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GREENSBORO -- The old Embassy Club is long gone now, burned to the ground after a dance one night. Its foundation is still visible through the tall grass, a rough outline of the wild weekend nights we once spent here. The old Manor House is gone, too, the echoes of debutante balls and masquerade parties barely audible in the breeze.

Sedgefield Country Club's past is never far from us, its sentinel water tower rusting elegantly over a place in time.

The 69th playing of our golf tournament starts today at the old place. Summertime itself will pause. The high is expected to be in the low 80s, golf scores possibly in the low 60s. Lines of cars are expected to form off the new highway and empty into a lot off Guilford College Road.

Everybody in the city will be here today. If you're not, you probably need to have an excuse, preferably that you'll be here for the weekend. The new Wyndham Championship is proof that this city can still have fun. Now it's up to Greensboro to prove it deserves it.

We used to have big fun. We'd cram 40,000 people onto the golf course and watch the entire tour walk past, Arnie and Jack and Ben and Sam. It sort of went with our style. We brought in the biggest basketball tournament, the biggest fishing tournament, the biggest concerts at the biggest coliseum in the South.

There'd be a gala affair with Bob Hope and Ed Sullivan, a black-tie event with polished silver and live music. And the city would turn out in droves, an entire town celebrating not the celebrities but the celebrants. The draw here was always the people.

They're all stories now, the tales of huge galleries walking among the dogwoods planted a 100 years ago, longleaf pine and Japanese cherry all blooming and blowing and people standing 50-deep around greens watching Slammin' Sammy putt side-saddle down a Donald Ross incline. They talk of "GGO Girls" strolling the course in short skirts and knee-high socks giving away cigarettes and brochures for Pilot Life insurance policies.

The multitudes would walk the rolling hills over a course they got to see one week out of the year, past the mansions they almost never saw, past the log Embassy Club over off the fifth fairway, past the Brown compound along the 15th and finally turn toward the water tower. That the nines have been switched and switched back over the years only adds to the myth.

We really did fill this place, though, and the feeling is all the work that's been done to save this tournament will be complete only when we look out across the course today and see people, girls in their summer clothes and young college boys in shorts and flip-flops, kids in strollers and men with canes. They used to close the schools during the "great week," and form long, perfect lines from the edge of town to the sprawling Pilot Life campus.

The old campus stands quiet now, its façade crumbling, the massive main structure awaiting an uncertain fate. If you stand there now, looking out across the grand yard, you can just hear the old song.

"Worries are far behind you, there's even peace of mind, too."

But those days are over, and as much as we talk of the history of this place and this tournament's place in this city's history, the storyline has actually been switched. The city that could always point to the annual tournament for direction and proof that we mattered, must now begin to pay back the pilot. Today is an important day in the history of our city, not as another chapter in the lore of a golf tournament, but the first chapter in the new history of a new tournament.

Nothing so far suggests this will be anything less than a grand success, and crowds on a rainy Wednesday seemed to portend something big. Cars began to back up on High Point Road as it turns and dips down into the trees, lines of courtesy cars and volunteer buses and official vehicles snaking toward the water tower.

They stood in the rain and watched a pro-am with golfers such as Kyle Petty aiming at the mansions and professionals such as David Toms aiming at pins. Then they all met for a ceremony that included Kyle's dad and Arnold Palmer in a cowboy hat and wraparound sunglasses. Even the legends have been switched from here on out.

The tournament we've been waiting to see our entire lives will start today and end sometime in the future, in another time and a timeless place. Sedgefield will open its roads to the city again for an event destined to re-invent itself again and again.

The tournament is brand new. The sport is a modern game now. The GGO will rise again today with another sponsor and another tournament and another course, all built on a foundation barely visible in the tall grass.

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