2 greens on 1 hole?! Why this famous US Open site added a surprising quirk

If you live in New Jersey, like me, you don’t have to be a golfer at the very least heard from Baltusrol Golf Club, just as you don’t have to be a music lover to have heard of Carnegie Hall or a corned beef lover to be familiar with Katz’s Delicatessen. The place is an institution: 130 years old; host venue of 18 major championships; home to a 50,000-square-foot Tudor Revival-style clubhouse that ranks among the game’s most iconic buildings. The club is so historic that it was designated as one in 2014 National Historic Landmark. The only thing missing from Balty’s resume is a Ken Burns film – and who knows, maybe one will come along.

Baltusrol has two excellent and challenging courses – the Lower and Upper, both built by the legendary AW Tillinghast – which does not make the club unique in this region of the country. The same can be said of Winged Foot (about 50 miles northeast); Westchester Country Club (not far from Winged Foot); Trump Bedminster (25 miles west); and Philly Cricket (80 miles southwest); among others.

Here’s a nice wrinkle, though: Balty membership doesn’t lean toward the higher-ranked and more storied of the two courses (the Lower), but instead toward the “other” option: the Upper. This isn’t to say that the club’s members aren’t proud of their better-known offerings or that they don’t still enjoy testing their games; it’s just that if they want to quickly go outside after work or play a nice Saturday morning four-ball, most members prefer to do so on the less blue Upper.

This is more true today than ever thanks to a recent restoration by restorers of the day Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner, who also helped return the Lower Course to its Tilly-rich roots through a restoration job they completed in 2021. “The Lower had undergone a lot of the architectural changes in the name of hosting championships,” Hanse said at an Upper reopening event I attended earlier this year. “The Upper was kind of a sleepy little golf course out there.”

Sleepy but deeply loved! While the Lower dazzles you with length and imposing hazards (such as the Sahara bunker complex on the par-5 17th), the Upper delights you with more variety in hole settings and designs, due to its home in the side of a mountainside. (I was certainly happy with it; my summer round at the Upper was my favorite round of 2025.) Hanse and Wagner worked on a wealth of archival photography and maps, expanding green spaces to their original dimensions and removing trees to open sightlines, but never straying from Tillinghast’s original intent.

When I asked Hanse if he ever felt like he and his team could improve on the intent of a classical architect (no one is perfect, right?) he said, “Obviously we modernize golf courses, we move bunkers to a lower range, we move tees back, etc., etc. But we’re trying to figure out why.” [a designer] done something or: ‘Was that a mistake?’ – it’s something we really try to avoid because it just leads to different conclusions that may not yield the best results from a restoration point of view.”

So Hanse started digging.

“When Gil started exploring the right green, he was able to find remnants of that green, because during that period they weren’t deconstructing; they were just plowing things,” Matt Wirths, president of Baltusrol. told me last summer. “He could see the old layering of the green, and he could also see the dimensions.”

What to do? Hans was torn. “First we decided to leave out the non-original green, the top one,” Hanse said. “When we found the original contour of the lower green, the upper green was about eight to eight feet above it, and we thought, ‘Well, these can’t coexist. They can’t sit next to each other the way they are now.'”

But then Hanse asked his shaper to dig some more. “We’re going to blow it up anyway,” Hanse remembers thinking. “Let’s get all the dirt out of the way and see if we can find the original number. And we did. And then that appeared. It came back to the two [greens] can sit nicely next to each other.”

Whether Hanse and the club would actually keep the old second green in play remained an open question during the restoration; some members loved the idea, while others were less enthralled, worried that it was too quirky or downright gimmicky.

One of the key deciding factors was that Tillinghast had an affinity for double greens, so much so that in the 1920s he even outlined plans for a course in Atlanta with double greens on every hole. Wirths said the Depression kept the course from becoming a reality, but the plans alone were a sufficient indication that Tillinghast was more than okay with the unconventional design feature. “That was another block in the fire to actually keep both greens,” Wirths said.

And keep them, like the club did. If you play your second shot in 14 today, the challenge – depending on which green is in play – can look very different from round to round. It’s new, fun and makes you wonder why the game should have more double greens.

It is not yet clear which surface is better, which is appropriate for a two-course club where members are used to making difficult choices.

“I think we’ll take a year to look at it and see how it plays,” Hanse said. “And then we can determine if [the club swaps out greens] every other day or whether one green is more suitable for a championship than another.”