Pressure to perform. Golfers feel it. Golf course architects do, too.
“If I didn’t, then I’m in the wrong business,” Gil Hanse said the other day. “It would mean that I don’t care enough.”
His comments came in a conversation with Simon Holt on the Destination Golf podcast, recorded in late November in the clubhouse at North Berwick. The famous Scottish club is Holt’s home course and, as it happens, Hanse’s latest high-profile commission.
Listen to Gil Hanse on the Destinatrion Golf podcast here.
Word that Hanse and his longtime design partner, Jim Wagner, had signed on with North Berwick made headlines last month amid a particularly buzzy moment for architecture obsessives. GOLF Magazine had just finalized its newest ranking of the Top 100 Courses in the World, and North Berwick was one of the big climbers, jumping five spots to No. 25. Not bad for a course that, only a generation ago, flew largely under the radar.
So much for anonymity. In recent years, North Berwick has gained widespread recognition for what it really is — a living museum of template holes whose DNA runs through designs around the globe. As its fame has grown, so has the sense that the course has been in good hands with Clyde Johnson and Chris Haspell as consultants. Which is partly why the club’s decision to bring in Hanse and Wagner grabbed the industry’s attention. At a club that is clearly doing so much right, what exactly could there be to change?
As North Berwick’s board made clear in its announcement, the mandate isn’t aimed at reinvention. It’s about polish and preservation. Some stretches of the property are under threat from coastal erosion — the green at Perfection, for instance, the famed par-4 14th, sits just paces from the bluffs. The charge for Hanse and Wagner is to help safeguard and refine what’s there, not redraw it.
Hanse described that as a welcome kind of pressure. Not fear-of-failure pressure, but the pressure that comes with a chance to get something important right. He and Wagner have earned trust in this arena with acclaimed work at The Country Club, Los Angeles CC, Seminole and more. Still, as Hanse tells Holt, North Berwick is its own animal. “You could make the case,” he says, “that it’s the most consequential piece of golf course architecture in the world.”
For more from Hanse on the wonders of North Berwick and his approach to restoration work on storied courses, you can listen to the entire episode here.
