Harbour Town Golf Links was a very important golf course in Pete Dye’s career, as well as for Hilton Head Island. The golf course hosting the 1969 Heritage Classic PGA tournament spearheaded Pete’s recognition as a top designer, and led to many of his courses being used for Major Championships and Ryder Cups in the years that followed.
Unknown to many golfers, South Carolina is truly the home of golf in the United States. The oldest golf club in the US was the South Carolina Golf Club (established in 1786 just outside Charleston) made up of post-revolutionary residents who imported the game from Scotland and England. They played golf at Charleston Green (no longer there), where the term ‘green fees’ originated—stemming from the fee to play Charleston Green.
Hilton Head developer George Fraser desired a PGA Tournament that celebrated South Carolina’s heritage in the annals of US golf history, and originally commissioned famed architect George Cobb to sketch preliminary designs for three courses in Fraser’s new Sea Pines development. His first course, The Ocean Course (now known as Atlantic Dunes) created excitement in the area—making Sea Pines a golf destination. However, the final course to be built at Sea Pines was to be the championship course for a PGA tournament, and Fraser contacted Pete Dye to be the designer, with superstar player Jack Nicklaus as the player consultant (Fraser knew the promotional importance of having Jack’s name associated with the course).
Jack had met Pete Dye many times prior, the first time in 1957 when competing against each other in an amateur tournament at Prairie Dunes Golf Club (where Jack beat Pete 3&2 in the semifinals of the match play tournament on his way to winning the event). Pete and Jack’s relationship solidified after Jack played Pete’s ‘The Golf Club’ in New Albany, OH, when Jack gave glowing reviews of the course—and Pete could tell Jack was interested in getting into course design as well. So the partnership of working together at Harbour Town was a natural fit, and the output of their collaboration provided the golf world with a gem of a golf course!
Construction on Harbour Town was complicated due to the topography of the land (swampy with many drainage canals dredged and consolidating water into 8 separate lagoons), and there was little elevation change on the western end of Hilton Head Island. Dye used different varieties of grass throughout the course to create the perception of varying elevations. For fairways green Bermuda 419, and used a duller green strain (Bermuda Tilfdwarf) for the greens. He used the thicker off-green centipede behind greens, and used Bahia grass for the rough—providing a multicolored border for the course [1].
The idea for the narrow fairways and small greens at Harbour Town was actually ‘pseudo-inspired’ by the Robert Trent Jones course at Palmetto Dunes (just a few miles east of Sea Pines on Hilton Head Island), but mainly due to Pete wanting to do the opposite of what that course presented. Instead of grand long tee boxes, large greens and broad fairway designs like at Palmetto Dunes, Pete went the other direction with small greens, multiple smaller tee box locations, and narrow fairways at Harbour Town. The number of bunkers at Harbour Town are small when compared with other championship courses (fewer than 60), but it’s their strategic positioning which make them an important aspect to golfers’ shot decisions. Many of the bunkers aren’t traditional sand bunkers, but actually contain small stones and tiny coquina shells. The term ‘waste bunker’ was actually coined during the construction at Harbour Town. To let Pete tell the story himself:
“During construction, I was checking the course one day and spotted the local sewer patrol fighting a losing battle with a broken pipe near Harbor Town’s border. With raw sewage about to pour over the area, I suggested the workers pump it into a long, narrow depression that was to be used for a bunker. As the waster water filled the bunker, somehow the term ‘waste bunker’ was born, and it has been used to designate such areas.”
The PGA had to formally declare that grounding clubs and removing loose impediments from waster bunkers was permissible.
The first Heritage tournament in 1969 was won by Arnold Palmer, which brought tremendous amounts of attention to the course as well as Pete Dye and Jack Nicklaus as course designers. The tournament champions list is an impressive list of the most distinguished golfers in the game, and remains a favorite on the PGA Tour.
The clubhouse at Harbour Town is also a living museum to Pete Dye and Jack Nicklaus. In it you can find hundreds of photos and mementos from the course’s history, as well as a dedicated room (The Pete Dye Room) devoted to Pete Dye and his career. On display in the clubhouse are the original course designs by Pete himself, a replica the Donald Ross Award that Pete won in 1995, as well as an original SmithCo Easy Rider that Pete would drive around pushing dirt during construction! The Pete Dye Room is definitely worth a visit when in Sea Pines.
After the 1969 Heritage, Hilton Head witnessed an explosion of golf course development on the island—and has now become a golfer’s paradise with 29 golf courses available on an island that is only 12 miles long and 5 miles wide!!
References
1-“Bury Me in a Pot Bunker” by Pete Dye with Mark Shaw, Chapter 7
2-All photos taken inside Harbour Town Golf Links clubhouse by Society Members