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Foreword by Jack Whittaker
Introduction by Cal Brown
Chapter I Pebble Beach Golf Links
Chapter II Cypress Point Club
Chapter III Spyglass Hill Golf Course
Chapter IV Monterey Peninsula Country Club
Chapter V The Links at Spanish Bay
Chapter VI Poppy Hills Golf Course
Chapter VII Pacific Grove Municipal Golf Course
SAMPLE CHAPTER (excerpt from Chapter 1)
At its most elemental, golf is a form of combat, man against nature, in which man seeks the most direct, most efficient and sometimes the most elegant path to an objective. Paradoxically, before we can tame the terrors of nature and terrain we first must tame the demons of ego, nerves, bravado, fear and doubt, or, as Old Finley Peter Dunne once wrote, "It is the kind of game that you play with your own worst enemy; which is yourself."
Small wonder, then, that the grati-fications of the game are most keenly felt where the natural setting is most dramatic and ominous, where nature exhibits her-self most spectacularly. It does not always follow that the most majestic setting produces the most challenging golf, but when they coincide, as they do at Pebble Beach, who but the terminally numb can resist?
The scenery alone, a setting that Pat Ward-Thomas, the respected British golf essayist, called the noblest in golf, would be enough to place Pebble Beach in a special rank among the world's courses. Its fairways slope gently toward Carmel Bay on the southern flank of the Monterey Peninsula, nearly half of the holes running along the jagged, ocean-whipped cliffs that supply so much of the grandeur and menace of the course. Tall Monterey pines form a backdrop for The Lodge and the elegant homesites that flank the northern borders of the course. The ocean panorama is visible even from the inland holes, a promise and a reminder of imagined glories. Below the cliffs, when the tide is out, people stroll the beach, leopard seals and sea lions nest and bark, otters play in the surf and cormorants dive swiftly from the sky for fish. At dusk, when the light has all but faded and you gaze from The Lodge across the ghostly lawn of the eighteenth fairway, the sea wind fills the nostrils with a whiff of brine and cooling turf and you wonder if there is another place on earth quite like it.
One cannot imagine that any developer of today would have the audacity to commit such priceless terrain to a golf course, but Samuel Morse was not without audacity and certainly was no ordinany man. Morse had acquired fiffty-three hundred acres on the Monterey Peninsula, including Pebble Beach, in 1915, and had dreams of creating a world-class resort and residential enclave. Golf was the coming thing. Francis Ouimet, an unheralded Massachusetts caddie, had won the United States Open just two years before, the first authentic American golf hero, and the game was becoming a hugely popular pastime. It did not escape Morse's notice that it was attracting an affluent and sporty segment of society. As he surveyed his new domain, Morse found that the meadowlands sloping down to the ocean at Pebble Beach, which were being used for picnics and grazing sheep, had been plotted in eighty-foot lots for future residential development. He must have felt that there was plenty of shoreline and other land for that sort of thing, and when he decided to place the golf course on its present site, the character and stature of Pebble Beach was almost certainly settled. The golf course could hardly be less spectacular than the terrain it would occupy.
Morse knew little about golf but knew enough to consult those who did. To design the course, he chose Jack Neville, and to assist him, Douglas Grant. Both were well-known amateur players and each had won the California Amateur Championship; Neville three times. While some of the inland holes, particularly at the beginning, emerged with no special distinction, neither were they without golfing merit, and when they got to the ocean, Neville and Grant obviously knew what to do.
"It was all there in plain sight," Neville said years later. "The big idea was to get in as many holes as possible along the bay. It took a little imagination, but not much. Years before it was built I could see Pebble Beach as a golf links. Nature had intended that it be nothing else."