Hale Irwin

Hale Irwin is a professional golfer and a golf course architect, born on June 3, 1945 at Joplin in Missouri. He grew up at Baxter Springs in Kansas and at Boulder in Colorado. At the University of Colorado he was twice named to the all-Big Eight Conference team as a defensive back in American football, and at golf he took the individual title at the NCAA Championship in 1967. He turned professional in 1968 and won the U.S. Open three times, at Winged Foot in 1974, at Inverness in 1979 and at Medinah in 1990. He was 45 when he won in 1990, which remains the oldest a champion has been at the U.S. Open. On the PGA Tour he won twenty times in all, and he played in five Ryder Cups between 1975 and 1991. He was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1992. After turning fifty he won 45 times on the Champions Tour, the former senior tour, and took the U.S. Senior Open in 1998 and 2000.

His design work began in earnest in 1986, the year he founded the firm Hale Irwin Golf Design. According to the official site as it stood in 2015, he worked on his designs together with his son Steve Irwin, and the courses they had built by then numbered more than 25. The firm’s stated approach is a style suited to the ground as it was formed, and an unwillingness to compromise on detail. One of the best known of his courses is Coyote Crossing Golf Club at West Lafayette in Indiana, which opened in June 2000; the club’s own site credits the design to Irwin. The Members Course at St. James Plantation at Southport in North Carolina, which opened in 1997, TPC at Wakefield Plantation at Raleigh in North Carolina, The Jewel Golf Club at Lake City in Minnesota, Red Hawk Golf Club at Sparks in Nevada and Lodestone Golf Club at McHenry in Maryland were also listed among the firm’s work.

As a player he won professional tournaments on all six of the inhabited continents, Asia among them. In Japan he won the Bridgestone Tournament in 1981. GoGolf does not at present list any course designed by Irwin.

See the other golf course architects here.

Photo: Ted Van Pelt（Flickr） / CC BY 2.0