History nook
One bold move put Baltusrol on course to carve place in golf lore
In 1918, Baltusrol Golf Club made arguably the biggest gamble in the game’s history for a club of prominence. And 98 years later, it’s still paying off. Having already played host to the five major championships, including two U.S. Opens, one U.S. Amateur and two U.S. Women’s Amateurs, the club decided to rip up what would become known as “the old course,” and totally revamp its sprawling property in Springfield, N.J. The club hired proclaimed golf course architect A.W. Tillinghast, whose unheard-of proposal was for two golf courses, both of the highest caliber, playing up to the venerable Tudor clubhouse and along the side of Baltusrol Mountain.
The club opened in 1922, and the accolades have never stopped coming. It’s a history that is hardly lost on the current membership, now readying this week to play host to its 17th major championship, the PGA Championship.
“The history is very important for the average member,” said Rick Jenkins, the club historian and the member appointed to be the general chairman for the 98th PGA Championship. “It’s part of the culture here. Every member knows every 15 years, we’ll host a major championship. That’s the timetable we’re on. We want to do this because we think it’s not only part of our legacy, but our contribution to the game.”
That bold move to hire Tillinghast has paid off tenfold for the club, as now the Lower and Upper courses both hold special places in the sparkling realm of Metropolitan Area golf courses. The Lower is the championship course, and right there on the front of Baltusrol’s website is a quote steeped in truth from the best player of all time.
“I shall always count Baltusrol among my favorite courses,” Jack Nicklaus once said. “It is certainly one of the finest in the world.”
As much as Phil Mickelson’s emotional victory at the 2005 PGA Championship was, and as much as that did to deepen Lefty’s connection to the New York area, it is still Nicklaus who holds the club’s most memorable moment. And Mickelson will be first to admit that.
Because settling over his approach into the 18th hole on Sunday back in 2005, Mickelson walked over and tapped the bronze plaque that sits in that fairway, commemorating the 1-iron hit by Nicklaus in the 1967 U.S. Open.
Holding a one-shot lead on the tee, Nicklaus had used 1-iron to drive it into the trees, then chunked an 8-iron back out to the fairway, leaving him 239 yards for his third shot into the par-5, over water and up a hill to a well-bunkered green.
“Into a breeze with an approaching thunderstorm,” as Nicklaus remembered it.
He absolutely blistered it, reaching the green and making the putt with a whitepainted bull’s-eye putter that future PGA Tour commissioner Deane Beamon had given him in a practice round, jamming a pencil down the back of the grip to make it more to Nicklaus’ liking.
“It was called ‘White Fang,’ ” Nicklaus told the USGA for a video made a few years back, as that final putt had broken Ben Hogan’s scoring record for a U.S. Open. “I putted beautifully that week.”
Coming back for the U.S. Open of 1980, Nicklaus had not won on Tour in more than a year and he thought the course looked so hard that he said, “I actually won here?” Well, he broke his own scoring record that week., and as so many headlines read that week, “Jack is Back.”
There have been many alterations since to modernize the golf course, and in preparation for the 1954 U.S. Open, architect Robert Trent Jones came in to lengthen the famous fourth hole, a par3 over water to a wildly sloping green. The members thought it became far too difficult. Sitting in the grill room eating lunch, Jones was hearing the complaints, and so he and his companions walked straight out to the tee, very close to the clubhouse, and teed it up. Jones made a hole-in-one with a 4-iron, turned to two members and pro Johnny Farrell, and said, “Gentleman, I think the hole is eminently fair.”
So the course that Mickelson, Jason Day, Jordan Spieth and Dustin Johnson will play this week is different from what Nicklaus faced. The 17th hole is now 650 yards, which was two good par-4’s when Baltusrol first opened with the old course in 1895. Yet the 13th hole, where Bobby Jones essentially lost the U.S. Amateur to George Von Elm by taking too big a risk and trying to cut too much off the angle of a diagonal stream, still remains very similar.
What hasn’t changed at all is the history that lives in the ground, from the 1903 U.S. Open won by Willie Anderson to the 1993 U.S. Open won by Lee Janzen, and all that’s in between. That is what makes Baltusrol more than just a great golf course, but turns it into living history.
This week, another chapter will be written into its impressive annals.