How Gil Hanse has become restorer of choice for so many cherished courses

This content was first published in Golf Journal, a quarterly print publication exclusively for USGA Members. To be among the first to receive Golf Journal and to learn how you can ensure a strong future for the game, become a USGA Member today.

***

Gil Hanse is on the phone from his home in rural Nebraska. It’s a rare time when he’s actually there.

“It’s kind of depressing to talk about,” Hanse said, mixing sigh and laughter. “But I’m on the road something like 300 days.”

He pauses, seemingly trying to grasp the number, to comprehend the places he’s been and the golf courses he’s touched.

“Home is wherever we’re working on projects,” said Hanse, whose wife of 38 years, Tracey, is almost always wandering from place to place with him. “It’s a nomadic existence, but one that works for us.”

It can be overwhelming, especially when you consider all the iconic layouts that have Hanse’s fingerprints on them.

But, no, right now, he’s, in fact, distracted by an airplane overheard. He heard the noise, saw the thing circling and cannot quite figure out what it’s doing.

MORE THAN A THOUSAND MILES and a time zone away, there is an endless string of beeps as big machines crawl all over the place. The chirping never ceases — a sound that stretches across the sweeping, historic property at Baltusrol Golf Club in Springfield, N.J.

Hanse restored the Lower Course of this 36-hole A.W. Tillinghast masterpiece during the pandemic, and now all these big machines are helping him work his restoration magic on the Upper Course.

To an outsider, one who doesn’t grasp the work, detail and precision with which Hanse goes about building, shaping and restoring courses as one of the world’s foremost golf architects, this might seem like mayhem. But chaos seems to be the background music of Gil Hanse’s life.

“If you were here six months ago, it looked like a bomb went off,” said Kevin Vitale, Baltusrol’s general manager and chief operating officer. “There were 50 trucks.”

At one recent point of the Upper restoration, Baltusrol director of grounds Greg Boring said, Hanse had nearly 100 people working on the property. That doesn’t include the 25-30 people from Boring’s staff.

To others, it can be maddening, a bewildering puzzle that seems impossible to put back together.

“I’ve stood up on some of these vistas for nearly 40 years,” said Rick Shea, a longtime Baltusrol member and former president of the club. “I never saw what Gil would instinctively see.”

HANSE HAS STARTED FROM SCRATCH with original design projects. He has done a host of renovations. But his most noteworthy work comes with restorations, where the task is to find the original plan and bring it back to life.

Look at the stunning list of places that have entrusted him with unearthing the soul of their golf course — Merion, Winged Foot, Oakmont, Oakland Hills, Olympic and The Los Angeles Country Club, just to name a few. Each place had faith in him to rediscover the plan laid forth by Donald Ross or Alister Mackenzie or C.B. Macdonald or Seth Raynor and make it relevant to the modern game. At Baltusrol, Hanse went through the archives — more than 5,000 pieces of documentation — in search of Tillinghast’s intent, which had been scraped away over time.

“When you look at the aerials from the 1930s, this place did not resemble that one bit,” Boring said.

Baltusrol has hosted 18 major championships, seven U.S. Opens among them (second to Oakmont, which hosts its 10th in 2025). In 2023, after the Lower Course restoration, it hosted the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship. The PGA Championship will return for a third time in 2029. With that in mind, Hanse was charged with digging through the minutiae and uncovering the Baltusrol that Tillinghast intended when he embarked on this massive project, which marked the first simultaneous design and construction of 36 holes in this country.

“It’s like a sense of stewardship, trying to preserve, protect, restore elements that have been either lost or altered over time on the courses of these great architects,” said Hanse, who takes on only three new projects a year. “So it’s something that we embrace going in — researching and studying.”

He pored over the endless documentation acquired over decades by Baltusrol’s exhaustive history committee. He talked to members, who knew the place far better than he ever could. Then he laid out a plan.

“It was really our responsibility to the club and our responsibility to the original architect — they are going to be the guiding forces behind everything we do,” Hanse said.

Hanse made his intentions clear — the work at Baltusrol would be about Tillinghast, not Hanse. It’s his hallmark principle in restorations.

“Right from the get-go, he said it’s going to be a sympathetic restoration, and we’re going to go back to Tillinghast’s design and design intent,” said Matt Wirths, Baltusrol’s president and master restoration plan committee chair. “That’s what attracted us to Gil. He said it was Tillinghast’s name on the scorecard, not his.”

This wasn’t just about restoring two historic golf courses. It was also about making sure all 36 holes were positioned for years to come — through better drainage, the installation of an HVAC system for greens called PrecisionAire and the acknowledgement that technology will forever impact how a golf course plays. It would be ready for major championships, but so too would it be pristine on a random Tuesday in the middle of the summer after it rained for a week straight.

All these people and machines were working to establish the future while still adhering to the past.

“The restoration was about getting back to our true DNA, and what A.W. designed and to hopefully have a path to keep us there for a long time,” said Ryan Fountaine, Baltusrol’s director of golf.

The two courses have distinct personalities. The Lower Course is more noteworthy to the public; the Upper Course is the favorite of the membership.

“[The Upper] has hosted a major before, but it just doesn’t have the space to handle the crowds now,” Vitale said. “If it could handle the crowds, there would be a major on the Upper.

“When Gil took the job, he said something along the lines of ‘I am going to enjoy working on the Lower, but I can’t wait to get to the Upper.’”

Hanse quickly seconded that assessment.

“The changes on the Lower were more substantive and the Upper was closer to Tillinghast’s vision,” he said. “But I think embellishing or improving those subtleties on the Upper are going to be truly impactful to the way the outside world views the Upper.”

The word “topography” kept coming up, how the hills and terrain and undulations made the Upper a shotmaker’s course.

“It’s just a better piece of ground,” Hanse said. “I think the holes on the Upper are more striking than the holes on the Lower. I think [the par-5] eighth green, the way it sits up there, is one of the most beautiful compositions I’ve seen Tillinghast do.”

Hanse went about his work, first on the Lower Course, then on the Upper Course. Uncertainty can be uncomfortable, especially with so much at stake — history, tradition, reputation, money.

“On the Lower there were a lot more questions,” Boring said. “We were new to this. We didn’t know. [The membership] thought it knew what was going to happen. Then they played it and experienced it and were pleased and happy with it. When it came to the Upper, it was, ‘Go repeat what you just did.’”

Still, despite having experienced how Hanse worked and falling in love with the finished product on the Lower, if the membership had questions during the restoration of the Upper, it asked.

“My experience has been that there’s no stupid question,” Wirths said. “Gil always takes the time to explain his methodology and the rationale that forms his opinions. It’s because we value that rationale, methodology and opinion, that it was really for us to deliver that messaging to our membership, as opposed to us telling him what we wanted. The toughest thing is to go in with a blank slate and defer to an expert.”

That doesn’t always happen. At Baltusrol, they let Gil Hanse be Gil Hanse.

“We don’t have the expertise, he does,” Shea said. “We are welcome to have our own opinions, but it’s his call. He is the person we’ve asked to guide us. Very early on we had a couple things that came up, and the procedure became clear to us: Gil was going to make the call.”

Hey, you don’t ask Picasso to paint you a picture and tell him what colors to use or select the grocery list when Wolfgang Puck invites you over for dinner.

“It’s inspiring to watch him work,” Boring said. “He knows what he wants. He’s very demanding with what he wants. But he never has to show he’s demanding with what he wants. We basically went through $40 million worth of projects in the last five years. I’m anti-drama. And if you’re anti-drama, you want Gil Hanse running the operation. Gil’s not about ego. There is not a person who has a bigger name, and you would not know it.”

Every once in a while, a member will be wandering the property and do a double take. Could it be?

“He’s hands-on,” Boring said, highlighting one of the qualities that makes Hanse in such high demand. “Everybody is amazed when they see Gil on a bulldozer. I’m like, what do you think he does when he comes here? He’s not pointing fingers and telling people what to do. If Gil’s happy, it’s because he’s in a dozer.”

THIS COMING MAY, nearly seven years after he was contracted to bring Tillinghast’s intent back to life, and five years after the work started, the heavy lifting from Hanse and his team will be done.

Wirths said it took him a year or so to relearn the Lower. He expects, given the nuances of the Upper, it might take him and the membership a little longer this time around.

“A year to relearn the course, and it will take about two or three years to learn those greens,” he said. “Or, at least, that’s the excuse I’ll use.”

Still, the biggest adjustment might not be with the eyes, but with the ears. One by one, they laugh at the question: How happy will they be when the work is done, when the beeps are silenced, when the property is quiet?

“I made the mistake of having this conversation with Gil and said, ‘It’s been great to have you here, but it’ll be great when you’re gone.’ I probably shouldn’t have said it that way,” Vitale said. “I said it as a joke. I think we are going to be the [object of] envy by having two golf courses at this level.”

That is the end game with anyone who signs up to have Gil Hanse dive into history.

“We are going back to our roots,” Vitale said. “We aren’t doing something that is changing us, making us different. We are going back to what made us who are in the first place.”

For Hanse, a man who travels so much, who is entrusted to do his work on so many hallowed pieces of ground, is it hard to just walk away when the job is complete?

“Somebody once said Ben Crenshaw’s line is that he cries at shopping mall openings,” Hanse said. “I’m not quite that emotional. But yes, because we spend so much time on our projects, they’re all very personal. The other part of it is the relationships you build with the people, the leadership at the club, the leadership on the staff. Those are things that are going to stay with me for the rest of my life.

“When we leave this property, the courses seen by these members will be the closest to what Tillinghast created for any generation of members since the courses debuted. There’s a great deal of pride and satisfaction in that.”