Meet the new Harbour Town. Looks very much like the old Harbour Town. At first glance, anyway.
The renowned Hilton Head course — home of the PGA Tour’s RBC Heritage since it opened in 1969 — reopened this week following a six-month restoration involving Davis Love III as a player-consultant. The goal wasn’t reinvention. It was preservation.
In a release accompanying the reopening, Love, a five-time Heritage Classic winner, said that the goal was “to protect the strategy and integrity of Pete’s design.”
No small task. Conceived by Pete and Alice Dye in collaboration with Jack Nicklaus, Harbour Town Golf Links was a pivotal work in postwar golf design — a minimalist statement at a maximalist moment. When it debuted, just in time for the inaugural Heritage Classic, most new American courses were being carved on grand scales, with sprawling fairways, vast greens and mountains of moved earth. Dye went the other direction, shaping a compact, cunning layout that asked for thought instead of power. Small greens. Crooked fairways framed by live oaks and pines. Visual deception inspired by Dye’s recent trip to Scotland, particularly Prestwick, whose railroad ties became a hallmark of the architect’s work.
It was Nicklaus, then in his playing prime, who’d encouraged his fellow Ohio State Buckeye to join him on the original job. Both men spent ample time on site, along with Alice Dye. When the first Heritage Classic was played that fall, Arnold Palmer won it, on a routing that tipped out at just over 6,500 yards.
Over time, the course’s edges softened. Turf crept, greens shrank, and a few of Dye’s subtleties faded. What began this spring as an infrastructure upgrade — new drainage, rebuilt bunkers, refreshed bulkheads — became a chance to restore lost details. Greens were returned to their original dimensions, reclaiming hole locations that had disappeared over decades. Greenside bunkers, which had drifted away from the putting surfaces, were pulled back tight.
Otherwise, what golfers will find now should be familiar: the same routing and wetlands and water hazards, along with the same famous red-and-white striped lighthouse, rising in the backdrop behind the 18th green.
For a flyover look at the new course, check out the video above.
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