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GREENSBORO — Don’t even ask which room was Arnie’s when he played in golf championships of old at Sedgefield Country Club.

It’s gone, along with all the other rooms that pros, celebrities and people with connections partied and slept in at tournament time.

When lovers of golf and lovely landscapes think of Sedgefield, they see that beautiful old Tudor-style inn framing the ninth hole.

Spectators at the Wyndham Championship this week are still calling it the Sedgefield Inn, even though rooms haven’t been available to rent for nearly two decades.

It’s now the clubhouse for the Sedgefield Country Club, not the inn.

What spectators see now isn’t the building constructed in 1927 and still there when the tournament left Sedgefield after 1976 to relocate at Forest Oaks.

In the early 1990s, the inn’s interior was gutted, leaving only the brick and stucco exterior. The interior was completely redone, but the classic long lobby with ceiling beams was restored to look old.

Upstairs, guest rooms have been replaced by staff offices, meeting places and locker rooms. About the only overnight guest at the club this week is tournament director Mark Brazil. He’s bunking in an apartment inside the inn, ah, clubhouse.

Sedgefield retains the leafy and monied feel that founder A.W. McAlister sought in the 1920s when he bought a 3,600-acre former hunting preserve.

Trees are more plentiful and taller. With temperatures in the 90s this week, the timber provides valuable shade. Paramedics on bicycles hurried to help a woman Friday who became overheated next to the third green. She found a shady spot and appeared to be all right.

Since the tournament departed 33 years ago, new homes have arisen along the fairways and new subdivisions on the edge of old Sedgefield proper.

The Pilot Life Insurance Co. headquarters, with grounds and Tudor buildings that awed people arriving for tournaments, stands empty and ghostly across High Point Road from the Sedgefield entrance.

McAlister, who was Pilot’s president, envisioned Sedgefield as a New England-like town with a business district, two golf clubs, polo grounds, gun club, stables, bridle paths, a tea house and big homes.

It’s all there on a painting that decorates the foyer on the clubhouse’s second floor. The second course appears, with one green next to Groometown Road, far from the clubhouse. The practice range, where pros hone their games, was built as the 18th hole of the second course.

Scotsman Donald Ross, who designed the course the pros are attacking this week, also did the second course. A bust of Ross now stands beside the clubhouse.

Construction of that second course ceased after two holes during the Depression and never resumed.

The old Manor House, which the owner of the original hunting preserve used as a second home, has been demolished. Many galas took place there.

The “Little Manor,” a white wood house across the street, survives as a private home.

The business district never materialized, save for a long-gone gas station near the inn. Polo grounds on the painting may have been finished, but they quickly evolved into Sedgefield Stables, which remains on Groometown Road.

Another old Sedgefield map shows a gun club behind what became Pilot Life, but people here say they aren’t sure if it was built.

All of this is not to say Sedgefield failed to live up to its potential. In one sense, it now has three golf courses. The unrelated Grandover Resort, with its two courses, adjoins the Sedgefield property near the sixth fairway.

Bill Daisy, a former district court judge and a Sedgefield resident for 25 years, said that despite development in and around Sedgefield, what lured him here remains — “elbow room.”

“We had lived in Sunset Hills before, and you could reach out and touch your neighbor’s house,” he said .

And the noise level at Sedgefield hasn’t grown enough to drown out the babbling of water flowing over rocks in the many creeks that run through the golf course.

Upstairs at the clubhouse is Nancy Carver, an assistant bookkeeper, who has worked for the club for nearly 42 years. She came here when the inn was still operating.

Her office was down from Perry Como’s room. He gave her an album, which included a song with those familiar Como lyrics, “ ... Like a big pizza pie.”

She recalls the UNC Tar Heels basketball team staying in the inn while playing at the Greensboro Coliseum.

“They had to duck their heads to get through the doors.” she said.

Those who are thankful for the tournament’s return to Sedgefield — it started there and at Starmount Country Club in 1938 — should thank a younger Sedgefield membership. An older membership in the 1970s found the event inconvenient and was glad to see it go.

It’s hard to recapture old glory, but the Wyndham seems to be coming close.

Sergio Garcia, Lucas Glover and Bo Van Pelt played the ninth hole Friday with a gallery lining both sides of the fairway and filling the green-side bleachers and pavilion.

The numbers matched anything Chi Chi Rodrguez, Lee Trevino, Arnold Palmer and Sam Snead saw walking the same land many years ago.

In those days, the tournament was in early spring, when it was often cold and the course was more brown than green.

Friday, it looked emerald green. If only those irrigation holes throughout the course were air-conditioning vents.

Contact Jim Schlosser at 601-9879 or beale1@clearwire.net