By Bion H. Butler
If I was a younger man by about 30 years and lived say four or five thousand years ago, I would be a prophet. I know of no other work that is so nice, and clean and easy as being a prophet. It gives you standing in the community, and is filled with romance, philosophy, neighborhood gossip, and abounds with interest. Lots of folks think that forecasting the future is a hard job, but it is not. Look at the men who make the almanacs, and those who figure out election results two or three weeks ahead, and those who tell you want teams will win in baseball contests, or what horses will win the blind pools.
Life is a long continued drama, and if you think about it the drama is always laid on the same lines. One generation watched and play and drops out, and another comes in and sees the same old story framed up with different names and with a few modern innovations, but it is merely a new crop of players and a new crop of spectators, and all the rest is as old as the hills around about Jerusalem that standeth fast and abideth forever.
Now if I were undertake to prophesy I would begin with the prospect of golf in the Pinehurst section. I would run my prophetic work on a system which would have for its foundation the records of the past. For instance, I would start with draw poker and base ball. As fa back as history can tell us men played games with cards and with balls. The more we became civilized the more skillful we began all over the country in playing draw poker and base ball, and the more the games are scattered. Poker is a game that takes little to establish. It is the game that takes the money. Base ball is more expensive, for it requires a big enough piece of ground as well as a ball and bat. But gradually every cross roads in the United States has found a ball ground and base ball has become a fundamental feature in education, in sports, in the newspapers, in daily conversation, and in life. It is as universal as the post office and much more popular and important.
Then came golf. Golf started away back in the misty past, just as ball and poker did. But while you can play poker with a deck of cards and a dry goods box, and base ball with an acre lot, you must have a 40-acre lot to make much of a stagger at golf, and for that reason golf has been a little slower coming. But here is what makes me so fond of the job of a prophet. This country has reached the point where it can pay for ground enough to lay out a golf course, and that is all you need to know to be a prophet. The minutes we get the money to pay for the things that are coming, we go out along the road to meet them. All over this big country folks have the money to build a club house and a golf course, so golf has struck in as deep as the infection of scarlet fever or base ball.
One thing that leads to success in being a prophet is to know the local conditions where you work. A knowledge of conditions in the United States shows that golf has swept the earth. Punkin Hollow and Pittsburgh are both alike in their enthusiasm over golf. Two ambitions lurk in the heart of every village in this country. One is a new hotel, and the other is a nine-hole golf course with locker rooms in the hotel basement. So a hundred million people are saturating themselves with the virus of golf and more children will be born every year to swell the throng. The world has never recovered from poker, nor from base ball, and never will. Neither will it ever recover from golf. So it is easy to go on with the prophesies about golf. Golf will get worse and worse as a chronic malady.
The building of a fine new hotel at Pine Bluff is to be followed by a nine-hole golf course. The natural course of a nine-hole course is to enlarge to an 18-hole course. At Southern Pines the original little layout is about to reach two 18-hole course. There is no remedy. Knollwood has its second 18-hole course planned on the ground. Presently we will have in the vicinity at least nine courses of 18-holes and then another will be started.
Pinehurst is the recognized golf center of the world. That is the most startling fact about this whole golf business. Realizing this much to start with is not hard for me to prophesy that in a few years more we are likely to have a dozen or 20 full-sized 18-hole golf courses in the vicinity, for all that is needed now is more room to play and more hotels to house the players. Once human kind starts to boom and the bars are all thrown down, Nobody knows what made Atlantic City, but everybody knows Atlantic City will never stop. Nobody knows what made New York or what made the Florida boom, or any other thing that sets people off in a whirl of wild enthusiasm, but we all know that those things swell up like a deluge, and it is easy to foretell the future of this golf center. Because golf has reached a state of perfection at Pinehurst and the world has joined on in the golf habit Pinehurst has ahead of it the job of its existence. Some day the road form Pinehurst to Pine Bluff will be a boulevard, lined with interesting homes all the way, and form there to Southern Pines will be a continuation of the magnificent avenue, and from there to Knollwood, and from there back to Pinehurst and possibly the like of it for a rural community will not be known anywhere else on earth. Golf is day by day taking on a virulence in this country that is not yet generally suspected. But for the purpose of uttering a prophesy, I have delved into the symptoms, and it is as plain as a coffee stain on the table cloth that golf has a grip that cannot be shaken and that is growing faster than the crime wave.
Some day the Seaboard will run the Golf express, and the real air line will not be the Seaboard or the Groundline, but the flyers that will drop down from New York in about five hours and land on the 50-acre air line terminal not far from the Carolina. My mild prediction is that one of these days Fort Bragg will be the east side of the county line and that west of the line will be such a succession of golf courses that boulevards will be continuous from the camp border dividing line that separates the clay of Moore and the Sandbelt which will be wholly given over to the peach orchards and winter homes. I am only an amateur prophet. Anybody who is a professional and wants to work out this idea farther is welcome to it.
From page 4 of the Pinehurst Outlook, Saturday, Jan. 9, 1926
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn91068725/1926-01-09/ed-1/seq-4/
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