The Hubbard Boys and the Miracle of Pinehurst

By Alex Podlogar

Bill Hubbard once saved a golf course.

He did it because of a man’s dying wish. “It was there in the man’s last will and testament – the golf course needed to be maintained and preserved. But the family didn’t want to maintain it,” says Bill’s younger son, Kent Hubbard.

So, Bill, deep into a career in finance, in 1989 he and his buddies…bought a golf course.

And maintained it. And they preserved it. Its original nine holes had been designed by none other than Robert Tyre Jones himself, who in 1933 laid it out on the private property of his friend Jack Porter, owner of the Porterdale Mill near Conyers, Georgia. Not only did they preserve Bobby Jones’ vision, Bill Hubbard and his friends had director Dick Schultz add nine holes. And made it an 18-hole public course.

But they added more than nine holes. Over the years they added family friendly tees. They offered free rounds on players’ birthdays. And for more than 30 years, The Oaks Course lived on, bringing families together and kids into the game with youth clinics and summer camps.

What Bobby Jones himself couldn’t have saved, Bill Hubbard, for a long while, did.

Bill Hubbard had a dying wish, too.

And in fulfilling it, his sons witnessed a miracle.

This is not a fable, but it could be.

Greg Hubbard, Bill’s older son, has two memories from the earliest days of his childhood. He can still see vividly in his mind’s eye himself dribbling golf balls off the driving range at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta, his father Bill by his side. A toddler mimicking his dad’s fluid stroke, Greg’s shots would roll innocently into the pond near the range where Jones had once made his home.

The other recollection comes 463 miles to the north, and you have to add another half mile from the interstate to get to Main Street in Farmville, Virginia. It was at Grace Payne Hubbard’s cozy home, where visible from the front door’s entrance Greg would see Granny Grace’s sturdy organ. Bill Hubbard, as a kid himself, would bound out that front door of his mother’s place, balance himself and the golf bag slung over his shoulder and perilously ride his bicycle to nearby Longwood Golf Club there in Farmville, where he would caddy and play golf when allowed.

“That’s actually my first memory from childhood,” Greg says. “I’d walk into the door and there was the organ she loved to play so much, and always there on the organ was the sheet music for Amazing Grace. It just takes me back to main street of Farmville, Virginia.”

Kent and Greg Hubbard are different. Greg is eight years older. Always faster, always quicker, better basketball player and golfer.

“It’s that older brother thing,” Kent says. “You’re always trying to keep up with, stay with your older brother.”

They were both born and raised in Atlanta and still make Georgia their home. Greg, those early range sessions sticking, grew up fascinated with competition and thrived in the local junior golf scene. As he got better, he played golf with his dad more and more. “The Sunday evening twilight rounds with him are the some of the fondest memories I have on the golf course,” Greg says.

He prospered at the junior and amateur level, eventually finding himself in Greensboro, North Carolina, to play college golf. His dad included him on golf outings to Pinehurst, to Kiawah, to Hilton Head. Kent was too young to go. But where Greg shined, Kent smiled. Kent was nicknamed after his father. “His buddies called him Happy – ironic because it was hard to get a smile out of him,” Kent says of his dad, a chuckle surfacing in his telling. “I was Happy Jr., which, well, is not ironic. I like to carry a big smile and enjoy the moment.”

Dad had his moments with Kent on the golf course, too. “Since I could walk I remember having a golf club in my hands. Easily before the age of 5,” Kent says. “Golf was my way to get time with him.”

When he was 14, Kent had a choice. His parents were separated, but in Georgia he had a say in who he wanted to live with. Bill had just retired from his career and, Kent says, probably had some big plans. Kent, though, asked to move in with him. On his 15^th birthday, he did.

Big Bill had a lot of nicknames. He was best known as Billy C, for William Curtis Hubbard, by his closest friends and playing partners. Billy C wasn’t a church’s deacon or anything, but he was spiritual. His soul was just stirred by a well-struck 6 iron or a perfect drive splitting the fairway. By his friends. By his sons. Golf moved him. On the U.S. Open Sunday, those Father’s Day broadcasts, he and his sons would always gather together to watch.

“That was his heaven,” Kent says. “That was his sanctuary. He’d always say he doesn’t go to church on Sunday, but he’s a religious man. His church was just on the golf course.”

His cathedral was Pinehurst No. 2. Bill visited often. His sons eventually joined him, competing in putting contests on the green on the West Lawn of The Carolina Hotel.

“Pinehurst No. 2 was my dad’s absolute favorite golf course in the world,” Greg says. “But it was more than that. It was really the people. It’s a community all about golf. It’s the fabric. It’s what it stands for. The people of Pinehurst, their love of the game, they are stewards of the game. They bring the game forward. Maybe I didn’t get it at first, but I certainly do now.”

Bill’s decline was a slow and agonizing one. Early in his 70s, his health began to waver. He tried to keep up with his failing eyesight by playing yellow golf balls – Titleist AVXs became his ball of choice, and necessity. But in the final years, even that wasn’t enough. The dozens of yellow Titleist AVXs began gathering dust.

Golf was gone. And when golf was gone, Bill was too soon going to follow.

“I think it was the lack of being able to play golf that ended up really killing him,” Kent says with a nervous, all-too-knowing laugh. “That was his true passion and joy in life. Also, his sons and his family, but golf is really what kept him going. And later in life, over the last five, six years of his life, his health was just overall deteriorating. Losing his eyesight took him away from the game of golf, and that’s when you saw the passion, the drive, the joy start to slip away when he wasn’t able to get on the links.”

“He had a rough go of things in his 70s,” Greg adds. “Over the last couple years, he had a lot of things he faced and he wasn’t able to play golf anymore and it was just gut-wrenching to him. We knew the end was coming, and he did, and all of us around him did.

“It was tough, but it was also a blessing. I was able to spend a lot of time with him in the last few months. We got to say some goodbyes and have some final conversations with him.”

In a hospital room at Emory University, Bill talked plainly, as he always did, to his boys.

“I do remember as if it were yesterday, our last one-on-one full clear conversation when he did tell me he had one last wish,” Greg says. “It was two parts – go to the U.S. Open at Pinehurst. Pinehurst is his favorite place in the world. Pinehurst No. 2 is his favorite golf course in the world.”

“His wish was for his two sons to stay close,” Kent says. “And his final wish was that on the 1-year anniversary of his passing was that his two boys go out and play his favorite course in the entire world – Pinehurst No. 2.”

On Feb. 7, 2024, Bill Hubbard died. He was 79 years old.

Amazing Grace was the only song the old man asked to be played at his memorial service.

Feb. 7, 2025, was a “bluebird day,” as Greg calls it. A high of 76 degrees, barely a cloud in the sky to block the view. Kent and Greg had the last tee time of the day on No. 2. Having driven from Athens, Georgia, that morning, they arrived at Pinehurst, had lunch in the Deuce and proceeded to the first tee a good 45 minutes behind the last group of the day. Pinehurst Ranger John Kearney made a note as the pace-of-play ranger for the day. He’d be following the twosome by the time Golden Hour rolled around. Kearney was tasked with picking up the flagsticks for that evening.

Kent and Greg both hit the fairway on their first tee shots. One ball was white. Kent’s was one of his dad’s yellow Titleist AVXs.

“Both of us hit the first fairway, so we felt like we may as well go ahead and snap this picture now while things are going good for us during the day,” Greg says.

For 16 holes they played – for them – middling golf. With Bill heavy on their minds, the golf was scattershot. Deuce coins may have been threatened a couple of times, but ultimately could stay safely hidden at the bar. At the par-3 17^th tee, they finally caught the group ahead of them. Kearney stopped short of them in his cart along the 16^th fairway with a view of the 17^th green. “I didn’t want them to think I was rushing them,” Kearney says. “They were fine – just two guys playing No. 2 as the day started to come to its end. I watched them play their final five or six holes.”

“A lot of toe-chunks,” Kent jokes.

Greg and Kent had a moment to themselves as the group ahead of them putted out on 17.

“It just gave us a chance to catch our breath,” Greg recalls. “Only two holes left and not many shots left in that day. It was a great opportunity for us to chat a little bit.

“I realized the ranger was scooping up the flagsticks behind us. And I just made a comment about him over there.”

Finally clear, Greg blocked his tee shot into the native area short and right of the green. “Fried egg lie,” Greg says. “I made a great bogey.”

Kent had a 6 iron in his hands. The 17^th was playing 165 yards with a front-right hole location.

“It never left the stick. It was such a beautiful shot,” says Greg. “It was one of those shots you just did not want to talk to.”

“It never left the flag,” says Kent.

The ball landed 15 short of the pin. A couple of hops, it began to roll like a putt.

“It disappears,” Greg says. “’Did it go in?’ I said. ‘I think it went in.’”

“Beautiful golf shot,” Kearney says, looking back. “I saw them walk up and pick it up out of the hole.”

Hole-in-one.

“Just a state of disbelief,” Kent says.

Walking to the green, Greg asked Kent for his phone, and started recording. In it, Kent picks the ball out of hole, and beams to the cell phone camera. “Big Bill’s AVX,” Kent says. Greg asks how it feels. “It was butter off the clubface,” Kent says to his brother, looking back toward the tee, his hands on his hips and a mix of marvel and disbelief in his countenance. Greg pans the camera to a cloudless blue sky.

And faintly, the chimes of the nearby Village Chapel, the top of its steeple barely visible among the towering pines, begin to play.

“I love those church bells,” says Kearney. “Every half hour, they play. The wind just sweeps them through the golf course.”

At 4:30 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 7, 2025, the melody becomes more clear.

Still on the green, Greg had already turned the phone off. He quickly hit record again to capture the carillon playing Amazing Grace.

Grace Payne Hubbard. The organ. The memorial. Years ago, Greg named his daughter Mary Grace.

Days later, Kent has a smile on his face as the moment washes over him. But his eyes begin to water.

“Even though he wasn’t there physically, with the bells playing his song…” Kent’s voice catches, and he begins again. “It really felt like he was there to witness…”

His voice trails off, and Kent recenters himself.

“It’s been a hard year missing him.” He pauses again. “We spoke multiple times a week, sometimes multiple times a day.”

Another pause.

“With his health, his highlights were his children and his grandchildren.”

Another.

“I kept his phone number, and I wish I could just call and leave some voicemails.

“We always had an after-round conversation,” Kent says, remembering his dad and the calls from the car after his rounds.

“I want to call him and tell him about what I did good, where I struggled throughout the day and get his wisdom and insights.”

Kent’s eyes, wet with gleam, dart back from the left and stare straight ahead. He is firm.

“It didn’t feel like I had to after playing No. 2. The signs show, with the bells playing – he saw that round.

“He got to see his boys playing together again.”

What is it about this place, Pinehurst? Why are there so many stories? Is it just the accumulation of 130 years, that with the 47,450 new sunrises something is bound to happen? Is it just simple math? Coincidence?

Or is it that in those years since this place’s towering pines were allowed to grow again, that something was stirred? Does this sandy soil, left barren and windswept after the timbering of its first stately long-needled trees in the late 1890s, well, did it always hold something magical? Was its soul always there, just needing a Boston philanthropist and his sons, and a century later, a thoughtful Dallas businessman and his son for that soul’s nurturing to be realized?

“We’re still trying to make sense of what happened,” Greg says. “I don’t know if we’ll ever quite get there. I will say, we’ve thought about our father a lot. I don’t know if we’re ever going to quite understand the magnitude and the gravity of what did happen.

“I think we’re going to be trying to figure out the how, the why, the what forever. But the one thing I do know, if anybody ever doubted that Bill Hubbard’s home was there in Pinehurst, and Pinehurst No. 2, there’s no doubts anymore. That’s his home, and it will be forever.

“Those who just think it’s a coincidence of all coincidences – some may feel that way. But it’s much deeper than that.

“It is for the Hubbard boys, I’ll tell you that.”

Bill Hubbard once saved a golf course for a father whose kids didn’t want it anymore.

At the end of his life, though, he saved his best moment for last.

For his boys.