Gil Hanse's 'Historic Renovation' at Southern Hills Playing to Rave Reviews

The Tulsa, Oklahoma, course has been restored to its 1936 self, with Tiger Woods calling the work 'a fantastic job' on the eve of the PGA Championship.

Author:
Gary Van Sickle
Updated:
May 19, 2022
Original:
May 18, 2022

Garrick Higgo plays a shot to the 14th hole during practice for the 2022 PGA Championship at Southern Hills. — Players at Southern Hills this week will find greens with runoffs into bunkers and closely mown areas.
Orlando Ramirez/USA Today

TULSA, Okla.—Prepare to add a new word to your golf lexicon this week at the PGA Championship:

Hansed.

It’s a verb parsed from the name of Gil Hanse, the noted golf architect who worked with partner Jim Wagner to complete a “historic renovation” — Hanse’s preferred description — of Southern Hills before it hosted its record fifth PGA Championship. Hanse and Wagner restored many of the slopes and fall-offs from original designer Perry Maxwell’s cleverly sloped greens, besides adding some length and updating the course to challenge modern tour players.

Southern Hills members have rediscovered Maxwell’s genius in the process and learned the hard way that approach shots that don’t find the middle of the green may catch a diabolical slope and carry their ball off the green, possibly a fair distance down an embankment since the areas around the greens have also been mowed as fairway, as Maxwell originally intended.

When such an unfortunate outcome happens, members now declare, “I got Hansed!”

So that’s something to look forward to this week, especially if a happy-go-lucky player such as, say, Sergio Garcia gets Hansed. You know he’ll be pleased.

“Well, that’s not unique to Southern Hills,” Hanse said Wednesday morning about his namesake verb, admitting it has happened at other courses he’s worked on. “I’d rather here they say they got ‘Maxwelled.’ Jim and I just felt really strongly about trying to get all of the details right.”

The Maxwell greens changed over time, Hanse said, because of natural golf course maintenance evolution. Top-dressing and sand built up, raising the edges of some greens so balls no longer rolled off.

“As a result, balls that were trickling off before may have gotten hung up on those lips,” Hanse said. “Now, they will go off. So I guess we are responsible for that in a way. We were trying to be truthful to the original design.”

Hanse and Wagner used old photographs to reconnect the original slopes and bring back the magic of Maxwell, an under-appreciated classic golf architect who got less attention probably because he worked in the middle of the country in states such as Oklahoma in middle third of this century when the big media were still anchored in the east.

MORE: A Look at Southern Hills' Distinctive History

So will tour players be using Hanse’s name in vain as a verb? Hanse laughed at the suggestion. “So far, so good,” he said. “Everybody seems very positive about the golf course. We all realize that once they start putting scores down on paper, that’s different and their thought process changes a little bit. The winds are going to blow this week but I don’t think there’s anything on the course that the wind or weather will make guys change their minds about what they’ve been presented.

“Jim and I have tried really hard to leave our fingerprints off Southern Hills and say, 'This is what Perry Maxwell did. You figure out how to set it up for a major championship.'”

The green runoffs are just a small part of the Hanse-Wagner work. They took out trees, added length and cut down the rough around the greens so missed shots would roll out a ways, not unlike Pinehurst, leaving players with 15-30 yard chips or more, a shot that requires skill. The greens were redone but thanks to laser technology, they were restored in most cases to the same contours as in the course’s original photographs.

Among notable changes were that the front shelves on the 9th and 18th green were leveled somewhat. The thinned-out trees make Southern Hills less of a lay-up-to-the-corner-of-the-dogleg course and gives players more options.

“Gil has done a fantastic job altering the course,” Tiger Woods said Tuesday. “We are going to be tested around the greens a lot. A lot of grain, a lot of creativity, but it still puts a premium in putting the ball in play and in the fairway and somehow below the holes in the right spots. There's still a lot of slope on some of these greens but it is kind of nice to see 9 and 18 not cut at a different speed.”

In past majors, those two greens were mowed to a different height because of their severe slopes. Tiger hadn’t forgotten (or forgiven?).

Besides the 9th and 18th, the two holes where fans may notice a difference are the 1st and 7th. At No. 1, the fairway bunkers (which weren’t original — they were added in 1958 before the U.S. Open) were moved from the right side of the fairway to the left. The left side of the fairway offers a better angle of approach so the change forces players to challenge the repositioned bunker.

The green at No. 7 was moved back 40 yards and pushed to the right, up against a creek with two bunkers added on the left. It is no longer a long iron-wedge par 4 at 440 yards and the second shot will have to be precise because that creek is now in play.

The course is 300 yards-plus longer than the 2007 PGA Championship. Its trial run came at last year’s Senior PGA Championship and reviews were good.

The last professional major at Southern Hills was the 2007 PGA Championship that Tiger Woods won in 107-degree heat. I was last here at the 2009 U.S. Amateur Championship, caddying for my son, Mike. I looked around the course Tuesday afternoon and a little bit Wednesday morning and it didn’t look familiar. Southern Hills looks fantastic after Hanse and Wagner updated it, much better than in ’09, but I almost didn’t recognize parts of it.

A big story this week, besides the wind the tricky greens, will be the realization that Southern Hills has been underrated. “When people think of Southern Hills in the past, all they remembered was thick rough and that it was really hot,” said Hanse.

Well, yeah, the PGA was in August and in 2007, the temperatures topped 105 degrees. Walking across the clubhouse’s asphalt parking lot with shoes on was like walking on a hot beach without shoes. Hanse hopes the update will revive interest in Maxwell among golfers and improve Southern Hills’ reputation.

It will be a shocker if Southern Hills doesn’t move up in the ubiquitous Top 100 rankings. Right now, it’s better than it’s ever been and this week should prove it.

Hanse revealed one other secret Wednesday morning that made a grown man gasp: Hanse admitted that he wears his expensive Rolex watch even while running a bulldozer at a course site.

Why is Hanse wearing a Rolex on a bulldozer? Well, he is so good at his job — he’s elite among golf course designers — that he earned a Rolex endorsement gig alongside golfers such as Tiger Woods, Brooks Koepka, Justin Thomas, Jon Rahm, Annika Sorenstam, Lexi Thompson, Hideki Matsuyama, Jordan Spieth and Phil Mickelson. Golf course designers don’t usually get recognized like that but Hanse has a sparkling resume, including that Olympic golf course in Brazil.

As for the bulldozer comment, Hanse chuckled.

“Well,” he said, “that’s just who I am.”

He is a hands-on guy who happens to wear a Rolex these days. And he’s the guy who fixed/saved/elevated Southern Hills. It was a major achievement that set up this week’s major championship.

Rolex Testimonee Gil Hanse at Southern Hills.
Chris Turvey/Rolex

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