Chocolate Drops: Four Things to Notice About the Gil Hanse-Renovated Olympic Club

How’s it going, FEGC? Hope you’re getting some golf in this week. The time is now.

Here’s what has my attention in the world of golf architecture this week:

→ Following last week’s delightful U.S. Women’s Amateur at Bandon Dunes, the U.S. Amateur is underway at the Olympic Club in San Francisco. The Olympic Club’s famed Lake Course has undergone some changes since the 2021 U.S. Women’s Open, the last high-profile tournament the club hosted. In 2023, Gil Hanse completed a thorough renovation of the course, significantly altering every hole’s look and playing characteristics. We documented the results of Hanse’s work in this video. 

Here are four things to look for when TV coverage starts with match play at the Lake Course on Wednesday:

1. Modification, not transformation. The Lake Course’s fairways are wider but not wide. The greens are bigger but not big. The bunkers are more rugged in appearance but still fairly tidy. Trees have been removed, but many remain. The rough is, if anything, thicker. Compared to Hanse’s ambitious projects at championship hosts like Southern Hills, Baltusrol, and Oakland Hills, his brief at the Olympic Club was relatively limited. The course is marginally more playable and attractive, but its basic identity—tight fairways, small greens, unrelenting difficulty—has not changed.

2. Better bunker shaping. The most successful aspect of Hanse’s renovation, in my opinion, was his work on the bunkers. After a misguided 2017 project led by the club’s former consulting architect Bill Love, the Lake Course’s bunkers had become faintly ridiculous—shaped with little regard for the surrounding landforms, and so deep as to be almost unplayable. Hanse settled these bunkers back into the terrain and made them more practical for daily play while retaining their basic character.

3. Fairway bunkers! For decades, the Lake Course had just one fairway bunker. Some members counted this as a point of pride: “Our course is so hard that it doesn’t even need fairway bunkers.” Sam Whiting and Willie Watson’s original design, while generally spartan, did feature a few fairway bunkers—specifically, on the fourth, ninth, 14th, 17th, and 18th holes. Hanse has now restored these, and I suspect the ones on Nos. 9 and 14 will be particularly relevant this week.

4. The new seventh hole. Hanse moved the Lake Course’s seventh green about 70 yards to the right, making the short par 4 drivable. If players carry the cross bunker 40 yards short of the front of the green, they should receive a friendly kick onto the two-tiered putting surface. This hole injects a welcome bit of levity into a mostly solemn round.

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Do I enjoy playing the Lake Course? Not really. Too many greens are bunkered in basically the same manner (short right, short left, rinse, repeat), and the greens themselves—aside from the anomalous first and the Hanse-designed seventh—have little internal contouring of note. There just aren’t a lot of architecturally inventive or nuanced holes.

Is the Lake Course a unique and worthy championship venue? Yes. It has an atmosphere and design ethos all its own, and it administers a robust examination of playing ability. This is a golf course for grown-ups. So I’m sure it will be a strong U.S. Amateur host, and I’m looking forward to seeing the PGA Championship and Ryder Cup there in 2028 and 2033, respectively.

→ After years of secrecy, the Fall Line, a new private destination club in the Georgia Sandhills, is spreading the word about itself. The club features two 18-hole courses—the East and the West—and a short course, all designed by OCM Golf, the Australia-based firm led by Geoff Ogilvy, Mike Cocking, and Ashley Mead. OCM’s social media accounts posted a “first look” at the courses yesterday.