Harbour Town Golf Links

Favorite Hole

No. 9, par 4, 267-332 yards

This short par 4 exemplifies Harbour Town’s mixture of restrained and bold architecture.

The only notable features in the fairway are some undulations between 150 and 100 yards from the green. These create uneven lies for those who play conservatively off the tee. The green itself, on the other hand, is the boldest and most eccentric on the course. Pick your descriptor for its shape: a “V,” a boomerang, a reverse Lion’s Mouth, Mickey Mouse’s head. It’s guarded in front by a broad, flat-bottomed bunker and in back by three pot bunkers, the first of which is savagely deep. The entire green complex has a manufactured symmetry that some may find off-putting. I find it attractively strange.

The approach shot, though short, is tricky. Both of the green’s lobes run away slightly, putting a premium on accuracy and spin control. Recoveries from the front bunker or just short of it require great touch. It’s perhaps for this reason that today’s PGA Tour pros, in spite of their training to hit driver everywhere, lay up with iron off the tee about half of the time here. Having a fuller swing with a wedge on the approach allows them to generate more spin.

Conventional wisdom holds that when the pin on No. 9 is on the right, one should favor the left side of the fairway, and vice versa. This is true in theory because the trees pinching the entrance to the green tend to get in the way of left-to-left and right-to-right approaches. But in practice, since the fairway is only 25 yards wide, most savvy players will simply aim down the middle. So, in my opinion, a little fairway widening and tree management would improve the hole.

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Overall Thoughts

Discussions of Pete Dye’s architecture tend to focus on visually obvious components: the small greens, the snaking water hazards, the railroad-tie bulkheads, the juxtaposition between 100-yard-long waste areas and pot bunkers. At Dye’s best courses, however, what impresses me most is his command of the quieter dimensions of his craft. His mastery of the fundamentals of golf course design is on full display at Harbour Town Golf Links. On a swampy, tree-choked property with barely five feet of total elevation change, he built 18 distinct holes that drain fairly well, present a variety of strategic challenges, and stick in the player’s memory.

Harbour Town’s hole-to-hole variety, especially on and around the greens, is perhaps its most admirable trait. A site as flat as this one is a true test of an architect’s skill in green design. Dye had no landforms where he could situate greens to take advantage of natural peculiarities. He instead built 18 greens from the ground up, making each one memorable through orientation, surrounding hazards, and contouring.

For the most part, Harbour Town’s greens are small and subtle, yet each has its own character. The first green has a simple, almost circular shape and sits flush with the ground, but its slight front-to-back, left-to-right tilt makes it distinctive and provides an advantage to approaches from the right edge of the fairway. The second green, on the other hand, is built up behind a large fronting bunker and angled from left to right, giving preference to approaches from the left side of the corridor. So it goes throughout the course: each green is immediately distinguishable from the last.

There are a few spots where Dye went for wilder green concepts. The green on the par-5 fifth hole is sharply pushed up, making players think twice about going for it in two; the ninth green, which I described above, is a one-of-a-kind creation; the 12th green has a striking “L” shape, wrapping around a front-left bunker; and the bulkheaded 13th green, designed by Pete’s wife Alice, has an idiosyncratic and arresting profile.

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It’s important to note, however, that the reason these more eccentric designs stand out is that there are only four of them. A less skillful (or less confident) architect might have concluded that nonstop boldness would be the only way to generate excitement on such unpromising land. Fortunately, Dye trusted both his own ability to create interest in quieter ways and the player’s capacity to notice and appreciate nuances of topography and strategy.

Indeed, Harbour Town’s most remarkable characteristic, especially in our current age of big and bold design, is its low-profile modesty. This is a course that must be experienced on the ground. Many of the holes hinge on one little contour, such as the spine running diagonally into the front-right corner of the fifth green, directing precisely played shots toward the putting surface and propelling others into the swale beyond. Others are defined by a single bunker in just the right place, like the infamous pot long and left of the 14th green, which dispenses punishment to those who hedge too far away from the water short and right. Discovering such subtleties, the ones that can’t be fully discerned in drone photos, is a big part of the pleasure of walking and studying Harbour Town.

It’s also what continues to set the course apart. In an interview with Geoff Shackelford in 2008, Dye said that “if you built that kind of golf course today, they would not pay you.” The ensuing exchange is sobering:

SHACKELFORD: Harbour Town? But it’s loved by pros and high handicappers alike.

DYE: When it was done, it was so entirely different. But that type of golf course in today’s market, where it has to look good in magazines and where you have to sell real estate….

SHACKELFORD: You mean Harbour Town is not flashy enough?

DYE: Absolutely.

(Update “look good in magazines” to “look good on Instagram” and “sell real estate” to “sell destination-resort stays and destination-club memberships,” and you have today’s incentives.)

This is a different version of history than we’re usually told. According to the standard narrative, one that Dye himself occasionally endorsed, Harbour Town set a new direction for the American golf architecture. “Modern golf course design started in 1969,” Dan Jenkins, one of Harbour Town’s earliest boosters, wrote late in his career, “when Pete Dye and Jack Nicklaus… introduced the world to railroad-tie bulkheads, small greens, small bunkers, and waste areas, thereby transforming a forlorn marsh into Harbour Town Golf Links on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina.”

The truth is that Harbour Town’s best traits have rarely been replicated. Pete Dye’s design was forward-thinking in 1969, and it seems even more so now.

1 Egg

I’ve frequently heard Harbour Town called overrated. In its present form, it probably is. This would not be the case, however, if the course were presented less like a 21st-century PGA Tour venue, complete with wall-to-wall overseed from October through May, and more like the rustic retreat that developer Charles Fraser envisioned. Fairway lines are the lowest-hanging fruit. As recently as the 1990s, Harbour Town had relatively little rough and several hardpan-filled waste areas. Now it’s all spindly fairways and white, fluffy sand. So a bit more short grass and ruggedness wouldn’t hurt. The place has “links” in its name, after all! It gets an Egg for design, but nothing more at the moment.

Course Tour

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