Get to know the new port city. Looks a lot like the old port city. At first glance, anyway.
The famed Hilton Head course – home to the PGA Tour’s RBC Heritage since its opening in 1969 – reopened this week after a six-month restoration that included Davis Love III as player advisor. The goal was not to reinvent. It was salvation.
In a press release at the reopening, Love, a five-time winner of the Heritage Classic, said the goal was “to protect the strategy and integrity of Pete’s design.”
No small task. Conceived by Pete and Alice Dye in collaboration with Jack Nicklaus, Harbor Town Golf Links was a pivotal work in post-war golf design – a minimalist statement at a maximalist moment. When it debuted, just in time for the inaugural Heritage Classic, most of America’s new courses were carved on a grand scale, with sweeping fairways, sweeping greens and mountains of moving earth. Dye went the other way, creating a compact, crafty layout that demanded thought rather than power. Little vegetables. Crooked fairways framed by live oaks and pines. Visual trickery inspired by Dye’s recent trip to Scotland, particularly Prestwick, whose rail links became a hallmark of the architect’s work.
It was Nicklaus, then in the prime of his career, who had encouraged his fellow Ohio State Buckeye to join him on the original job. Both men, along with Alice Dye, spent a lot of time on site. When the first Heritage Classic was played that fall, Arnold Palmer won it, on a route that topped out at just over 6,500 yards.
Over time, the edges of the track softened. The grass crept up, the greenery shrunk, and some of Dye’s subtleties faded. What started this spring as an infrastructure upgrade – new drainage, rebuilt bunkers, updated bulkheads – became an opportunity to restore lost details. Greens were returned to their original dimensions, reclaiming hole locations that had disappeared for decades. Greenside bunkers, which had drifted away from the putting surfaces, were pulled back tightly.
Otherwise, what golfers will now find should be familiar: the same route, swamps and water hazards, along with the same famous red-and-white striped lighthouse, rising in the background behind the 18th green.
Watch the video above for a flyover of the new course.
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