Meet the new Harbor city. It looks a lot like the old Harbor town. At first glance, anyway.
The famous Hilton Head course – home of the PGA Tour RBC inheritance since it opened in 1969 — reopened this week after a six-month restoration that included Davis Love III as a player consultant. The goal was not reinvention. It was conservation.
In a release accompanying the reopening, Love, a five-time Heritage Classic winner, 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 NicklausHarbor Town Golf Links was a seminal work in post-war golf design – a minimalist statement in a maximalist moment. When it debuted, just in time for the inaugural Heritage Classic, most new American courses were being carved on a grand scale, with large fairways, wide greens and rolling hills. Dye went in the other direction, forming a compact, cunning structure that required thought rather than power. Small greens. Crooked roads framed by live oaks and pines. Visual trickery inspired by Dye’s recent trip to Scotland, particularly Prestwick, whose railway links became a hallmark of the architect’s work.
It was Nicklaus, then in his prime, who encouraged his fellow Ohio State Buckeye to join him in the original job. Both men spent considerable time in the country, along with Alice Dye. When the first Heritage Classic was played that fall, Arnold Palmer won it, on a course that clocked in at just over 6,500 yards.
Over time, the edges of the course softened. The turf crawled, the greens shrank and some of the Dye’s finesse faded. What began this spring as an infrastructure upgrade — new drainage, rebuilt bunkers, refreshed sections — became a chance to restore lost details. The greens were returned to their original dimensions, reclaiming hole sites that had disappeared over the decades. The green bunkers, which had moved away from the putting surfaces, were pulled back hard.
Otherwise, what golfers will find now should be familiar: the same fairways and wetlands and water hazards, along with the same famous red-and-white-striped lighthouse rising in the background behind the 18th green.
For a look at the new course, watch the video above.
