HILTON HEAD ISLAND, SC – Davis Love III had a main goal during the recently completed restoration of the Pete Dye-designed Harbour Town Golf Links: “Don’t mess it up.”
Working with longtime Dye collaborator Allan MacCurrach and Harbour Town head superintendent Jon Wright, Love signed on as a player consultant and was tasked with sharpening one of the best-known courses on the PGA Tour. He also had to accommodate guests of Sea Pines Resort the other 51 weeks each year.
“It’s a different process and pressure, because, you know, it’s a Mona Lisa, so we needed to just restore it and make sure we don’t mess it up,” Love, 61, said of a course best known for its overhanging trees on many holes, its requirements of shotmaking, its Low Country coastal vibe and of course the iconic lighthouse behind the 18th green alongside Calibogue Sound.
Love won five times at the course among his 21 PGA Tour victories, including the 1997 PGA Championship. He also runs an eponymous design company with his brother, Mark, and lead architect Scott Sherman, and they have completed more than a dozen original courses plus a growing portfolio of renovations. The firm’s work already included the Atlantic Dunes course at Sea Pines, and the resort’s operators were completely comfortable bringing Love onboard for the Harbour Town restoration.
Understandably, nobody involved in the project wanted to introduce wholesale changes to the course that ranks among the top 30 public-access layouts in the United States. The course had changed slightly over the decades, as all courses do, but the resort’s managers wanted to keep the original design intentions intact for the course that put Dye on the map as an architect when it opened in 1969. Dye – often working with his wife, Alice – went on to become one of the most influential golf architects of his era before his death in 2020. Pete had even gone so far as to bring on board a young and curious PGA Tour player named Jack Nicklaus to help out in the design at Harbour Town, and the Golden Bear, of course, went on to his own design career with courses around the world.
The restoration started immediately after the PGA Tour’s RBC Heritage in April, and the course reopened Nov. 11. The project was first proposed because Sea Pines needed to upgrade the course’s infrastructure such as irrigation, and there’s no better time to make changes, big or small, than when shovels are already in the dirt. But everybody involved with the project had Dye front of mind.
“Every ‘change’ we made had some documentation or images or video of what it was like previously,” said John Farrell, director of sports operations at Sea Pines.
Most of the changes were indeed small, as intended. Greens were expanded back to their original sizes, with a few putting surfaces now stretched a couple of extra feet. Some bunkers were enlarged a smidge or moved slightly. A few trees were taken out, but more were introduced on a course known for its frequently overhanging foliage. The tall grasses that grew on some small islands of land within bunkers were removed, the islands now topped with just a thin layer of rough – a suggestion once made by Alice Dye. Some stretches of cart path were removed, replaced with sandy areas. The newly replaced turf – TifEagle Bermuda on the greens; Celebration Bermuda on the fairways, tees and rough – remained the same strains as before the restoration.
Farrell said that before the project, several PGA Tour players expressed concern that work to the course might alter its unique character. With well north of two decades spent working at the resort, Farrell heard the same concerns the last time serious work was carried out at Harbour Town in the 1990s. Nobody need worry now. With just a few exceptions, the changes are unlikely to be noticed by most players, be they among the world’s elite golfers or the resort’s members and steady guest traffic.
The most notable changes came on No. 5, a dogleg-left par 5. An ugly cart path that crossed the fairway from right to left was moved to remain tucked away on the right side, and the pond running much of the length of the fairway on the left was reshaped. Moving the path allowed a sandy parking area near the green to be removed, so a new bunker was added some 40 yards short of the green in that spot. The green was reshaped, and a mature oak tree that guards the approach on the right was dug up and moved 18 feet left to further pinch into the fairway. The main result is an approach runway that is about 40 feet narrower.
“The build ended with moving the tree on No. 5 as kind of the last thing,” Love said, adding that one of his big regrets of the project was not being able to be there the day they used heavy equipment to move that tree because he was playing a PGA Tour Champions event.
Love said the team spent a lot of time working on No. 5, a hole that had vexed Dye because the green had to be moved decades ago after his original plan didn’t work out properly because of property lines and shade. The restoration crew was determined to get it right in Dye’s honor, he said.
“We just got bogged down on 5 green, back and forth and this and that, little details that to the average person aren’t going to really make a whole lot of difference,” he said. “But in in the long run of protecting Pete’s legacy, they were very important.”
The other major alteration in Harbour Town’s restoration was the reintroduction of stacked-sod bunkers on several holes, perhaps most notably the fearsome par-3 14th. Such revetted bunkers are common at many true links courses in the United Kingdom and Ireland, and Dye had built several of them at Harbour Town, but over the decades those revetted walls had been replaced with more traditional bunker faces. Love and the crew noticed the revetted bunkers in old photos of Harbour Town, so they put them back into play, this time built with layers of artificial turf instead of stacked natural sod that frequently causes maintenance headaches.
Dye was a frequent tinkerer of his own courses around the world. Bunkers would come and go, as would other features. And because the revetted bunkers showed up in the old photos, they were fair game in this restoration.
“Going back to old pictures was a lot of fun,” Love said. “That was mainly my role, carrying the pictures around and holding them up. … As Pete told me, I’m not a golf course architect. You know, I’m a golfer. But I learned a lot about this golf course and what Pete said about things.”
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Harbour Town Golf Links shines after restoration by Davis Love III
