HILTON HEAD ISLAND, South Carolina — Davis Love III followed in the footsteps on some of the game’s highest profile players — the likes of Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Gary Player and Greg Norman — by starting his own design firm as a business extension of an illustrious playing career.
If you couldn’t meet Nicklaus or Palmer in person, well you sure could play one of their courses.
This movement of using top players as a front for design companies starting in the 1970s, at times, was met with skepticism from some of golf’s more established and traditional architects, among them the late — and great — Pete Dye.
Love recalls a chance airport meeting with Dye as the two were leaving Hilton Head Island back in the early 1990s.
“He says to me ‘So you're a golf course architect, huh?”’ recalls Love, who created Love Golf Design. “And I said, ‘Uh, yes sir.’” He says ‘No, you're not a golf course architect until you get on the equipment and you learn how to do it yourself. You just play golf and you know what you like.”’
Love took the brief conversation with the often curt Dye as constructive criticism.
“Not very many players can run the equipment, but I've learned to at least run the equipment enough to know how hard it is,” Love says. “We taught our son a couple of summers ago that unless you watch them dig the hole and put the pipe in it you don't know how that water's getting to where it needs to go on a golf course. That’s the kind of stuff that Pete challenged me to learn how to do.”
So, it’s ironic that Love would return to the South Carolina resort island in 2025 and be tasked with a somewhat tricky restoration of one of Dye’s early and iconic layouts, Harbour Town Golf Links at The Sea Pines Resort.
When word surfaced among PGA Tour golfers who play in the RBC Heritage Classic that the resort was looking at major work on Harbour Town Golf Links for the first time in a quarter century there was an overwhelming and universal response.
“Guys like Scottie Scheffler, Justin Thomas, Jordan Spieth and Patrick Cantley came to us unsolicited and said, ‘We heard you are closing the course, please don't change the integrity of this golf course. We got something we love now,”’ says John Farrell, the director of sports operations at The Sea Pines Resort. “We didn’t want the Tour players coming back to us in 2026 and saying ‘We liked it more before you messed it up.”’
Some of the top players in the world were not alone in their thinking. Farrell’s team brought in famed architect Tom Doak before Love was approached. He asked to walk the course alone in an effort to form his own opinion. He returned to the clubhouse a few hours later and greeted Farrell with a surprise.
“Tom came back to us and said ‘You have a Pete Dye masterpiece that revolutionized American golf course architecture, the worst thing you could after Pete’s unfortunate passing is make wholesale changes to the integrity of the golf course,”’ Farrell says.
Once Doak turned down the job, the call was made to Love, seemingly a natural fit since the Hall of Famer grew up in the Lowcountry in nearby St. Simons Island, Georgia, and had won the RBC Heritage a record five times.
After Love walked the course with an architectural eye instead of that of a Tour player, his response to ownership mirrored that of Doak.
“Davis walks into the room, identical set up as when we met with Doak, everybody's sitting in the same darn chairs, and Davis says ‘Hey guys, don't mess up a Pete Dye masterpiece,”’ Farrell says. “And our owner said ‘Here we go again.’ Davis said ‘I’m one of those people who has a love affair with this golf course so embrace that and don't run from it.”’
Davis took the job, under one condition.
“I’m not putting my name on the scorecard,” Love says. “This is a Pete Dye designed golf course.”
“That’s how unselfish Davis Love is,” Farrell says.
With the course mostly landlocked by lodging development, ample live oaks and marshes, adding any substantial length was not a focus for Love. Instead, it was drainage, bulkhead replacement, bunker tweaking and overall aesthetics.
He also moved the cart paths on several of the iconic par-3s to hide them and restore the beautiful scenery and overall eye appeal.
“There's pressure at every club we go to, whether it's a new course or an existing golf course,” Love says. “Early on for sure, my name got us in the door. Now we're getting jobs because of the scope and body of our work. And we're getting known that if you want somebody to take care of your Pete Dye golf course we’re in that group.”
Love spent countless hours in 2025 at Harbour Town asking a simple question over and over again: “What would Pete do?”
“We all made a list of things that we felt like we needed to protect,” Farrell says. “We wanted to make sure that the play remained just as enjoyable for the average golfer as for the Davis Love’s of the world. During the restoration the thing I was most excited by was it wasn’t just the PGA Tour player that we were advocating for. We wanted all ability levels to have a place at the table and Davis and his team embraced that without any resistance.
“We were a united front, we locked arms, we had common purpose and all pedaling in the same direction. We didn’t leave a single blade of grass unturned. Our level of commitment from ownership was we got one shot at this. We haven't done this in a quarter of a century, so we are really committed to doing it right and not looking back on it and saying ‘I wish we had considered this or that.”’
Love, who used to draw golf holes with his father around the dinner table as a kid, started Love Golf Design with his brother Mark in 1994, and firm highlights Scot Sherman — a former Dye pupil — as its lead architect.
Love’s designs include the highly-ranked The Dunes Course at Diamante in Cabo, Mexico, but this spring he’ll be the toast of the Hilton Head Island when the pros return to test his Dye restoration.
“There’s nothing here that Pete didn't build at one point,” Love says. “There's an argument for everything that was here or had been done before, but sometimes things just get lost over time.”
“We think we have something for all ability levels here,” added Farrell. “We kind of have a Fenway Park or Wrigley Field charm and we’re not embarrassed by that. Yeah, we like our intimacy.”
Love’s childhood memories of Sea Pines Resort remained fresh in his mind as he tackled what can be described as an architectural dream.
“My dad actually played here in the tournament in 1969,” Love says. “I clearly remember being here because I went in the marsh looking for golf balls and I got stuck in the mud. I don't remember anything about my dad playing or anything else about that first trip to Hilton Head except for that Marsh Mud.
“I loved watching this process, standing there and watching the artistic part of it and the mechanical part of it. I loved just slowing down here and sending time on site, studying the greens detail.”
