It seemed rather impertinent of a one-time singing waiter to suggest that "the US Golf Association visited us to see if we could run a championship." But Pat Corso's current status as president and chief operating officer of Pinehurst, takes much of the sting out of that snide swipe at authority.

He was referring to 1989 when the renowned Pinehurst No 2 course played host to the US Women's Amateur Championship in which Vicki Goetze triumphed. Now, 10 years on, it is to receive the ultimate accolade of staging the US Open for the first time, starting on Thursday.

Small wonder the course has been closed to allow maintenance crews nearly three weeks - a week longer than normal - to prepare for the big occasion. Apparently there is some concern about newly-sodded areas of Bermuda grass around the greens. "Pinehurst doesn't want to see any white paint (indicating ground under repair) and neither do I," said USGA official, Tom Meeks.

Meanwhile, expanding on the 1989 experience, Corso added: "They determined we could do it." And further proof came when the 1992 USPGA Tour Championship was held there. But the real breakthrough occurred on the other side of the country, earlier that year.

During the 1992 US Open at Pebble Beach on California's Pacific coast, Pinehurst made a proposal to the USGA. It went something like this: "We know that our existing bentgrass is not of a high enough standard for the Open. So work with us to rebuild the greens and find a strain of bentgrass more conducive to southern summers." The USGA agreed.

So it was that the arrival of the blue riband of American golf to Pinehurst, took a little more than 100 years. For it was on February 18th, 1898, that the local newspaper "Pinehurst Outlook" carried a story which began: "A nine-hole golf course has been laid out after the famous St Andrews, near Edinburgh, Scotland."

This was Pinehurst, a picturesque little village in North Carolina, where the local ordinances included a ban on owning a rooster, for fear the natives would be woken too early. The great Bobby Jones called it "the St Andrews of United States Golf", which was acknowledged as "a fair enough claim" by Henry Longhurst. But these sort of descriptions seemed to be commonplace at the time, insofar as a similar reference was made to the Sutton area in North Dublin, early this century.

For almost 30 years, it was home to the renowned Scottish golf-course architect, Donald Ross, until his death in 1948. Indeed locals suspect that his ghost probably still stands in a window of his house, overlooking the third green. And it can't resist chuckling at the approach shots of modest mortals while caddies, as they've always done at Pinehurst, whisper "Donald Ross got him."

Born the son of a stonemason in the northern Scottish town of Dornoch in 1872, Ross served his apprenticeship under Robert Foggan and Old Tom Morris at St Andrews before returning home when he was 21. After progressing to the dual role of professional/greenkeeper at Dornoch, he undertook a major redesign of the links until a visiting Harvard professor, Robert Wilson, persuaded him to emigrate to the US.

Which was how Ross, in 1898, became head professional at Oakley CC in Boston. And it was there that he attracted the attention of the Tufts family. The story goes that James Walker Tufts, who lived in Massachusetts, was on his way to a winter break in Florida when he stopped in eastern North Carolina and was pleasantly surprised by the climate.

With his American Soda Fountain company thriving, he left it in the charge of others and set about finding a place for "people of modest means" to escape the northeast's freezing winters. So it was that in June 1885, he bought 5,000 acres of barren land which had been stripped of its pine trees by loggers. At $1 per acre, it was considered outrageously expensive at the time.

Now, Pinehurst is home to eight golf courses and all of them, except No 8 and No 4, which are called Centennial and The Tribute respectively, are identified only by their number. Many find this to be curiously prosaic in a country which delights in fancy, even flamboyant names.

Ross designed Nos 1, 2, 3 and 4; Tom Fazio did another two and Rees Jones and Ellis Maples did one each. But the centrepiece is Pinehurst No 2 which is almost invariably given a lofty position on lists of the world's greatest courses.

Meanwhile, the St Andrews connection was greatly enhanced by the experiences of Bill Campbell, the West Virginian who captured the US Amateur title in 1954. It seems that in the 1950 North and South Amateur Championship at Pinehurst No 2, Campbell stood over a four-foot putt on the 17th green, his 35th hole of the day.

He had to sink the putt to keep his match with Dudley Wysong alive. Suddenly, Campbell backed off as the bells of the Village Chapel rang out 6.0p.m. He then made the putt and went on to capture the first of four North and South titles, on the 37th.

One month later, Campbell stood over a similar-length putt on the 17th green at St Andrews in the sixth round of the British Amateur. Remarkably, at that precise moment, bells from a nearby church rang out 6.0p.m. "It put a tingle up my spine," said the American, "and I knew then I was going to make the putt." No matter that he failed to win the match.

It seems that the head of the Tufts family had no great faith in the future of golf. But his son, Leonard, most certainly did. And in 1903, when Leonard became the first president of Pinehurst GC on the death of his father the previous year, he promptly put Ross to work.

The gifted Scot redesigned course No 1 and went on to build No 2 in 1907. By 1910 a third course was open and in 1919, Pinehurst became the first resort in the world to have 72 holes of golf, all on the same property.

From then on, the success of the venture was reflected in the words of Arnold Palmer, who enthused: "Pinehurst was the most elite spot in the world as far as I was concerned. It was the golfing capital of the world and No 2 was the best course I'd ever played. As that golf course stood in the 1940s, when they had the North and South Open and North and South Amateur, it was impeccable. It was perfect."

Mention of the North and South Open calls to mind a strong Irish connection with Pinehurst. It was there, on April 1st 1922, that Pat O'Hare (known in the US as O'Hara) from the famous Greenore golfing family, captured the title on the only occasion that it was reduced to 54 holes, because of inclement weather.

It was also the venue for the 1980 Eisenhower Trophy in which Ronan Rafferty, then a mere 16-year-old, finished fourth individual behind America's Hal Sutton.

And when international golf came to Pinehurst with the Ryder Cup in 1951, Fred Daly was a member of the visiting team. While they sustained a crushing defeat by 9 1/2 to 2 1/2, which was regularly their lot at that time, Daly contributed to their modest total with a halved match against Clayton Haefner.

In the days when O'Hare was competing, the course measured only 5,860 yards as opposed to the current length of 7,020. But the quality of the design was such that it became largely instrumental in elevating Ross to the status of doyen of American golf-course architects.

It has been described as a kind of idealisation of the old-fashioned parkland courses which characterised American golf architecture until World War II - tree-lined, following the natural terrain, with small greens and ample but not profligate use of bunkers. It is the kind of course which lays emphasis on the planning and precision of the golf shot, rather than the physical strength which more recent courses demand.

"Pinehurst is probably my favourite golf course in the United States from a design standpoint," said Jack Nicklaus. "And I say that because there isn't a water hazard in play on the golf course and there is not a tree in play. It's tree-lined, but the trees aren't a strategic part of the golf course."

For the technically minded, the discussions between Pinehurst and the USGA seven years ago, resulted in the choice of a dense, heat-tolerant bentgrass called "Penn G-2". As a test, the grass was used for seeding the greens on the new, No 8 course in the autumn of 1995 and the results were studied closely before its official opening a year later. As it happened, the grass did so well that all of the resort's greens are now to be seeded with G-2.

Longhurst once described Pinehurst as "a land of soft accents, smiling faces and unfailing courtesy . . . a village, and a model village at that, law-abiding, of good behaviour and, as Pepys put it, `all things civil, no rudeness anywhere.' I cannot imagine there to exist a Pinehurst policeman."

The church bells still ring in Pinehurst, every hour on the hour. But it is said that they ring so sweetly there isn't the chance of a player being bothered on his backswing.

As the author John P Marquand observed: "Peace never wholly leaves Pinehurst. It never loses the spiritual lack of haste or the impression of leisure and repose and hospitality that its founder designed for it."