-5, it calls for a big tee shot from a slightly elevated tee box into a valley-like fairway. If a drive hooks left, it lands in a Sahara of love grass. From the valley, the view toward the green--through a filter of long-leaf pines--one can see the outline of the World Golf Hall of Fame, a great white structure housing memorabilia and tributes to the greats of the game.

“The first time I played the fourth hole and my playing companion told me what I was looking at, I got shivers all over,” said Michael Jick, a young professional from Sacramento who is an assistant to Sullivan. “To think I was playing so close to all that history, and was playing on a course where every great golfer from Harry Vardon to Bobby Jones to Snead and Hogan and Palmer and Nicklaus had played, I was almost overcome. I still get a chill every time I play the fourth hole and look down the fairway toward that building.”

Vardon was the first famous player to test Pinehurst. Already a three-time British Open winner, Vardon played No. 1 in 1900 on a historic tour of the United States, during which he also won the U. S. Open. After shooting a 71 at Pinehurst, Vardon proclaimed it a fine test, which did much toward popularizing the hideaway course.

Sam Snead, who has played golf just about everywhere it is played during 50 years as a professional, is another Pinehurst enthusiast. “My No. 1 course anywhere,” Snead calls No. 2.

Surprisingly, despite its reputation, Pinehurst has not been the site of many major tournaments. A year after No. 2 was completed, the 1936 national PGA was played there. Denny Shute defeated Johnny Thompson in a match that showcased the problems on No. 2’s final 50 yards.

Outdriven by as much as 60 yards on most holes, Shute found the green with his long irons, whereas the long-hitting Thompson, when he missed a green, could not cope with the delicate chipping and putting needed.

Labron Harris defeated Downing Gray in the 1962 U. S. Amateur here, and the 1951 Ryder Cup was played here. For years, in addition to the North and South Amateur, which has been played continuously since 1901, the North and South Open was a fixture until it was terminated in 1951.

In 1940, Ben Hogan won his first tournament here as a pro, and the North and South Women’s Amateur has the likes of Babe Zaharias (1947), Hollis Stacy (1970) and Jane Bastanchury Booth (1972) on its victory scroll.

Not long after Ross’ death, when interest in golf soared during the 50s--caused by the grass-roots popularity of Arnie’s Army, a golfing President Eisenhower and TV golf--it brought a demand for more courses from guests of Tufts’ Carolina Inn, now the Pinehurst Hotel. Ellis Maples, son of Pinehurst’s original groundskeeper, completed No. 5 in 1961, and Tom and George Fazio designed No. 6, a championship course built to be the equal of No. 2 in 1979.

No. 6 is 7,098 yards and carries a 74.5 rating, one shot more difficult than No. 2. The 10th hole is the most demanding--522 yards of tree-lined fairway that narrows into a landing area of only 18 yards for a second shot. It’s called the Throat of Hell.

Robert Trent Jones was hired in 1973 to lengthen and toughen No. 4, making it into a 6,890-yard test that was used for the World Open. Jones also modified No. 5, creating what is probably the most pictured hole in the 108-hole complex--the 15th. Called the Cathedral Hole, it is 175 yards over water from an elevated tee to a green surrounded by an amphitheater of towering pines.

Pinehurst No. 7, designed by Rees Jones, is scheduled for completion in the fall of 1985. It will be 7,100 yards, with the first hole adjacent to the World Golf Hall of Fame.

Ross’ influence extended to California when Lawrence Hughes, one of his Pinehurst proteges, turned wastelands into beautiful courses such as the Thunderbird and Eldorado--Dwight Eisenhower’s favorite course--in Palm Springs, and the Desert Inn in Las Vegas.

Unlike New York’s Bethpage State Park public course complex, all of Pinehurst’s courses are private--open to its 6,000 members--2,000 of whom live within 50 miles--and guests of the Pinehurst Hotel, the White House of Golf.

The hotel actively recruits large groups from all over the world. It has a full-sized promotional brochure printed in Japanese, and a resort guide is printed in English, French, German, Spanish and Japanese. During the height of the season, all six courses are busy from dawn to dusk, and it is not unusual for golfers to play as many as 1,500 rounds a day. The golf shop did more than $1 million in sales last year, and the fleet of 400 carts is one of the largest in the world.

Attesting to its popularity, Pinehurst accepts room and starting-time reservations up to two years in advance.

Golf isn’t Pinehurst’s only sporting activity. As with many resorts, there are tennis courts, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, a riding club, health club and lake.

One of the busiest and more unusual facilities is the gun club. It has nearly as rich a heritage as the golf courses. The legendary Annie Oakley, after years as the star of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, retired to Pinehurst to teach shooting. Club records indicate that she taught up to 15,000 men and women between 1916 and 1920. Each October, the Annie Oakley tournament attracts hundreds of the world’s leading trap and skeet shooters.

Pinehurst remained in the Tufts family for 75 years until it was purchased by Diamondhead Corp., a land development company, in 1970.

It was sold again last August, this time to the Club Corporation of America, a Dallas-based firm that specializes in the private club business. Under its umbrella are five Southern California golf facilities, Braemar and Porter Valley in the San Fernando valley, Canyon Crest in Riverside, Spring Valley in Victorville and Shadowridge in Vista.

It also operates the famous Firestone courses in Akron, Ohio, and Inverrary in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.