How to talk about the U.S. Open at Pinehurst with your golf-obsessed friends

You don't need to love golf to take pride in the U.S. Open in Pinehurst. You simply need to love North Carolina and a good story or few.

Why it matters: With the USGA's recent investment in making this Sandhills village an "anchor site" for its national championship, Pinehurst enters this U.S. Open as the unofficial beating heart of American golf for the next generation — in the same way that Tobacco Road is the heart of college basketball, and Lexington is the pulse of pork barbecue.

If you want to look smart among your golf-obsessed friends, here's how to fake it.

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The basics

The U.S. Open starts Thursday with 156 players from all over the world. It ends on Sunday, Father's Day, barring a playoff or rain delays. A Texan named Scottie Scheffler is the favorite, but North Carolina has several ties in the field — including Raleigh native and Charlotte resident Webb Simpson; Raleigh natives Chesson Hadley and Carter Jenkins; Akshay Bhatia from Wake Forest ; Hickory's J.T. Poston; and Michael McGowan from Southern Pines.

• Tickets: Gallery tickets are still available for the Thursday and Sunday rounds. Friday and Saturday are sold out.
• Pinehurst is less than 90 minutes from Raleigh and two hours from Charlotte

Talk about Donald Ross and "turtle-back" greens

The Scotsman sketched out No. 2 in the early 1900s to be "the fairest test of golf" of all the 400 courses he designed. He's largely associated with "turtle-back" greens, which sit higher than the fairway and slope hard, especially around the edges.

• Hitting a ball into these greens is a little like trying to drop a Lucky Charm on a turned-over bowl. If you don't land it in the middle, off it rolls.
• But if you really want to stun your friends, tell them this: Ross liked contours in his greens, sure. But the dome shapes have been exaggerated over time with the reconstruction of his courses, and he likely didn't intend to have that shape be his signature.

Call the brown areas "natural areas"

The squirrels love the new back-to-nature feel of Pinehurst No. 2. Photo: Gregory Shamus/Getty Images

Pinehurst did something with its grass in 2010 that's actually really cool. Golf courses for decades wanted to be lush green on color television.

Pinehurst followed the pack for decades, wasting endless amounts of water trying to keep grass alive in a place called "the Sandhills," so named because the soil's ridiculously sandy. (The region was actually an ancient shoreline.)

• Making Pinehurst wear green is like making someone wear a tuxedo to the beach. It made no sense. So in 2009, the resort consulted with Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw to remove tens of thousands of acres of perfectly manicured turf, haul it away, and create brown natural areas alongside the fairways.
• Crews ripped up all the extra irrigation lines in favor of one central line that runs directly down the middle of each fairway. The closer to the center you land your ball, the better your lie. The closer to the fairway edge, the more likely it is to roll into one of the waste bunkers.
• More than that, Pinehurst is now a leader in the golf world for water conservation and using natural resources and terrain.

Speak lovingly about Payne Stewart

The memorial statue to Payne Stewart, winner of the 1999 US Open Championship, beside the clubhouse and the 18th green of the No. 2 course. Photo: David Cannon/Getty Images

In 1999, No. 2 hosted its first U.S. Open. Knickerbocker-wearing Payne Stewart went into the final day as the leader. As he warmed up for the final round on a misty Sunday, he became frustrated with his rain jacket so he cut off the sleeves with scissors, contributing to a trend of sleeveless jackets in golf that still persists.

• Stewart won the championship with a 15-foot putt on the 18th green, and thrust his fist forward and right leg skyward.
• Damn near everybody who comes here takes a picture of themselves next to the bronze statue of Stewart that typically sits behind the 18th green.

Drop a history lesson about fresh air

Few sports cherish the past like golf, and few golf course document their history like Pinehurst No. 2. A quick rundown:

• A soda fountain baron from the north named James Walker Tufts founded Pinehurst in 1895 on the belief that the pine trees had healing powers for ailments of the era, including consumption, now known as tuberculosis.
• A few years later he saw hotel guests hitting golf balls into a field of dairy cows and grew concerned that the balls would affect the resort's milk supply. So he commissioned a golf course, Pinehurst No. 1. A few years later he hired Ross to design No. 2. Now the resort has 10 courses — No. 10 opened in April .
• Fun-ish fact: Pinehurst almost died. In 1970, the Tufts family sold the resort to a corporation that filled it up with shag carpeting and cookie-cutter apartments. The resort went bankrupt in 1982. Two years later, Robert Dedmon and ClubCorp bought the resort and willed it back to prestige.

And if that doesn't work …

Say you want to visit. Pinehurst has become much more than a golf mecca in recent years.

• The resort added a spa in the 2000s.
• A brewery (whose beer program was started by a former brewer at Heist in Charlotte, by the way) opened in the 2010s.
• The resort added a delightfully fun par-3 course, The Cradle , in 2017.
• More restaurants opened around town, and a sleepy golf paradise became a bona fide family or anniversary getaway, on par with the Sanderling on the Outer Banks and the Grove Park in Asheville.