Rating courses: Jack Nicklaus’ Harbor Shores in Michigan worth a second look

BENTON HARBOR, Mich. – When he first saw the property that would become Harbor Shores, Jack Nicklaus asked the developer, “You want me to build a golf course where?”

My own first impression of the course that Nicklaus ultimately constructed on the property was, “Oh, my gosh. I don’t much like this golf course.”

The moral of the story is that first impressions can be very wrong. Wrong for a designer of golf courses, wrong for a golfer, wrong for a golf course rater.

The course that Jack built, which I played for the first time a few years after it opened, is adjacent to the sister cities of Benton Harbor and St. Joseph in southwestern Michigan. Completed in 2010, Harbor Shores quickly became the host of the Senior PGA Championship (renamed the KitchenAide Senior PGA Championship in 2017, with Harbor Shores hosting biennially), whose winners included Roger Chapman (2012) Colin Montgomerie (2014), Rocco Mediate (2016) and Paul Broadhurst (2018).

Perhaps the most famous moment at Harbor Shores came when Nicklaus, at the course’s grand opening, stepped in before a large gallery to demonstrate for playing partner Johnny Miller – Arnold Palmer and Tom Watson filled out the foursome – how to putt a left to-right curling and steeply uphill putt from the front to the back of the 10^th green. A seemingly impossible putt over 100 feet long, Miller had asked Nicklaus how anybody was supposed to handle that challenge. Jack being Jack, he drained it to send the crowd wild.

So why were the first impressions of Harbor Shores so negative?

It was a property full of difficulty and supreme ugliness for the design of a new golf course … or for much else of anything. The 500 acres involved in the Harbor Shores development were incredibly nasty for healthy public use. In the 1980s, once-humming factories had been abandoned on the site, leaving huge piles of waste products. Environmental testing revealed the presence of more than 20 chemicals in the ground and water – lead, trimethylbenzene, anthracene, pyrene, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons among them, some at levels far too high to be safe for nearby residential neighborhoods let alone a clubhouse, putting green, practice range and 18 holes of play.

But over the next 25 years the Whirlpool Foundation and Whirlpool Corporation, which called Benton Harbor home, carried out an extensive – virtually miraculous – renovation of the property, transforming the horribly degraded former industrial site into a unique yet still highly problematic site. It impressed Nicklaus enough, on second impression, that he committed his architectural design firm to create a major championship golf course upon it.

There were serious public controversies over the use of the land for a private golf course. The most heated opposition involved 22 acres of grasses and trees at the center of a small park on the back side of some towering dunes overlooking Lake Michigan. The quiet swath of parkland sheltered three rare plants; residents enjoyed bird-watching, hiking and walking dogs there. In exchange for this prize acreage, which the developers knew would make a wonderful parcel for the golf course, the people of Benton Harbor received seven scattered parcels of real estate within an area that was not nearly so desirable.

Eventually, the competing interests accepted an overall land plan negotiated in 2008 by the National Park Service, which would not have been possible without the Harbor Shores Development Corporation maintaining a commitment to the surrounding community as a not-for-profit development that would fund local job training and educational programs. (The course also has since become home to The First Tee of Benton Harbor.)

The Inn at Harbor Shores Resort in Michigan (Courtesy of Harbor Shores)

Today, Harbor Shores, with a beautiful new hotel and excellent restaurants overlooking the inner harbor and Lake Michigan – which is only five minutes from the golf course – is a vibrant resort destination, ready to boom in the post-COVID era.

For golfers who take a second look at Harbor Shores and evaluate the character and quality of the course in the context of the many significant challenges faced by the developer and Nicklaus Design, they will find not just a solid golf course but a rather incredible – and in many respects, superb – golf course. Perhaps not quite a masterpiece, but one that Nicklaus has called one of his top 10 designs. What made Nicklaus most proud was the context: not just building what turned out to be an excellent golf course but helping transform an entire community in the process.

Harbor Shores in Benton Harbor, Michigan (Courtesy of Harbor Shores/Evan Schiller)

Playing Harbor Shores a second time – and a third time – leaves a golfer with a more thoughtful, reasoned, mature evaluation of the qualities of the course. On first impression, with little if any thought given to the historical genesis of the property, the layout seemed far too disjointed. The distance from a few of the greens to the next tees were sometimes longer than the hole just played. It was hard to pay attention to the inherent values of what went into ­– and came out of – the design process. But in context of what the property was, i.e., what it could and could not be, one realizes that there really was no choice but to plan the golf in a very unique way.

What a golfer notices far better in later trips around the layout is it features four distinct styles of play, each incorporating in a different way the natural beauty and terrain of the coast of Lake Michigan. For the first six holes the course presents a resort-style feel, with open landing areas and Nicklaus’s emphasis on precise approach shots to well-protected pins. The last three holes on the front nine move to the edge of tall sand dunes right at the beach of Lake Michigan. At the turn, holes moved into a woodland with tree-lined holes featuring bunkers and massive undulating greens (like the infamous No. 10). The closing stretch meanders along the Paw Paw River, with more of a traditional feel of a Midwest course.

“You never get a second chance to make a first impression,” or so goes the truism. Indeed, psychological research clearly indicates that first impressions – of a face, of an entire person, of a work of art, of a golf course – are critically important, formative and long-lasting. We tend to judge books by their covers and golf courses by what we see the first time we walk – or unfortunately, many times just ride – the property.

Harbor Shores in Benton Harbor, Michigan (Courtesy of Harbor Shores/Evan Schiller)

The key to our understanding and appreciating a course we play for the first time is to be actively cognizant of the bias. Go take another look. Experience it again with fuller information of what you are seeing, and how and why it is there. Fathom the context and judge what you see based much more on it.

This is an especially important principle for those of us who do golf course ratings for magazines and websites. Play the golf course more than once before you are sure you got it right the first time around.

– Jim Hansen, a longtime Golfweek’s Best course rater and occasional contributor, is professor of aerospace history at Auburn. He is the author of several books on aerospace and golf, including “A Difficult Par: Robert Trent Jones Sr. and the Making of Modern Golf,” winner of the U.S. Golf Association’s Herbert Warren Wind Book Award for 2014.