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

If you live in New Jersey, as I do, you don’t have to be a golfer to at least have one heard e Baltusrol Golf Clubin the same way that you don’t have to be a music fan to have heard of Carnegie Hall or a steak lover to be familiar with Katz’s Delicatessen. The country is an institution: 130 years old; host site of 18 major championships; home to a 50,000-square-foot Tudor Revival-style clubhouse that ranks among the game’s most iconic structures. The club is so historic that in 2014 it was designated as one National Historical Monument. All that’s missing from Balty’s CV is a Ken Burns film – and, who knows, maybe one will come along.

Baltusrol has two great and challenging courses – Lower and Upper, both built by legendary AW Tillinghast — which does not make the club unique in this region of the country. The same can be said for Foot with wings (about 50 miles to the 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 fun wrinkle, though: Balty membership doesn’t gravitate toward the higher and higher ranking of the two (lower) courses, but rather the “other” option – the upper. That’s not to say that club members aren’t proud of their most famous offering or that they still enjoy testing their games there; it’s just that whether they’re sneaking out for a quick nine after work or playing a Saturday morning friendly, most members prefer to do so in the least bruised top.

This is truer than ever today thanks to a recent restoration by restorers of the day Gil Hanse and Jim Wagnerwho 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 architectural changes in the name of hosting championships,” Hanse said at an Upper reopening event I attended earlier this year. “Upper was a sleepy little golf course that sat up there.”

Sleepy but deeply loved! While Lower scares you with its length and imposing hazards (like the Sahara bunker complex on the par-5 17th), Upper delights you with more variety in hole settings and designs, due to its home on the side of a mountain. (I enjoyed it anyway; my summer round at Upper was my favorite round of 2025.) Working with a trove of archival photos and maps, Hanse and Wagner expanded the greens to their original dimensions and removed trees to open sight lines, but never strayed from Tillinghast’s original intent.

When I asked Hansen if he thought he and his team could ever improve on a classical architect’s intent (nobody’s perfect, right?), he said, “Obviously we modernize golf courses, we move bunkers down, we move machinery back, etc., etc. But trying to figure out why he did something (a designer, did he do something?’) — is something we really try to avoid, because it just leads to other conclusions that can do not give the best results from a restoration point of view.”

One of – if not THE — The most interesting questions Hanse and Wagner faced along the way came at the par-4 14th, where the club, in anticipation of playing in the 1936 U.S. Open, had added a second green. The original putting surface, which is on lower ground, would occasionally flood when rainwater came down the hill, so the club installed the second green as a backup. At some point in the late 1950s, the club gave up on the second purchase and in the years that followed it was lost in the sand. . . well, dirt of time.

So Hanse started digging.

“When Gil started exploring proper green, he was able to find remnants of that green, because in that time period they weren’t deconstructed; they just plowed through things,” Matt Wirths, president of Baltusrol. he told me last summer. “He was able to see the old layers of green and he was also able to see the dimensions.”

What should be done? Hanse was torn. “First, we decided to drop the non-original green color on top,” Hanse said. “When we found the original contours of the lower green, the upper green was about six to seven feet above it, and we thought, ‘Well, these can’t coexist. They can’t sit side by side like they are now.”

But then Hanse asked the shaper to dig a little more. “We’re going to blow it up anyway,” Hanse recalls thinking. “Let’s get all the dirt out of the way and see if we can find the original grade. And we did. And that’s what came up. It came back to both (greens) being able to sit side by side nicely.”

However, whether Hanse and the club would actually keep the second green in play remained an open question throughout the restoration; some members liked the idea, while others were less enamored, fearing it was too weird or a simple gimmick.

One of the main deciding factors was that Tillinghast had a penchant for double greens, so much so that he actually sketched plans for a course in Atlanta in the 1920s with double greens on every hole. Wirths said the Depression prevented the course from becoming a reality, but the plans alone were indication enough that Tillinghast was more than okay with the unconventional design feature. “That was one more log for the fire of holding both greens,” Wirths said.

And keep what the club did. When you play your second shot on 14 today, the challenge – depending on which green is in play – can look very different from one round to the next. It’s novel, it’s fun, and it makes you wonder why the game needs more double greens.

As for which surface is superior, the jury is still out, which is appropriate in a two-course club where members are used to making tough choices.

“I think we’ll need a year to watch him and see how he plays,” Hanse said. “And then we can determine if (the club will switch greens) every other day or if one green is more suitable for a championship than another.”