Harbour Town Golf Links reopens following restoration

Harbour Town Golf Links on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina has reopened following a six-month restoration by Love Golf Design.

The highly regarded course, a Pete Dye and Jack Nicklaus collaboration that opened in 1969, hosts the RBC Heritage tournament on the PGA Tour.

Scot Sherman of Love Golf Design completed a series of changes in 2020.

For the recent project, Davis Love III, who won the RBC Heritage five times at Harbour Town, served as a player-consultant. “From the beginning of the project we were committed to protecting the strategy and integrity of Pete’s design,” he said.

Love Golf Design worked alongside MacCurrach Golf Construction; Jon Wright, head golf superintendent at Harbour Town; John Farrell, director of sports operations; and The Riverstone Group, which owns The Sea Pines Resort.

“We feel very fortunate to own such a historic and popular PGA Tour tournament venue in Harbour Town Golf Links,” said Matthew Goodwin, representing The Riverstone Group. “We are fully committed to maintaining the golf course to the highest possible standard, while preserving the original design integrity of Pete Dye.”

Originally intended as an updating of the course’s infrastructure to ensure championship-calibre conditions year-round, Love Golf Design decided to also restore features from Dye’s original design. All greens, bunkers and bulkheads were rebuilt, with TifEagle used on greens and Celebration bermuda on fairways, tees and rough.

“Every ‘change’ we made had some documentation or images or video of what it was like previously,” said Farrell. Updates include returning some greens to their original shapes, which brought back some hole locations that were lost as the surfaces had shrunk over time. The same applied to some greenside bunkers.

Some of the biggest changes on the front nine come at hole two, where a new bunker has been added at the back of the green, which has also been expanded by 200 square feet. A fairway bunker has been extended further into the line of play and rebuilt with a steeper, stacked-sod face. On the following hole, the left greenside bunker has been reduced in size by around 35 per cent, while the right-side bunker has been reshaped to be closer to the original design - larger and positioned closer to the putting surface. At the fourth, the bridge crossing the lagoon 50 yards short of the green has been removed with the cart path rerouted to the right.

The fifth has seen several renovations including lowering the green complex by 16 inches and restoring it closer to its original shape. A live oak tree previously located near the right side of the green has been replanted 18 feet closer to the fairway with the canopy encroaching on the right third of the green complex.

At the seventeenth, the back of the green has been expanded slightly (Photo: The Sea Pines Resort/ Bill Hornstein)

Stacked-sod bunker face work has been completed on several holes, including two, four, five, six, nine, ten, eleven, fourteen and sixteen. Other bunker work included expansion into the fairway (for example on hole sixteen), restoring their original shape and size (hole twelve) and adding a pot bunker next to an existing pot on hole fourteen.

Greens have been expanded on holes two, five to seven, ten to twelve, and seventeen. Meanwhile, the fifteenth green has been reshaped to provide more hole locations.

“It’s still the original, honest Pete Dye strategy,” said Love III. “There’s less sand around the green at seven; the dirt is a little higher around the boards at thirteen. The pot bunker at fourteen may not be as hard as it was, while the bunker at sixteen looks a little different from what Pete built. We were able to refer to lots of photographs and videos of the early days, and we can add back some of what we see in those old pictures.

“We recently talked to a foursome of members playing fourteen. At that hole, almost all average golfers avoid the pot bunker long left. But if you want to get on the green on Sunday of the tournament when the pin is way back, you must challenge it, and if you pull your shot, it’s a significant penalty. That’s what Pete intended.”

The project has included restoration work on greens, bunkers and bulkheads (Photo: The Sea Pines Resort/ Bill Hornstein)

Farrell added: “Tom Doak was here and said, ‘please tell me you’re not going to tinker with a course that revolutionised course design. You’re one of the few that didn’t mess up a Pete Dye design’. There’s no ego here, there’s no one saying, ‘I want to show what I‘ve got’. The job here is to honour Pete Dye. That’s why we are very deliberately calling this project a restoration in respect to Pete’s original design.”