Good article containing these points in this week's Golfworld written by Ron Whitten. Its at home so can't reference the actual name, but memory tells me that someone from the Resort spoke up to Bill and said the main irrigation line was left in the ground, and if they staked 90' on either side they would be able to go back to Ross' original intent. They were floored at how much things had shifted over the years. Bill was quoted talking about how huge this revelation was.
wanted to make sure I gave the proper credit to the story from Ron Whitten ...
"Bob Farren, Pinehurst's director of grounds and golf course maintenance, met with Coore, who was struggling to find accurate information about the course as it existed after an extensive 1935 Donald Ross redesign of his original.. (Only one scrapbook of photos exists, and Ross apparently made no blueprints.) Farren told him the irrigation mainline installed 80 years ago was still in the ground. He suggested that flagging that mainline would indicate where the original fairway centerlines had been.
Paul Jett, at the time the superintendent of No. 2, and Toby Cobb, a Coore associate who managed the reconstruction, located the mainline, measured 90 feet on either side of it (the average throw of water) and placed small flags along the perimeter to delineate the original fairways. "It was amazing," Coore says. "It was no longer supposition about where the fairways had been. They'd all been serpentine, following the contours of the land. The fairways had changed so much, the mailine was in present-day rough in a few places." Had they done nothing else but reclaim the original "swings and curves" of the fairways, he said, they would have imporved Pinehurst No. 2.