Baltusrol’s Storied History Ready For A New Chapter

Baltusrol Golf Club was three years old when it hosted its first major championship, the 1901 U.S. Women’s Amateur, at the time the most important championship in the women’s game. It was only the seventh playing, and only the fifth time the Robert Cox Trophy had been handed out to, as local newspapers printed at the time, “the finest golfer of the fairer sex.”

Previous host venues included places like the original Meadow Brook Club in Nassau County, N.Y., where hounds and horses roamed freely and always had the right-of-way; Essex Country Club in West Orange, another hunting property that was also the first country club ever established in New Jersey; Ardsley, America’s first residential real-estate club with members like J.D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt and various offspring of the Gould and Whitney families; Philadelphia Country Club where Byron Nelson would later win his only U.S. Open and where Virada Nirapathpongporn would beat Jane Park in another U.S. Women’s Amateur in 2003. Most notably, Morris County Golf Club hosted the second U.S. Women’s Amateur in 1896. It was the first club in America organized and managed solely by women.

Named after the farmer, Baltus Roll, who brought tomatoes and corn out of the dirt where the course now sits, Baltusrol Golf Club was founded by Louis Teller, the publisher of the New York Social Register. Turned out, Baltus was murdered on George Washington’s birthday in 1831, a horrific and brutal event dubbed the “crime of the century” at the time. Two men were arrested, although one was acquitted after the presiding judge disallowed the prosecution’s evidence. The other suspect, a vagrant, committed suicide before trial.

Once Teller took over the land and built the club, there was only one golf course, which negated the need to differentiate it with its own name. Only later, when the original design was plowed under by A.W. Tillinghast to make way for the current two courses – Upper and Lower – was the old course aptly named The Old Course.

It was that Old Course where the USGA held the only major championship in the women’s game at the turn of the 20th century. In fact, Baltusrol held two women’s amateurs before first shots of World War I, a time when Arizona and New Mexico were not yet states. Genevieve Hector won her first U.S. Women’s Amateur title in 1901 at Baltusrol. She would then successfully defend at The Country Club in Brookline, Mass. in 1902. Then in 1911, Margaret Curtis won her second U.S. Women’s Amateur title at Baltusrol, ultimately going on to win a total of three. Later, with her sister Harriot, also a U.S. Women’s Amateur champion, Margaret donated the Curtis Cup to the USGA.

After the hiatus every club went through during World War I, Teller brought in Tillinghast to add another course on some hillier adjacent land. Tillie had other ideas. He told Teller that he’d like to plow up The Old Course and build what he called “dual courses,” that would be equal in quality and challenge. No club in America had 36 contiguous holes at the time and no one had ever considered building two golf courses that were equal. Most of the Golden Age architects came from Scotland where clubs numbered their courses based on their caliber. Tillie was proposing two virtually interchangeable top-notch courses, which also meant blowing up an existing course that had already held two Women’s Amateurs, one U.S. Amateur and two U.S. Opens. It was an idea that Tillie would later take to Mamaroneck, N.Y. when he designed and built Winged Foot. 

There were other Amateurs and Opens in the ensuing years, including the first U.S. Amateur played after World War II. Few remember that Ted Bishop beat Smiley Quick on the 37th hole that year, but everyone remembers the feelings of pride and fortitude after hostilities ended and post-war Americans sought some semblance of normalcy. 

Baltusrol’s next event that left a dazzling impression came with the 1961 U.S. Women’s Open. That year, a 26-year-old from San Diego named Mary Kathryn Wright, known to everyone as “Mickey,” rallied after a second-round 80 to play the weekend 3-under par and win her third Open in four years, this one by six shots over Betsy Rawls.

It was the midway point in Wright’s storied career, although no one knew it at the time. She would win three major championships that season, including the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship, and become the only woman in LPGA history to hold all four major championship trophies at the same time. Her 13 career major titles place her second all-time on the LPGA Tour behind Patty Berg (15) and her 82 professional wins, collected in 14 years from 1955 to 1969 when she retired, are second only to Kathy Whitworth, the winningest player in golf history who passed away last year having amassed 88 titles. 

Baltusrol Lower leapt into the television age in the late 60s when a trimmer and more athletic Jack Nicklaus put on one of the most impressive final-round displays in golf history. Nicklaus never led the 1967 U.S. Open until Sunday when he fired a record 65 to leap past Billy Casper, Don January and his archrival and eventual runner-up Arnold Palmer. It was Jack’s second U.S. Open victory and his seventh major title.

Thirteen years later, the U.S. Open returned to Baltusrol where one of the greatest players of all time put on an even more impressive show. In June of 1980, Nicklaus had not won a golf tournament in almost two full years and 1979 had been his first winless season since he’d joined the tour in 1961. Adding to the consternation, he had developed the chipping yips, often putting around bunkers to keep from having to chip over them.

Nicklaus spent the winter of ’79 with his original and longtime coach, Jack Grout, the man who put a club in young Jack’s hands at Scioto Country Club in Columbus, Ohio, and he enlisted his friend and fellow tour pro Phil Rodgers to help him with wedge work. The results were not immediately apparent. Before heading to New Jersey for another crack at Baltusrol Lower, Nicklaus missed the cut at the Atlanta Classic, an event he traditionally used as a tune-up for the U.S. Open. At age 40, many wondered the era of the Golden Bear had come to an unceremonious close.

Then, like lightning from a blue sky, Jack shocked everyone. 

When the starting gun fired, it wasn’t that tough. On Thursday, Nicklaus equaled another U.S. Open record. He shot 63, the lowest single-round score in Open history until 2023.

He had a 5-footer for 62 that slid low.

“I choked,” Nicklaus said. 

“Even though I hadn’t won for a while, I got myself in position and knew how to play,” Jack continued. “I won the PGA Championship (at Oak Hill) later in the year and I didn’t play nearly as well as I did at Baltusrol.”

He birdied the final two holes of that 1980 championship to beat Isao Aoki by two shots. It was Jack’s second U.S. Open at Baltusrol and his fourth overall, tying Bobby Jones, Willie Anderson and Ben Hogan as the only four-time U.S. Open champions. 

“I’ve always told people it’s the most important tournament in golf to me because I’m an American,” Nicklaus said. “It’s the championship of your country.”

He also cut down an extraordinary number of trees. When a guest in the summer of 2021 guessed that Hanse had taken out 5- to 7,000 trees, the member in his group offered wry smile and pointed a thumb in the air. It was way more.

“Over the years, bunkers and green-surrounds were raised for framing, and it was our belief that the golf course would present itself more authentically if we removed these raised features,” Hanse said. “Now, the course better fits the ground and our perception of how Tillinghast presented it.”

It will be presented to its first major audience when the greatest players in the world tee off on Thursday, June 22 in the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship. And at the end of the week, Baltusrol will have another story to tell, another major to record and another champion to adorn the walls of the “old golf” clubhouse at one of America’s finest clubs.