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GREENSBORO -- Standing on the second tee at Sedgefield Country Club, you see what Donald Ross saw almost a century ago. A long, lazy field of green, shaped by God and unspoiled by man. And possibly a few pheasant rising from the tall grass and winging away from a small group of men walking the land.

This is where a much larger group of men will stand this week, looking out over a corner of a golf course Ross began to design in his head all those years ago. This is where his vision comes into focus. The second hole at Sedgefield might be one of the best golf holes in the world.

The pheasant are long gone, taken on the wing in another time. A family of red-tailed hawks lives here now, the mother soaring overhead and screaming at everyone who walks the fairway as her 3-month-old fledgling flies from one side of the fairway to the other.

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He came here. That's the first thing you need to know about Sedgefield. This wasn't one of those courses drawn up on a piece of paper by Ross, nor was it one of those walked and mapped by one of his many associates. Donald Ross came to the hunting preserve off old High Point Road and walked it off himself. We have his handwritten notes.

They're cryptic, of course, a measurement here and a notation there about trees and drainage. Technical stuff mostly, but an indication that he was impressed by the lay of the land and determined to move as little of it as possible.

He came here with mules and saws and large grading implements from the Sandhills, bringing them all up old Highway 22 through Carthage and Highfalls and Coleridge and Ramseur, and he began clearing the land for not one but two golf courses on the club's vast preserve of quail and deer and fox hunting grounds in the red-clay piedmont of North Carolina.

Ross was from Scotland, a protégé of Old Tom Morris of Dornoch, the grandfather of golf himself. He came to America at the urging of a professor who told him he could come here and help introduce the game to North America. In 1899, Ross came to Boston to operate Oakley Golf Club. A year later, he received an invitation from a man from Greensboro to come build a course at a health spa called Pinehurst.

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The land Ross saw at what is now Sedgefield Country Club was mostly pine forest and open field. He walked it with his men, who'd already been here and surveyed the property, and he nodded as they pointed out meandering streams and interesting land features. He sketched a rough routing, one potential hole leading to another, no worries about houses or roads or even health spas.

Ross wasn't big on ponds or forced carries over man-made obstacles. He wanted a golfer to stand on a tee and know exactly where to hit the ball, the way golf was played in Scotland, bounding the ball from tee to land, then making decisions based on Victorian principles - style and discretion. The second hole at Sedgefield is a short walk from the first.

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The decision to move from Forest Oaks to Sedgefield was by necessity. The tournament that has survived all these years - from the first ball being struck at Starmount in 1938 to Sedgefield then Forest Oaks; from the Greater Greensboro Open to the many sponsored manifestations to the modern Wyndham Championship - has adapted to golf's many trends. There was a time when golf was about golf, and we had the best of all time, Sam Snead.

Make your argument for Hogan or Nicklaus, Palmer or Woods. Folks in Greensboro believe the greatest golfer to ever play the game was Snead. He won the first one here wire-to-wire.

The sport survived without reflecting the generations that followed, but stretchy pants and modern golf courses managed to erode then compromise the classic feel of golf. Snead no longer was cool, and Ross was forgotten. Only one event on the entire PGA Tour schedule is now played on a Ross course.

This one.

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You stand here and look at the shot, a 257-yard carry over a bunker complex to the right side of the fairway and a comfortable, wide-open area to the left. The dogleg kicks straight downhill before jutting 43 degrees to the right, where a stream appears out of nowhere, seemingly right out of the earth, and guarding the bottom of a treacherous green that narrows as it falls away and slopes toward the creek. Ross saw four distinct pin locations on the putting surface, one for each round of a tournament, two of them almost impossible to deal with.

Three years ago, Sedgefield brought in a local guy named Kris Spence to restore the course to its original state. He had no motivation to lure a PGA event or make headlines in the trade magazines. Spence was asked to restore the course to the original intentions of its designer. He'd redone many Ross courses, and he approached this one with the respect and attention he gave to all his projects. Then someone asked him if he wanted to see some drawings of the land and he realized they were the original drawings themselves.

Spence said chills went up on his arms when he realized what he was seeing.

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Ross actually drew two courses here, the course we now know and another that ended for undetermined reasons after a hole or so. The first hole of the unfinished course now ends in a modern kitchen.

The truth is, he never saw many of the courses he designed, probably never set foot on more than a third of the 400 courses he is generously credited with designing. Ross sat in the little cottage behind the third green at the No. 2 course in Pinehurst and made decisions about courses hundreds of miles away that still bear his name.

Sedgefield is different. Spence says his team of course archaeologists found the original traps when they began to restore the grounds, found shelves where shots settled in 1926, embankments for redirecting bad decisions and landing areas and tee boxes of a sport gone by. To his credit, he changed little.

Ross wanted most of his papers burned after his death, and this only adds to the mystique of his name. His work lives on in his golf courses spread across the states, including Pinehurst No. 2, the site of three majors, and Oakland Hills, the site of this year's PGA Championship. The papers drawn up for Sedgefield survived as did one of the two courses he originally imagined.

The tournament first played here in 1938 survived, too, Snead winning the first and seven more after that as the event moved from course to course and the sport changed to a more modern game of technology and strength. It was thought a place like Sedgefield could never again play host to a tour event.

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Standing at the top of the grounds, looking out on the second hole, you see what Ross wanted you to see. A chute of trees, a bunker complex at a blind angle and a horizon. The rest is imagination.

Time stands still here as you listen to the wind coming through giant oak and poplar, sycamore and pine. The hawks circle high overhead, and a stream that has no apparent headwater runs silently downhill to a green smoothed by Ross himself almost a century ago.

This might not be golf as it was intended to be or even golf as it used to be. The game changes and the game goes on. But it's golf as Ross intended it to be, golf as Snead played it, golf as Greensboro remembers it from all those years ago when they turned the old hunting preserve out off High Point Road into a golf course, then left it to mature on its own, an original landscape of an artist in his element.

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com