Harbour Town Golf Links hosts this week’s RBC Heritage, the PGA Tour’s initial event hereafter year’s Masters. The famous course on Hilton Head Island initially opened and held a tournament greater than 50 years ago.
Created by the dynamic team of Jack Nicklaus as well as Pete Dye, it was finished, under time constraints, just in time to enjoy Arnold Palmer finish a 14-month victory drought with a three-stroke win over Bert Yancey and Richard Crawford.
” I simply want to give thanks to Jack for building a program to ensure that I could win once more,” Palmer said after the success in late November, a few months after he turned 40 years old.
The elegance of Harbour Town, built on level, low-lying marshy ground, is not simply its motivating and also tranquil setup on Hilton Head Island, simply off Calibogue Sound. It’s additionally in its strategic minimal layout, which was debatable at the time (as several designs with the Dye signature had a tendency to be) with its harrowingly little eco-friendlies and also slim fairways.
The par-71 layout measured simply 6,657 yards when it opened (now 7,099 backyards), brief even by 1960s standards. But what it did not have in length it offseted in its directing as well as unique attributes. Harbour Town demands shot-making quality to prevent the numerous trees– curtailed after the ravages of Hurricane Matthew in 2016– and the lots of “sharp, crisp” shelters that Dye as soon as claimed are its best property. (A historic nugget: some of the larger tracts of sand became referred to as “waste bunkers,” a term initial coined at Harbour Town, according to Dye.)
” We tried to make it to make sure that it requires an accurate well-played shot,” Nicklaus claimed before the preliminary Heritage, which started on November 28, Thanksgiving Day. “A bad shot can put you in trouble.”
When he ended up connected for 6th place with a closing 75 as well as 5-over 289 total amount, Nicklaus discovered out how much difficulty. The Golden Bear would certainly go on to win the event himself in 1975, not a small success offered that Harbour Town shackled his power video game. The success was among only four amongst Nicklaus’ 73 PGA Tour wins that came on courses lugging his design trademark. The others were 2 success in the Memorial Tournament offered by Nationwide in 1977 and ’84, the occasion he has actually organized given that 1976, as well as the 1973 Ohio Kings Island Open on the Grizzly Course near Cincinnati.
Dye has actually credited his fellow Ohio native Nicklaus for accepting the style concept at Harbour Town as well as fine-tuning its attributes, which was enlightening to the creative designer, who, certainly, understood well that Nicklaus’ game was improved power. That layout, which needs precise play, consists of the 192-yard, par-3 14th opening, played over water, as well as the 472-yard, par-4 18th, amongst the most stunning finishing holes on the PGA Tour.
The co-designers paid earnest interest to the response from gamers that first year as well as were typically happy that, although there were some concerns concerning the layout, most players were free of charge, perhaps none more than Lee Trevino, among golf’s most renowned shot-makers. There was bound to be whining when rounds in the 80s phoned number two times as lots of as rounds under par.
When fabulous author Dan Jenkins called it the “Pebble Beach East,” Dye and Nicklaus felt satisfied that they had actually produced a legendary golf links, one that has stood the examination of time as a supreme challenge in this contemporary age of ever-longer drives.
The list of champions talks to the quality of format. Pros like Johnny Miller, Hubert Green, Hale Irwin as well as, obviously, Palmer and also Nicklaus led. Later on came Tom Watson, Nick Faldo, Nick Price and also Greg Norman, plus the occasion’s all-time leader in triumphes, five-time winner Davis Love III. Jim Furyk, Matt Kuchar and also Webb Simpson are among the remarkable victors of the last years.
When Nicklaus took a last trip of the design two weeks before the inaugural tournament, he understood that the Heritage Classic (a name motivated by what is thought to be the first golf club in the U.S.– South Carolina Golf Club, chartered in 1896) needed a training course to match what creator Charles Fraser as well as the PGA Tour really hoped would certainly be a special event on the timetable. Said Jack, prophetically, “They have the capability in the training course to do just that.”