SPRINGFIELD, New Jersey — Legendary Baltusrol Golf Club, home to 20 national championships, including USGA and PGA majors, has now completed the third major phase in its long, storied history. The reopening this summer of its Upper Course after a two-year head-to-toe reconstructive restoration brings to a close one of the more ambitious — and costly — such projects in U.S. golf history.
Baltusrol is only 18 miles due west of Times Square in Midtown Manhattan and has always been a central part of the Metropolitan New York sports scene. Phase One of its evolution came in 1895 when it was founded by Louis Keller, an apostle of the Gilden Age “Social Register” culture that Edith Wharton made notorious in her novels of that era. Within two years, the rudimentary nine-hole course had evolved into a championship 18, good enough to hold five USGA championships before the U.S. entered World War One, including U.S. Opens in 1901 and 1915.
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Phase Two began with the club’s momentous decision in 1918 to hire architect A.W. Tillinghast to plough under the existing course and create two new 18-hole courses in its stead. “Tillie” was just then ascending to the apex of his creative powers; he was also still sober enough to keep those talents going over the two years needed to complete construction of what came to be known as the Lower and Upper courses.
When they opened, Baltusrol became legendary for its two, equally challenging courses: the Lower on softer flowing ground with noticeably more intense bunkering and mounding; the other Upper more rolling, with 100 feet of elevation change from top (the fifth tee) to bottom (10th tee) and marginally more modest bunkering.
An impressive run followed, with both courses widely acclaimed on various “Best” lists for decades and a string of national championship credentials validating that status. The Lower was home to four U.S. Opens a U.S. Women’s Open, two U.S. Amateurs, two PGA Championships and a Women’s PGA Championship. The Upper held Baltusrol’s first “Tillinghast Era” U.S. Open, in 1936, as well as a U.S. Women’s Open. The club’s 36 holes were the setting for a U.S. Amateur in 2000 and a U.S. Junior Amateur in 2018, with match play and the finals staged on the Upper.
According to the club’s leadership, Phase Three of Baltusrol is defined by its decision to 2017 to hire Gil Hanse as the restoration architect who would proceed with a complete restoration of both courses. The unstated assumption there is that the half-century of renovation undertaken by two generations of self-proclaimed “Open Doctors” — Robert Trent Jones Sr., starting with the 1954 U.S. Open, followed by Rees Jones in the 1980s and 1990s — did not, in retrospect, enhance Baltusrol’s core identity. In fact, that work was a diversion, and it has now been put aside entirely.
As busy as Hanse was at the time, with The Country Club in Brookline, Los Angeles Country Club, Southern Hills in Tulsa and Oakmont on his plate, this was not a project he could bypass.
“When a club like Baltusrol, with its incredible architectural tradition, calls you, you have to take the opportunity seriously,” he said. “The one condition we set, which the board embraced, was a complete restoration.”
A major overhaul and return to the Tillinghast version of the Lower Course was completed in 2022. Now the Upper Course has been finished and reopened, and with it, one of the more dramatic re-presentations of classic-era golf in the contemporary era is complete and ready for full member play again.
It has been quite an undertaking, roughly $22 million per course, with no assessment given the club’s ability to finance the project from reserves, anticipated revenue and some borrowing.
For the Upper. the restoration has meant a new irrigation system with 2,200 heads, a complete rebuilding of the old, push-up greens into modern USGA-specified structures. Along the way, the club’s long-adapted perennial Poa/bentgrass mix has been kept and simply replanted. Instead of seeding the greens anew, Hanse and the construction team from Total Turf Golf Services stripped the old greens, preserved the sod long enough to rebuild the greens, and laid the veteran sod back.
Crucial to the progress was the work of Greg Boring, director of grounds, and his crew, in preserving that sod while cultivating new sod for the 32% enlargement of the surfaces needed to restore the putting surfaces to their original size.
For all the public discussion about restoring Tillinghast, the motivating force here was upgrading the infrastructure — meaning the underground array of wiring, drainage, irrigation and proper soil base for agronomy.
The Upper Course got over 20 miles of drainage installed, more than 2,000 sprinkler heads and new HDPE pipe to replace the old, increasingly fragile PVC connections. The bunkers convey a simpler look, with less superficial earth movement around the sides cluttering up their strategic function. Their guts are now outfitted with Better Billy Bunker semi-permeable liners to allow for longer life and fewer washouts.
The mishmash of cool-season grasses comprising the roughs has been transformed and is now 95% turf-type tall fescue. It provides a turgid blade that stands up well and requires less than half as much water as the roughs used to demand. Extensive tree management has enabled more sunlight and air movement to work their agronomic wonder on the putting surfaces and tees. The course can now be maintained with more consistency, less labor and fewer chemicals.
One big indulgence, befitting the championship-profile that Baltusrol rightly considers its peer group, is the reliance upon PrecisionAire technology at every putting green. The underground HVAC complex of pumps, blowers and pipes provides the capacity to dry out, cool down or vent the insides of every green cavity.
In terms of playability, which is really the ultimate test, the Upper is now more fun to play because it is firmer, faster and better connected to native landforms. A reshuffling of tees has improved proportionality and spacing, with the par-72 layout now 300 yards longer from the back and 300 yards shorter from the front.
“I am completely confident it can hold major championships,” said Hanse on the media day at which the Upper Course was revealed.
Also evident is a course that is wider in the mid-range landing areas. That helps when utilizing the ground game — especially on the opening six holes, which ascend steadily along the lower banks of the steep hill lining the right side. One of Hanse’s great achievements is reducing the right-to-left gravitational pull of putting on those first six holes: simply by recapturing Tillinghast’s embedded contours that offset marginally the native slope.
Throughout the newly revived course, the putting greens animate this restoration with their complexity. The expanded surfaces offer more access up front for the ground game and more rollout in different directions than was the case over the last few decades.
Whether it’s the recapture of a twin-green complex on the par-4 14th hole or the layered look of green turf down the middle and tall, willowy fescue fields on the flanks, the Upper now looks and feels like a product of the Golden Age.
The only difference from its Tillinghast origins is that the playing surfaces are tighter, more consistent, firmer and faster rolling than the old master could have imagined. In that case, it’s the perfect kind of restoration, one that welds a classic sensibility to a modern technological capacity of golf maintenance.
