RBC Heritage at Harbour Town Golf Links – 2025 Preview

The PGA Tour heads southeast a couple of hours down the road toward the Atlantic coast for its traditional post-Masters event, the RBC Heritage. With a reputation as one of the most beloved events by players, it presents a relaxed vibe compared to the pressure cooker that is the Masters. For a third consecutive year, however, the pressure will be taken up a notch as one of the best fields ever gathered here will participate in one of the Tour’s “Signature” events.

Situated at the Sea Pines Resort on the southwest corner of Hilton Head Island, Harbour Town Golf Links has hosted the annual RBC Heritage each April following the Masters tournament. From the pervasive palmetto trees and Spanish moss-draped oaks to the beautiful island scenery that Hilton Head provides, Sea Pines is one of the most popular golf resorts in the nation.

With tight fairways, numerous doglegs, sharp angles, and flat terrain, it presents a stark contrast for players coming over from Augusta National and its broad undulating wide-open expanses. Harbour Town is a course where finesse and shot-making are prioritized over length and power. Few other courses on Tour require such a premium on accuracy off the tee and precise iron shots into minuscule greens. The list of past winners and contenders is filled with elite wedge players with stellar short games including Scottie Scheffler, Matt Fitzpatrick, Jordan Spieth, Webb Simpson, Jim Furyk, Shane Lowry, Matt Kuchar, Luke Donald, J.T. Poston.

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The Field

Another elite field will assemble this week in Hilton Head. Every eligible player inside the OWGR top 30 except for Hideki Matsuyama and Rory McIlroy will be in attendance. It will be another limited-field, no-cut event, smaller than even the Masters with only 71 players scheduled to compete.

Most elite golfers rarely play the week after a major. But with $20 million on the line, including a $3.6 million share to the winner, it’s back to the grind with no time to decompress from the tension of last week’s Masters. The last four winners of this event, Scheffler, Fitzpatrick, Spieth, and Stewart Cink each participated in the Masters the week before.

Harbour Town Golf Links – History

In 1967, when Hilton Head Island was a detached, sparsely populated barrier island, Jack Nicklaus landed the design contract for a new course named Harbour Town. Nicklaus appointed young architect Pete Dye to design the layout Dye saw it as an opportunity to distinguish his work from that of his rival, Robert Trent Jones.

Along with consultation from Nicklaus, Dye shocked the golf world with a revolutionary new course design. A layout with narrow fairways, elongated waste bunker areas, and tiny greens was unheard of at the time. Unlike other builds during the era, there were no mounds, no elevated greens, and flat lies everywhere.

After his win at the inaugural “Heritage Classic” in 1969, Arnold Palmer described Harbour Town Golf Links as a “thinking man’s course”, and it brought now-famous course architect Pete Dye into the spotlight for the first time.

While the course caused a bit of an uproar in its early years, it has recently been voted as one of the top public courses in the country. Along with Palmer, Tom Watson, Greg Norman, Davis Love III, and Jack Nicklaus himself are just a few of the renowned champions of the RBC Heritage.

Finish Position and Strokes Gained History at Harbour Town (2015-2024)

This includes the average finish position and Strokes Gained per round since 2015 for each of the categories. Players are sorted by SG: Total. Harbour Town is the 17th most predictive annual course on Tour.