Rejuvenating the Ocean Course: Hilton Head's 1st golf course gets modern Love

Building a golf course, Scot Sherman muses, sometimes stirs memories of watching his mom in the kitchen as she prepared a stew.

"She had piles of stuff strewn all over the counter," said Sherman, part of the braintrust teaming to redesign the Ocean Course at Sea Pines. "A little bit of this, a little bit of that. It all goes into the stew. Then she'd say, 'Don't ask me to make this again.'"

And so it goes in golf course architecture. For all the drawings and computer printouts at one's fingertips, not everything goes strictly by the recipe.

"You have all the elements laying on the counter, and you piece them together to create one golf hole at a time," said Sherman, Love Golf Design's lead architect on the project. "I'll let you know what the painting looks like when we make the last stroke."

The canvas here is the Ocean Course. Though not the best-known or most highly rated layout on Hilton Head Island, it was the first course on the island when it opened in 1962, and it unearthed all sorts of possibilities for Charles Fraser and others who would develop the island.

Fraser found a top-notch course would attract the type of buyer he sought for his new community. And over time, golf would become a compelling draw for vacationers.

Now that course is getting a $10 million, down-to-the-foundation overhaul that will drape modern upgrades across George Cobb's original routing.

"We have a blank slate," Sherman said. "We have the property lines and such, but we've really tried to look at everything new and different."

As with Sherman's proverbial painting or his mother's stew, those involved have a good idea how the final product ought to turn out. Along the way will come tweaks - perhaps even substantive changes and obstacles - before the course reopens sometime in September.

Right now, several holes are just churned-up dirt, awaiting a bulldozer to give it new shape. Some are in a more advanced state, with trenches for drainage pipes and gravel in a carved-out basin that will become the green.

The rest are somewhere in between, marked with colored stakes and tiny flags. In some places, a Sea Pines flag pokes out from a partially buried pipe, awaiting a shot still nine months in the making.

The only limitation: The new layout has to stay roughly within the same corridors Cobb carved out a half-century ago. Can't go knocking down residences, after all.

"The good news is that George Cobb was a wonderful architect and he did do a very nice routing," said Mark Love, president of Love Golf Design.

Rounding out the design team is its most prominent member - Davis Love III, Mark's brother and a favored son around Sea Pines.

Love is a five-time champion of the RBC Heritage, contested at Sea Pines' Harbour Town Golf Links. Three of those victories came with Mark as his caddie. Out of that history has grown a relationship, giving the brothers an affinity for the place that few can match.

"It's tremendously important to us as a firm," Mark Love said, "and obviously a lot of people we know are going to see it over the coming years. We obviously want to do something really special. It's going to get a lot of attention on all our parts."

Davis Love last was on site a month ago, part of a busy fall schedule that included host duties at the RSM Classic on home soil in Sea Island, Ga., and his role as U.S. Ryder Cup captain. Another visit was set for last week, but it was canceled so they family could help their 88-year-old mother return home following treatment for a stroke.

The winner of 21 PGA Tour titles will squeeze perhaps a dozen visits into a 2016 schedule that includes maybe 15 more starts and Ryder Cup preparation.

"We're going to be very hands-on," Mark Love promised.

In a sense, they're digging into a bit of island history. Planning for the Ocean Course dates to 1959, shortly after Sea Pines' master plan was finalized. Developer James Self, an early supporter of Fraser's concept, was so certain that golf would help boost interest that he formed a partnership to finance the course and supplied both the equipment and manpower.

Self and Fraser sought out Cobb, whose profile was riding high after completing Augusta National's par-3 course a year earlier. The Savannah native wound a layout amid marshland and lagoons, with a back nine highlighted by the par-3 15th, where the Atlantic surf provided a memorable backdrop but never came into play.

The view, though, was enough to give the Ocean Course its name.

"I know the 15th hole was for many, many years the most photographed hole on the East Coast," said Cary Corbitt, Sea Pines' longtime vice president of sports and operations.

Within two years of its opening, rounds on the new course had reached capacity and plans moved ahead to build a second layout. A third design followed just a few years later - Pete Dye's iconic Harbour Town.

Mark McCumber gave the Ocean Course an extensive upgrade in 1995, extending it by nearly 300 yards to measure 6,906. Over the course of two more decades, though, the course has shown its age amid advances in equipment and other technology.

"There were days we had to keep the golf course closed because it wasn't draining very well after big storms," Corbitt said. "We'd close it in lieu of having people out there that were going to do damage because the golf course didn't drain. That would have affected the look and playability."

It's not unlike an old house, where wiring and outmoded appliances eventually need to be replaced. "They all have a life," Corbitt said.

The Ocean Course, in fact, is the last of the Sea Pines trio to get attention during the resort's years-long renovations. The Sea Marsh course was transformed by Dye into Heron Point, which opened in 2007 and underwent subtle modifications two summers ago to improve playability. Harbour Town replaced every blade of grass this summer.

Now it's the eldest sibling's turn.

5 prominent changes being made to the Sea Pines Ocean Course

A quick glance at the major changes planned for the venerable Sea Pines Ocean Course.

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"We've talked about this for a number of months, trying to get all the pieces together," said Sherman. "It took a little time to work through what everybody's comfortable with, but we finally got there."

Even so, situations inevitably crop up that require adjustments on the fly. The third green, for instance, needed a makeover when the principals determined a raised front didn't mesh with the rest of the hole.

"You never quite know," Sherman said. "Once you start messing with the dirt and learning how it feels, you kind of go from there."

Sometimes a snag hides in the dirt, too. Earlier this month, workers churning up the old 16th fairway were surprised to find a fiber-optic line buried there. The line, which serves a home near the 16th tee owned by Home Depot founder Arthur Blank, somehow got left off a utilities survey.

"They have to mark them so you realize they're there," said Tom Weber, who oversees the project's day-to-day operation for MacCurrach Golf Construction. "It is rare (to hit one). Hopefully very rare, but it does happen occasionally."

Sherman, too, knows of projects thrown into delay by the discovery of old burial grounds or Civil War ruins. Fifteen years ago, he was part of a Florida redesign that flirted with going on hold when rare foliage - spotted wakerobin trillium - was discovered in a corner of the property.

Weather naturally is a concern, especially for a project spanning nearly a year. A cold, wet winter in Sweden, for instance, has slowed ground clearing on another of Sherman's current projects. If heavy storms hit a project during the grassing process, it can wash out a half-day's work in minutes.

"You get back and it looks like you haven't done anything," Weber said. "You do it again, and you might come back and it's washed out again. So you do it a third day. That's very frustrating."

That stage remains a few months off, though. So far, so good.

"There's a lot of moving pieces," Sherman said. "It's just like building a house, though you have much more flexibility. ... The minor details aren't set in stone, but the big ideas are all pretty much still there."

Or to paraphrase Sherman's mom, we can't know the full flavor until it's finished.

This story was originally published December 16, 2015 at 2:09 PM with the headline "Rejuvenating the Ocean Course: Hilton Head's 1st golf course gets modern Love."