![]() ![]() “The Coca-Cola guy was just a church friend,” he said. Hendley, one of the first two golf professionals here in 1967, received a phone call out of the blue in 2017 about Quail Ridge. And that’s where the Coca-Cola man comes into play. Well, they weren’t, and rumors pointed to apartments being planned for the 156-acre property. There wasn’t any grass here… I don’t know how people were playing.” “I would say on a sale of 1-10 the course was a 2 when we sprayed it out,” Dallas added about the turf retooling effort that has taken place. ![]() “And that’s being generous,” said Randy Dallas, a consultant and course superintendent. In the course’s heyday it logged close to 30,000 rounds, but that number had dipped to around 8,000. How far had Quail Ridge fallen since Wake Forest won the 1968 ACC title here by 31 strokes? Well, the snack bar/grill had been closed since 2004 and rounds were selling online for as cheap as $10. “You just want a place like this to thrive and now that it’s in great shape you want people to know about it.” “I really wasn’t ready to jump back in (to golf) but I’m just stepping my toe in the water because I had a personal interest in this place being a hometown boy and my family’s roots run deep here,” Gay said. Gay, born and raised in Sanford, has briefly returned to the golf business to help promote Quail Ridge. ![]() “It’s pretty bad when you can’t auction a place off,” added Joe Gay, the former director of golf at nearby Tobacco Road who left golf 2 ½ years ago to go into the restaurant business. The fairways were nothing – they were actually sand.” There just wasn’t any grass out here at all, and the greens weren’t good. They tried to auction it off and it didn’t work. It was not closed but it was getting ready to be. “The golf club was in very, very poor shape,” said Mike Hendley, now one of three principal owners who have helped revive an Ellis Maples design that once hosted an ACC men’s golf championship and U.S. 1 to Pinehurst, along with Triad and Triangle golfers. So just how did Quail Ridge Golf Club return to form after the previously dilapidated course had zero takers at auction?Ī call from the Coca-Cola man, of course.īut this success story really has nothing to do with soda pop at all, other than a phone call between friends that set off a chain of events that has now placed Quail Ridge Golf Club back in the rotation for snowbirds heading south on U.S. ![]()
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