Gil Hanse’s last performance? Refining one of the world’s ‘most consequential’ courses

Pressure to perform. Golfers feel it. Golf course architects do that too.

“If I didn’t, I’m in the wrong business,” Gil Hanse said recently. “It would mean I don’t care enough.”

His comments came in a conversation with Simon Holt on the Destination Golf podcast, recorded at the North Berwick clubhouse in late November. The famous Scottish club is Holt’s home club and, coincidentally, Hanse’s latest high-profile assignment.

Listen to Gil Hanse on the Destinatrion Golf podcast here.

Word that Hanse and his longtime design partner, Jim Wagner, had signed on at North Berwick made headlines last month amid a particularly buzzy moment for architecture obsessions. GOLF Magazine had just completed its latest ranking of the Top 100 courses in the world, and North Berwick was one of the big climbers, jumping five places to number 25. Not bad for a course that flew largely under the radar just a generation ago.

So much for anonymity. In recent years, North Berwick has gained widespread recognition for what it really is: a living museum of template holes whose DNA runs through designs around the world. As awareness has grown, so has the feeling that the course has been in good hands with Clyde Johnson and Chris Haspell as advisors. That’s partly why the club’s decision to involve Hanse and Wagner caught the industry’s attention. What exactly could change at a club that is clearly doing so well?

As the North Berwick board made clear in its announcement, the mandate is not for reinvention. It’s about polishing and preserving. Some parts of the site are threatened by coastal erosion; the green at Perfection, for example, the famous par-4 14th, is just a stone’s throw from the cliffs. The brief for Hanse and Wagner is to help protect and refine what is there, not to redraw it.

Hanse described that as a welcome form of pressure. Not the pressure of fear of failure, but the pressure that comes with the opportunity to do something important well. He and Wagner have earned trust in this arena with critically acclaimed work at The Country Club, Los Angeles CC, Seminole and more. Yet North Berwick, as Hanse tells Holt, is its own animal. “You could argue,” he says, “that this is the most consequential piece of golf course architecture in the world.”

For more from Hanse on the wonders of North Berwick and his approach to restoration work on legendary courses, listen to the full episode here.