By Tom Cunneff
So many great and historic golf clubs grace the Met Area, it’s a bit staggering. But there are only two clubs with two courses each on Golf Digest’s list of America’s 100 Greatest Golf Courses: Winged Foot and Baltusrol (all designed by A.W. Tillinghast, by the way). And while Winged Foot has a higher aggregate ranking, Baltusrol is inching its way closer now that Gil Hanse has completed his restoration of the Upper earlier this year (he restored the Lower in 2021).
Due to its championship pedigree, the Lower is the more famous of the two (the 2029 PGA Championship is next), but the Upper has its own major championship history and occupies a more interesting piece of ground closer to the club’s namesake mountain. Mountain might be a bit of a misnomer, but the slope makes the first five holes especially challenging. Where are two places you don’t want to find yourself? In the Arctic without gloves and above the hole on the Upper’s front nine. Either one could cause severe trembling.
That precarious, tilt-in-your-knees opening is part of the Upper’s charm – and its identity. At Baltusrol, bold choices have a way of shaping the place. In 1917, after just two decades and five USGA championships on its original course, the club plowed it under and hired Tillinghast to build something audacious: two distinct championship courses, equal in stature, side by side. A century later in 2017, the board made another gutsy call, retaining Hanse to sympathetically restore both courses to Tillinghast’s original intent.
“Even though both projects were completed on time and on budget, one cannot underestimate the boldness of the vision,” says club president Doug Rotatori. “The similarities with the hiring of Tillinghast a hundred years earlier are remarkable.”
Hanse’s task was a tightrope act: Restore a Golden Age voice, account for a century of equipment advances, and build something that’s great fun for members yet capable of testing the best players in the world. He calls the Upper “a little bit more restrained” than the Lower because Tillinghast had a better piece of land to work with, and that restraint is precisely what makes the Upper so beguiling. Where the Lower flaunts its Saharas and showpiece bunkering, the Upper earns its drama from rumples, shelves, and side-slope green sites that mess with your eye and your nerve.
Baltusrol’s 2014 designation as a National Historic Landmark set the philosophical frame: the Lower and Upper together form Tillinghast’s seminal work, where he codified a strategic test set within a naturalistic landscape – the “course beautiful,” he preached.
On the Upper, that meant less earthmoving than on the Lower. “You felt like you were a lot closer to Tillinghast,” says Hanse, who performed no shortage of detail work: expanded green pads, recaptured hole locations, and bunkers rebuilt with the Better Billy Bunker method for durability. Below the surface, it’s 21st century: USGA-spec greens with varied profile depths and PrecisionAir, plus a new irrigation system and extensive drainage. The modern backbone is what allows the classic presentation – fast and firm – to live day in and day out.
Tree removal was another piece of the puzzle – more extensive on the Upper than the Lower – replacing heavy groves with native fescue where appropriate. The result isn’t just agronomic health and restored playing angles; it’s a return of vistas across Baltusrol’s property and, on a clear day, the Manhattan skyline.
If there’s a single emblem of the Upper’s restoration, it’s the resurrected double-green concept on the uphill, par-4 14th. Tillinghast’s original lower right-hand green was abandoned decades ago in favor of an upper surface added ahead of the 1936 U.S. Open, partly to avoid periodic flooding. Hanse’s team set out to restore the original, and what followed was part archaeology, part nerve.
The plan was to abandon the non-original upper and move on. “Let’s just dig into the upper one,” Hanse told shaper Seamus Maley. “We’re going to blow it up anyway.”
As Maley excavated deeper into the upper pad, chasing grade, the land started telling a different story. What appeared was a way for the two to sit side by side. Archival help from the club’s committee sealed the conviction: the two greens had coexisted for decades, not mere years, before midcentury simplification won out.
Is it a novelty? At Baltusrol, it’s precedent. Pine Valley has dual greens in spots, and Hanse himself built a two-target par 3 at Streamsong Black. Here, though, the split offers elasticity without artifice. The club will “take a year to look at it and see how it plays,” Hanse says, deciding later whether to alternate use or favor one for championships. The result is less about options for options’ sake than about honoring a layout that always sought different ways to test the same shot.
If the 14th is the showpiece, the soul of the Upper might be its beginning stretch of holes two through four where two par 4s sandwich a par 3. Green sites perched on hillside skirts wage a subtle war of perception.
Baltusrol is the only club to have hosted both a men’s and women’s U.S. Open on both of its courses. The Upper’s résumé – 1936 U.S. Open, 1985 U.S. Women’s Open, 2000 U.S. Amateur, 2018 U.S. Junior Amateur – stands on its own. Fitting in all the infrastructure a modern major championship requires is the only thing keeping it from hosting another major.
Do the USGA and PGA imprint requests on a restoration like this? Not really. But what tournament operators do notice and appreciate are the added hole locations unlocked by recaptured green edges and contours. Flexibility is the currency of modern championship golf, and the Upper now has plenty in the bank.
There’s also something fitting about the way this project unfolded – meticulous research, then a willingness to let discovery on the ground override preconceptions. “We constantly need to be flexible in response to what we find out on site,” Hanse says.
That nimble faith – in history, in craft, in the land under your boots – is a Tillinghastian virtue if ever there was one.
And if you’re tempted to declare a winner between Baltusrol’s twins, remember what founder Louis Keller asked Tillinghast for in the first place: two different, yet equal, courses. A century on, the Upper now says that with conviction.