Baltusrol: Seven Opens and a Murdered Farmer

The name on the sign is Baltusrol, and it belongs to one of the most storied golf clubs in the world. But before it was a golf club, it was a farm, and the farm belonged to a man named Baltus Roll, a Dutch farmer who was murdered by thieves on nearby Watchung Mountain sometime around eighteen thirty-one. When the land was later purchased in the eighteen nineties by Louis Keller, publisher of the New York Social Register, he kept the name.

Keller founded the club in eighteen ninety-five and laid out an original nine-hole course, later expanded to eighteen. In nineteen eighteen the great golf architect A. W. Tillinghast arrived, took one look at the existing layout, and told the members he would rather tear it all up and start over. They let him, and what emerged were two new courses, the Upper and the Lower, both of which would go on to host United States Open Championships.

Baltusrol has now hosted more U.S. Opens than almost any club in the country: seven in total, in nineteen oh three, nineteen fifteen, nineteen thirty-six, nineteen fifty-four, nineteen sixty-seven, nineteen eighty, and nineteen ninety-three. The defining moment came in nineteen sixty-seven, when Jack Nicklaus shot a final round of sixty-five on the Lower Course to finish at two hundred seventy-five, setting a new U.S. Open scoring record and erasing Ben Hogan's previous mark. Nicklaus won with a White Fang putter he had acquired just days before the tournament.

He came back in nineteen eighty and did it again, setting another Open record on the same course. Only a handful of venues in American sport have witnessed a single player return and rewrite history twice.

In nineteen eighty-five, Baltusrol became the first club to have hosted both the U.S. Open and the U.S. Women's Open on two different courses on the same property. The land that once fed a Dutch farmer's family has spent more than a century at the center of American golf.