Relics of golf history at Baltusrol Club
Once had moat hole that saw ‘one of the great shots of golf’
There is nothing exotic about the 16th hole on the Lower Course of Baltusrol Golf Club. Competitors in this week’s PGA Championship in Springfield, New Jersey, will encounter a 230-yard par 3 that plays slightly downhill to a well-bunkered green. The most dramatic moment to occur at No. 16 was in the 1993 U.S. Open, when Lee Janzen holed a chip shot for a score of 2 during the final round on his way to a two-stroke victory over Payne Stewart.
Where the putting surface of the 16th hole is situated, though, once existed one of the most talked-about features in early American golf: the sport’s first island green. The site was the location of the 10th green on Baltusrol’s Old Course, an 18-hole layout created in 1900 that was used for two decades before the opening of the Upper and Lower Courses in 1922, built by the noted golf course architect A.W. Tillinghast.
Greens surrounded by water have long been a polarizing aspect of golf design. The most notable example is the par-3 17th hole on the Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, which hosts one of the PGA Tour’s flagship events, the Players Championship, each spring. Critics of island greens argue they are a one-dimensional, unforgiving gimmick; proponents tout the dramatic stages they can be, particularly when the pressure is great.
Baltusrol’s island green 10th hole was created in the months before the 1904 U.S. Amateur Championship at the course, and it was thought to have been the idea of the club’s longtime professional, George Low. The addition was disputed from the outset.
The 10th hole was a 330-yard par 4. After a downhill tee shot over a pond, golfers were faced with an approach to a large oval green — 150 feet in diameter, which the club boasted was the biggest in the United States — surrounded by a shallow moat like a snug belt around an ample waist. Low was a native of Scotland, and it was as if the Swilcan Burn on the first hole of the Old Course at St. Andrews encircled the entire green rather than merely guarding the front.
“The new and unique island green on the tenth hole at Baltusrol is giving the golfers there much trouble,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported on Aug. 12, 1904. The Eagle noted that “the new green is a ponderous proposition and it has been debated all along if it would be fair to make it part of the course for the approaching national amateur championship.”
Amid the debate about the hole’s stiff challenge before the championship, a committee of three Baltusrol members — average golfers — played the 10th and judged the green too difficult to hit with a second shot. An alternative green beyond a fairway bunker on the left, short of the water hazard, was used. The defending U.S. Amateur champion, Walter J. Travis, was not pleased, contending that the island green was an appropriate demand.
Opponents of the island green apparently got their way — at least for a time. In 1906, it was reported that “the hazard in front of the green is now a sand trap instead of water, and the hole is, therefore easier than formerly.”
The absence did not last for long, however. British stars Harry Vardon and Ted Ray played an exhibition against Low and Alex Smith at Baltusrol the week before the 1913 U.S. Open in Massachusetts. In the morning round of the 36-hole match, Ray hit his tee shot into the moat fronting the 10th green, the ball settling in mud a few inches below the surface of the water.
Ray went into the moat and was cheered by spectators when they realized he was going to attempt a shot. “Then came a moment of stillness,” reported The Sun, “followed by a shower of spray, and the ball shot across the green, coming to rest about five feet from the cup.”
Ray, a burly Englishman, made a birdie from the ditch, as did Walter Hagen during the second round of the 1915 U.S. Open.
However, the most memorable and important stroke in the 1915 U.S. Open was a shot played over the moat at No. 10, not out of it.
Jerome Travers, an amateur, made the turn in the final round knowing he needed a solid closing nine to win the title, but he began the home-stretch with an awful shot, a ball struck by a driving iron sliced out of bounds on the 10th. Using a driver on his second shot from the tee — the penalty was then distance only — he hooked his ball into a difficult lie in the rough on the left, facing a perilous shot to the water-guarded green.
“Strokes were as precious as diamonds,” The New York Times reported at the time. “It was then that the disposition of Travers made itself manifest, for he coolly tore the ball out of its nesting place and laid it on the green within six feet of the cup, carrying a dangerous water hazard in flight.”
Other accounts judged Travers’ third shot to have finished no more than 30 inches from the flag stick. He sank the putt, a crucial par save in his one-stroke victory over Tom McNamara.
Reflecting in 1927 on Travers’ daring escape from the rough “with his championship dreams about to explode,” Grantland Rice wrote that “it was one of the great shots of golf, considering the conditions and the circumstances.”
By the time Rice was writing about Travers’ hero shot, the stage on which it had occurred was only a memory. It was eliminated when Baltusrol’s board of governors, reacting to criticism that the Old Course had too many short par-4 holes, decided in December 1915 to replace Nos. 10, 11 and 12 with longer holes.
Hired later in the decade to produce dual courses for Baltusrol, Tillinghast incorporated the abandoned moat-guarded green as part of the plan for No. 16 on the Lower Course. A hole-by-hole description in The New York Times on July 13, 1919, described No. 16 as a “jigger to the old island green from the orchard.” (A jigger was a short-shafted iron with low loft.)
“The routing sketch showed the moat was still there around 16th green,” said Rick Wolffe, co-author of a 1995 centennial history about the club and a Tillinghast aficionado. “But Tillinghast drained the moat, plowed over the green and put bunkers around it. I don’t know why, but can speculate that he thought it would be too hard to have a long par 3 play to a green surrounded by water.”
Although Tillinghast ultimately did not resurrect the island green at Baltusrol, he was a fan of them in his designs. Before his work at Baltusrol, for example, he created the ninth hole at Shackamaxon Country Club in Westfield, New Jersey, in 1916 and the 15th hole at Galen Hall Golf Club in Wernersville, Pennsylvania, in 1917, both of which featured island greens.
It’s possible that the most notorious island green, No. 17 at TPC Sawgrass, might not be part of golf’ s modern landscape if example had not been built 112 years ago.
Among the contestants in the 1915 U.S. Open was Herbert Strong, an English professional who moved to the United States and was a founding member of the PGA of America in 1916.
Strong, who tied for 26th in 1915, later became a course architect. He designed the island-green, par-3 ninth hole on the Ocean Course at Ponte Vedra, Florida, which opened in 1932.
Pete Dye, who with his wife, Alice, designed TPC Sawgrass, was familiar with Strong’s island-green iteration, having played the course as a college golfer during the late 1940s and in a U.S. Open qualifier in 1957.
“Perhaps it was the memory of Strong’s island green, but I knew we had happened onto something special,” Dye wrote of the connection in his 1995 memoir, “Bury Me in a Pot Bunker.”
Dye’s diabolical do-or-die hole has elicited plenty of grousing since the Players Championship moved to TPC Sawgrass in 1982. One imagines that if Jerome Travers were around, he would relish the challenge.