Course Profile: Harbour Town Golf Links

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The sub-7,000 yard course at Harbour Town features tight fairways and unpredictable wind.

Apr. 11, 2010
By Evan Hartley

When Harbour Town Golf Links opened in 1969, the golf world had never seen anything like Pete Dye's innovative design, which included masterful shaping and the use of railroad ties, sharp edging and ornamental flourishes of Bahai and pampas grass--design elements unheard of at the time--that cast indelible images in a first-time player's mind. Three decades and a 2000 renovation later, Harbour Town stands as a classic, and in fact is one of the courses that helped usher in the modern era of golf course architecture.

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Harbour Town was a meeting of several forces. Dye was an accomplished amateur player who left the insurance business in the late '50s to build golf courses. In keeping with the general mood of the '60s, Dye brought a defiant, even counter-cultural approach to course building.

Meanwhile, on the remote South Carolina island of Hilton Head, Charles Fraser was looking to build a third course at Sea Pines Plantation, a resort and residential community, and already had hired George Cobb to complete a routing. He was approached by Jack Nicklaus, who was looking to get into course design and convinced the developer to also hire Dye.

With Dye on site and Nicklaus making 23 visits during construction--a remarkable attendance record for a still very active tour player--the course quickly took shape. Nicklaus would sometimes play shots from bare, unseeded ground to roughly shaped green settings to assess shot values. The pair also made a significant change to Cobb's original routing, taking the par-4 18th hole out along the marshes of Calibogue Sound rather than bringing it back toward the clubhouse.

All the while, Dye and crew were under excruciating time constraints. The PGA Tour had committed a professional event to Sea Pines and Fraser desperately wanted the tournament to be played at Harbour Town, a plan that would leave Dye and crew an 11-month window from start to finish.

It was ready by Thanksgiving weekend 1969, but the reception of the course by the field was initially as chilly as the temperature during the first round. Many players stalked off the course shaking their heads at Dye's unconventional design. But after shooting 69, Jim Colbert extolled the course as the greatest American layout since Pine Valley. "That round saved us," Dye would claim years later. "Colbert's 69 saved me and the golf course from extensive criticism. The momentum could have easily shifted the other way."

If Colbert's round boosted Harbour Town's reputation, Palmer's win in the inaugural Heritage burnished it. Afterward, Palmer raved about the course, noting that winning there required a competitor to play "smart golf."

A week before the '69 Heritage Classic, few had heard of Harbour Town; a week after the tournament it was known throughout the world. Soon, it was being included among the world's top courses, a reputation it continues to enjoy today.

Harbour Town's continuing allure lies in its contradictions. While Dye purposely made it less than 7,000 yards, the course doesn't play short. Depending on wind direction and velocity, holes such as 8, 10, 11, 12 and 18 can be as long and difficult as any par 4s in the world. It was never a long hitter's course, yet long hitters have learned to manage it and win there.

Two of the three par 5s on the course are birdie holes, yet the back nine's only par 5, the 15th, is a true three-shot hole. Its short par 4s -- 9, 13 and 16 - -are exquisitely maddening. Dye and Nicklaus can claim credit for only 17 holes at Harbour Town. The 363-yard 13th was designed by Dye's wife, Alice, who sketched its design on a cocktail napkin then oversaw the crew that built the hole.

Harbour Town Golf Links is founded on a design that violated the prevailing culture of course architecture. It is an unfussy routing, ever in stride with its island environment, yet as complex a shotmaking challenge as any constructed by its mastermind, Pete Dye.