Couple that fear with cutting-edge concerns, like the looming golf ball rollback, and you get an idea of what the past few months have been like for Davis Love III.
Love is a five-time winner at Harbor Town Golf Links – he’ll tell you he’s a six-time winner, including his Junior Heritage title – and he was an easy choice to lead the redesign efforts when Sea Pines Resort decided it was time to give the tree-lined gem a facelift. But while love was an easy choice, the actual job was much more demanding.
Harbor Town is regularly cited by PGA Tour types as one of the best layouts on the circuit, and those Tour players weren’t shy when Love was tasked with bringing South Carolina’s layout into a new era.
“What I’ve heard is, what does it look like? The professionals are interested in the quirky stuff. They’re like, OK, are you really putting emphasis on the things you do?” [sod] bunkering again [No.] 14? Yes, we are,” Love said Tuesday at the reopening of Harbor Town, home to RBC Heritage since 1969. “I think [original architect Pete Dye] would tell you that there should be some hard holes, and there should be some easy holes, and you should be challenged.
Harbor Town is consistently one of the Tour’s most demanding courses, despite being among the shorter layouts on the circuit’s rotation, and its length was a talking point for Love and his team throughout the process.
It’s not as if Love added any real distance to the course — the redesign includes about 100 additional yards on a piece of property with little room to grow — but with the USGA and R&A ball rollback looming in 2028, there was reason to think about what exactly the game might look like three years from now.
“That’s come up a lot in recent years. For example, if you’re going to redesign a golf course, do you think about what might happen to the golf ball? Yes,” Love said. “But in recent testing it was maybe only 10 yards shorter than I’ve seen. This golf course we could use, we could use maybe 10 or 15 yards on a lot of holes.”
This year Harbor Town stretched to 7,213 metres, much less than that of Caves Valley (BMW Championship), which checks in at 7,600 metres. Still, the old home of the Heritage returned a modest winning score of 17 under.
For Love, the rollback will likely help keep Harbor Town one of the Tour’s most challenging layouts, but Dye’s design will always be more important than length.
“The professionals said, don’t change the integrity of the golf course,” Love noted. “The strategy, you either appreciate it or it frustrates you. Lee Trevino didn’t like courses that didn’t fit his golf ball, but I think what Scottie Scheffler likes about this golf course is when you hit it on the right side of the fairway [No. 1]you will be rewarded. You hit it on the left side of the fairway [No. 2]you will be rewarded. Not if you just smash it to pieces.
#Davis #Love #III #fivetime #RBC #Heritage #winner #leading #redesign #Harbor #Town