Course of History

The story of Baltusrol Golf Club, the site of this month’s PGA Championship, is in many ways the stuff of a great American novel. Look no further than the outsize characters and coincidences that figure in its origin story. On an icy night in 1831, a farmer named Baltus Roll was strangled to death by a desperate robber on the hilly New Jersey land where the course now stands, 28 miles from Manhattan. Soon after, the Gatsby-esque Louis Keller and his family acquired Roll’s farmland. By no means a member of the elite, Keller would go on to create the New York Social Register, the who’s who listing of Manhattan’s upper crust. Ever the opportunist, he also saw the rising popularity of golf and built the course’s first nine holes on his family property. He charged his friends $10 per year for a membership so they could take the train to the Short Hills Station and enjoy some time away from the city.

But the real protagonists of this story are the three designers who shaped the land over the course of nearly a hundred years and 11 major championships—A.W. Tillinghast, Robert Trent Jones, and Rees Jones. Few golf clubs in the world can claim such legendary architects, and only three others in the country share the designation of a National Historic Landmark. Each renovation has taken Baltus Roll’s farmland to greater heights, and ushered pro golfers to new levels of fame.

Just after the turn of the 20th century, future ‘Golden Age’ course designer A.W. Tillinghast first came to Baltusrol not as an architect, but as a player in the National Amateur tournament. In a game-changing stroke, his opponent hit a tree near the 13th green, only to have the ball ricochet and land six inches from the hole. Tillinghast would go on to lose the match—and never forget it.

Over the next few years, his design business would outpace his playing career. He unveiled his first modern design in 1911 at Shawnee Country Club in Pennsylvania (it has been called “a showpiece of modern architecture”), and in 1918, Keller brought him on to update Baltusrol. But Tillinghast had something more revolutionary in mind: to erase the old nine entirely and replace it with two distinct courses, 36 holes in all.

Four years later, they opened as the Upper Course, built into the side of the hill, and the flatter Lower Course. The design was unimpeachable, but Tillinghast had to add one last touch. As he told a reporter, he “took ax in hand” to that tree on the 13th hole, cussed it out “as only a golfer with a long memory could,” and then proceeded to personally chop it down and burn it.

Another, less vengeful idea of Tillinghast’s has provided much of the drama in Baltusrol’s many major championships—ending the Lower Course with two consecutive par 5s and plenty of birdie possibilities. At the 1967 U.S. Open, after a rickety drive and a recovery shot on the 18th, Jack Nicklaus needed to pull off a perfect one-iron shot to ensure his win. He got it, and his subsequent birdie putt gave him a then-tournament scoring record—and a plaque on the fairway commemorating his shot. In the 2005 PGA Championship, Phil Mickelson made a miraculous lob wedge shot out of the deep rough around the 18th green to within two feet of the hole. The ensuing birdie gave him his second major. And back in 1954, journeyman Ed Furgol actually used both courses to win the Open. After a wayward tee shot from the 18th tee of the Lower Course, Furgol played his second shot onto the 18th fairway of the Upper Course, before returning to the Lower with his third shot. He’d go on to win “the only Open to have been played over two golf courses.”

Baltusrol is “a great piece of property,” says Hank Gola, a longtime golf writer for the New York Daily News. “You don’t really see civilization; you don’t really feel like you’re in North Jersey.” And as became Tillinghast’s style, he adapted his design to the contours of the land. “It just falls off the mountain,” says Gola. “It uses the entire terrain.”

Baltusrol became something of a blueprint for the legendary courses Tillinghast built in the Roaring Twenties, mostly in the Old Line suburbs of the Northeast. In fact, it is the first of three layouts he designed in successive years in the New York metro area—Winged Foot (1923) and Bethpage (1924) being the others—that continue to host major championships.

Country clubs rarely can leave well enough alone, however. Especially not when there’s a major tournament on the line. So when Baltusrol’s Lower Course was tapped to host the 1954 U.S. Open, the club’s brass turned to Robert Trent Jones. Author of some 400 course layouts over his 93 years, including Minnesota’s Hazeltine National Golf Club (home to this year’s Ryder Cup), Jones was younger than Tillinghast, but was his contemporary for a time in the 1930s, building many courses with labor from the Works Progress Administration.

Jones lengthened the course and added plenty of bunkers, but his most famous changes came to the signature fourth hole, a par-3 that members initially criticized as being unfairly hard. Jones offered to lead a group out to play the hole. He promptly sank his tee shot for a hole-in-one, whereupon he proclaimed the hole “eminently fair.”

Almost 40 years later, it would fall to Jones’s son, Rees, to pick up the mantle. As a 13-year-old at the 1954 U.S. Open, Rees tracked the pros’ drives on the 15th hole for his father, so he was intimately familiar with the landscape. Fast-forward a few decades—through a Yale and Harvard education, and an entry into the family business—and Rees Jones returned to the course as its consulting architect. He first tweaked it for the 1993 U.S. Open, where the diabolical rough that he and course superintendents grew around the greens figured into Lee Janzen’s win. On the par-3 16th hole, Janzen sank an unlikely 30-foot chip shot from that deep grass for a birdie that gave him his final margin of victory.

Jones went to work again for the PGA Championship in 2005 and this year, each time staying loyal to Tillinghast’s original vision. He’s described the designer as “one of the first guiding lights of golf course architecture.” Jones’s thoughtful stewardship at Baltusrol has been an integral part of his reputation as the “Open Doctor”—the go-to architect to prepare an older course to host a modern major.

The work of these three men, plus the ongoing efforts by the club, result in a historic course in line with today’s championship standards. As Kerry Haigh, who oversees course setup for all the PGA’s championships, told The Met Golfer magazine: “The club does its own long-range planning for championships and tries continually to improve it…Baltusrol certainly has wonderful trees, a lot of bunkering, narrow fairways, and pretty challenging rough, so we’re just trying to make sure that those features are as you find them.”

In other words, challenging. Expect to see far more bogeys than birdies during the tournament. After all, as Tillinghast himself wrote: “If you may not cuss on a golf course, where in hell can you?”