Course Profile: Harbour Town Golf Links

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As part of his vision to transform his family’s property on Hilton Head Island into a world-famous resort, Charles Fraser hired Pete Dye in 1967 to build a championship golf course on a flat, soggy site adjacent to the Calibogue Sound. Jack Nicklaus, then in his late 20s, joined the project as a consultant, but his influence on the design seems to have been limited; Harbour Town is unmistakably a Dye creation. Bucking the mid-century trend toward ever-longer holes with runway tees, cavernous bunkers, and large, elevated greens, the course is small-scale, low-profile, and just 6,655 yards long. Its tree-lined corridors and angled greens call for accurate play more than raw power. Soon after it was finished in 1969, Harbour Town hosted the inaugural Heritage Classic on the PGA Tour. Arnold Palmer won, Dan Jenkins praised the course in Sports Illustrated, and Nicklaus received slightly too much credit. Dye eventually got his due as Harbour Town’s primary designer, however, and went on to become the most influential golf architect of the late 20th century.

Take Note…

Consultants, contributors, co-designers. Attribution is a tricky matter with Pete Dye golf courses, perhaps because Dye himself was always quick to mention the contributions of others. “When I design a golf course,” he wrote in his autobiography, “it’s really not just a Pete Dye golf course, since I draw on the expertise and advice of several people.” At Harbour Town, for instance, Dye not only listened to Jack Nicklaus’s input and worked within a general land plan created by George Cobb, but also made a few tweaks based on comments from writer Charles Price. If anyone deserves a full co-design credit at Harbour Town, however, it’s Alice Dye, Pete’s wife and most trusted advisor. Alice directed the construction of the 13th green and its horseshoe-shaped, railroad-tie-sided fronting bunker, turning the short par 4 into one of Harbour Town’s most memorable holes.

From Hilton Head to Ponte Vedra. Deane Beman, who served as PGA Tour commissioner from 1974 to 1994, considered Harbour Town the best course on the PGA Tour. “Harbour Town is a golf course that has just as many right-to-left as left-to-right holes,” Beman told me when I interviewed him in 2020. “It has smaller greens. It demands accuracy. It doesn’t favor a long hitter versus a shorter hitter. So I thought it had great balance, and it was a great test of golf and a fair test of golf.” This is why, in the late 1970s, Beman chose Dye as the architect of the new venue of the Players Championship, TPC Sawgrass.

Arnie’s speech. After breaking a 14-month-long winless drought at the 1969 Heritage Classic, Arnold Palmer had a quip ready: “I should thank my wife for giving me the encouragement to win. And I think that probably the next thing I should do is thank my good friend and competitor Jack Nicklaus for building a golf course that I could win again on.” Well delivered! And also an example of how much recognition Nicklaus initially received for “building” Harbour Town.

Vintage Heritage. This short film documenting the first Heritage is a wonderful time capsule. Give it a half hour of your time.