GREENSBORO - On the hallway walls inside the Tudor clubhouse at Sedgefield Country Club -- the building where the Atlantic Coast Conference was born in 1953 -- are photographs and memories from the golden age of professional golf in this city.

There are black and white images of Chi Chi Rodriguez, Gary Player, Sam Snead and others, the backgrounds often filled with flowering dogwoods, another reminder of the days when Greensboro was a springtime fixture on the PGA Tour schedule.

On a plaque, the names of the winners at Sedgefield from 1938 through 1976 start with Snead and include Byron Nelson, Billy Casper, Doug Sanders, Gene Littler and Player, among others.

When the Wyndham Championship returns after a 32-year absence to Sedgefield Country Club today, it will be a step that straddles the past and the present with the intention of enhancing Greensboro's golf future.

"You can get goose bumps when you think about the things that have happened here through the years," said Franz Hanning, CEO of Wyndham Vacation Ownership, the title sponsor. "When I saw the restoration work, we knew if we could make the tournament work here, it would be a special place."

There are still significant issues with the date -- this is the final week of the PGA Tour's so-called regular season and most of the top players are not playing, focusing instead on starting the big-money, high-profile FedEx Cup playoffs next week.

Still, the Wyndham Championship field includes Vijay Singh, David Toms, Davis Love III, defending champion Brandt Snedeker and, for good or bad, John Daly, among others.

The move to Sedgefield, which recently underwent a major renovation by course architect Kris Spence, is another step in the reinvention of the event that began last year when Wyndham signed on when the event was played at Forest Oaks Country Club.

Not only does it take the tournament back to where it was previously played, it becomes the only original Donald Ross-designed course on the PGA Tour schedule. Spence has lengthened Sedgefield to 7,117 yards -- nearly 500 yards longer than it played when Al Geiberger won there in 1976 -- and he has attempted to recapture what Ross had created when the course opened in 1926.

"It will be one of the top-10 courses on tour because we don't play that many traditional courses," Snedeker said after going around Sedgefield.

Spence, who lives in Greensboro and has studied Ross's work closely, was charged with updating a Ross design that had become outdated.

It was too short to challenge the modern player, strategic elements had been eliminated and the greens had lost 35 percent of their surface, among other things.

"But the bones were still there," Spence said.

Spence studied aerial photos of the original layout and supplemented those with ground-level shots from the early years. When a club official discovered the original blueprints for the course with Ross's handwritten pencil notes scribbled on the papers, Spence knew he could recapture Sedgefield's sparkle.

"We restored some holes that almost nobody remembered," Spence said, citing bunkering at the second, third and ninth holes that had been removed or diminished.

The result is a course that, Spence said, reinforces the Ross notion that golf should be played on the ground more than through the air.

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